Getting Full Value From Your Marketo Deployment
It’s that time of year when baseball nuts like me begin to dream about the next season, while basking (hopefully) in the latest victories of the previous. Like many serious sports fans, I appreciate the great technology (Thank you StatCast.) and how it helps me get the most enjoyment of out my entertainment. I see this parallel of potential with a lot of Marketo clients. It’s a fantastic marketing automation platform, yet many organizations are failing to get the most out of it. It’s not the technology per se. It’s what they are failing to put into the technology that’s causing lost potential.
The Marketo Gap
Over the past 4 years, Marketo, has emerged as the Marketing Automation leader for mid- and large-sized enterprises. It has lead in innovation, usability, and support for today’s broad MarTech ecosystem.
Our team has deployed it in many organizations. We have seen many of our clients use it to transform how they engage with contacts throughout the client lifecycle.
We also see many organizations who lack the necessary resources to get the most out of it. They are using it as an email service provider. The result is low client satisfaction and ROI. It’s not the technology. It’s what they are failing to put into the technology.
Scarce Resources
For many, it begins with not having the right people resources to run the platform. Skilled Marketo resources are hard to find—and even harder to keep. Demand far exceeds supply. We have seen many wonderfully talented Marketo power users within our clients. We have also seen many clients, especially in the past year, turn to us to run their day-to-day campaigns. We are either augmenting in-house resources or completely managing all campaigns.
People resources aren’t the only gaps we see pretty regularly. Lack of content, poor data governance, and marketing campaign strategies that fail to take full advantage of Marketo’s capabilities are common. It’s not the technology. It’s what they are failing to put into the technology.
The Getting Full Value out of Marketo Checklist
So what are the keys to getting the full value out of Marketo (or any Marketing Automation platform for that matter)? Here’s a checklist of 6 key considerations for getting the most out of Marketo:
- Build your business requirements before buying the platform: Like with any technology, don’t just buy it to keep up with the Joneses. Identify how you are going to use it, what problems it will solve for you, and how you will measure success.
- Work with a skilled implementation partner: It always costs more to cheap-out on the implementation. The lost time, lost productivity, and the cost of doing the implementation right several months later will always cost you more money.
- Hire the right resources to run the platform: Be it in-house or outsourced, hiring skilled, experienced marketing automation experts to run the platform will pay off several times over in pipeline and revenue.
- Take content seriously: Like going to the gym with low blood sugar, deploying Marketo without a well-planned and executed content strategy will always produce poor results.
- Always be managing data: As with content, poor data means poor engagement no matter how strong your strategy may be. Proper data governance means using tools like Radius Intelligence and data governance processes to continually clean, enrich, and deduplicate data.
- Educate and align your marketing strategy resources: While Segment Marketers, Product Marketers, and Industry Marketers don’t typically use Marketo, they absolutely need to know its capabilities. By understanding its lead nurturing, segmentation, personalization, and multi-channel capabilities they will be better positioned to create modern marketing campaign plans.
In the meantime, I’m off to dream up how to celebrate next years World Series. Dream big, folks. There’s a lot of untapped potential out there.
