Executive guide to success with Marketo Engage
As a marketing leader, you placed your trust in Marketo Engage and are responsible for delivering value from that decision. Whether you’re focused on marketing automation, lead management, account-based marketing, reporting, or personalization, you’ll find resources to help you start strong on your journey with Marketo Engage.
While your team is hard at work customizing Marketo Engage to strengthen your marketing strategy, you can help them succeed by giving them guidance and support. This guide was created to help you do just that.
Let’s get started.
Assemble the Team
There are several key team members you should ensure are part of your Marketo Engage journey from the start.
A strong system administrator. This person is fundamental to your success with Marketo Engage. They will be heavily involved in the implementation of your Marketo Engage instance and have ongoing responsibilities with the maintenance and enhancements of the platform, establishing governance principles, providing enablement, setting up new users, and more. Many successful system admins have at least 2-3 years of experience in a similar position, but this is also a good opportunity for one of your employees to step up into a more challenging role and grow in their career. Whoever you choose, we highly recommend they be dedicated full time to the role.
Tip: You may also consider hiring a consultant to act as your system admin in the short-term. Their expertise will be valuable as you stand up your instance and they will help you identify what qualities to look for when hiring a permanent system admin.
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ACTION: Identify one of your employees or hire a seasoned system admin to take on the role full-time and ensure they are enrolled in Marketo Engage learning courses if they’re not already experts.
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Technical staff. They manage technical aspects of your Marketo Engage implementation which may include configuring protocols and establishing integrations with other systems such as a CRM. You can leverage your existing IT department.
Analyst(s). They use data to come up with ideas for testing of visitor experiences across web, mobile, app environments. They do research before testing and analyze the results after testing.
Training for your entire staff is available through Adobe Digital Learning Services.
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ACTION: Meet with your program lead to identify an analyst(s) and technical staff to be on the team.
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Center of Excellence. The Center of Excellence (COE) will focus on the people, process, and technology to better enable your optimization and personalization program throughout your organization. Engage all teams who have digital touch-points early on when establishing your COE. They will provide thoughtful input to the use and scalability of Marketo Engage. This includes:
- User roles, permissions, and enablement
- Campaign and email templates
- Process management
- Campaign request intake and SLAs
- Governance
- Metrics and reporting
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ACTION: Establish a Center of Excellence with some of your internal Marketo Engage experts. Be a sponsor of this team and reinforce how valuable it is to have a COE driving efficiency and consistency across your organization.
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Share Your Vision
As a leader, you are responsible for setting and driving the marketing strategy. To ensure a successful Marketo Engage rollout, you will need to share your vision for marketing automation with stakeholders both within and outside of your organization.
Within your organization, speak to your team about how marketing automation fits into your overall marketing strategy. Start with the KPIs Marketing is held accountable to, like lead generation or pipeline contribution. Remind your team they should be leveraging Marketo Engage to target those KPIs and objectives. Answering some of these questions will equip them to best structure Marketo Engage to support your business needs:
- What KPIs are Marketing held accountable to?
- What are your goals and objectives for Marketing?
- How does Marketo Engage support those goals?
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ACTION: Write down 2-4 sentences about how Marketo Engage drives your marketing strategy forward. Share this with your team during departmental and staff meetings.
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You will also need to share your vision with teams outside of Marketing. You will have many stakeholders and collaborators who may not fully understand the power of marketing automation and what it can do. This is a great opportunity to share what your team does, set expectations for marketing automation, and lay the foundation for upcoming alignment meetings. Try to address these points in your conversations with other teams:
- Why are you implementing marketing automation?
- How are you defining marketing automation at your organization?
- What problems will Marketo Engage solve, or what new capabilities will it bring to your organization?
When your team and the broader ecosystem understand your goals and objectives for Marketo Engage, it ensures a shared understanding about how Marketo Engage supports the overall strategy and is key to the organization’s success.
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ACTION: Write an elevator pitch for how Marketo Engage supports your marketing strategy. Share this with stakeholders in groups like Product Marketing, Industry Marketing, Sales, Sales Operations, and IT.
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Keys to Your Success
Now that you’ve reinforced your strategy with your team, let’s talk about what else you can do to keep them on track as they stand up Marketo Engage. In our experience, the most successful Marketo customers do these three things from the start:
1. Align on expectations with Sales. You already know alignment between Sales and Marketing is important. You should both agree on what elements of your strategy you will implement first, but this is also a great opportunity to discuss what success means and agree on topics like lead scoring, lead routing, personas, and target audiences.
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ACTION: Schedule a meeting between Sales & Marketing to agree on a set of priorities for your initial Marketo Engage rollout.
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2. Connect operations teams. Be sure the Sales Operations and Marketing Operations teams are tightly aligned, as they will be working together on integrations between Marketo Engage, the CRM, and many other systems.
TIP: The CRM integration is one of the most important parts of implementing Marketo Engage, so get it right the first time – it can be costly to fix later!
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ACTION: Meet with the Sales Operations leader to secure their buy-in and discuss your priorities for launch. Ensure Sales Ops and Marketing Ops have regular touchpoints.
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3. Establish best practices early. Creating these habits now will have a big payoff down the road. Standard naming conventions, templates, enablement programs, and thorough documentation will save you a lot of headaches later. You have the unique opportunity to re-examine your current practices and processes during this time and improve the ones that are no longer working for you, so take advantage of it!
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ACTION: Ask your implementation team what processes they are carrying over into Marketo Engage, and what elements they are re-thinking. Discuss the plan for importing existing assets and what new templates or assets will need to be developed.
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Emphasize Operational Excellence
You’ve assembled a team of all-stars with a strong system admin and center of excellence. You’ve shared your vision for Marketo Engage and how it fits into your marketing strategy. You’ve held alignment meetings with Sales, and the operations teams are working together on the CRM integration. There are still some best practices you need to ensure the team follows.
Decision Context and Continuity. Clear documentation for the WHY behind decisions (in addition to the WHAT) will provide your team valuable context for why your system was set up the way it is, especially as they maintain your instance and plan future upgrades.
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ACTION: Talk with your system admin about their plans for documentation and request a copy be saved where other team members can easily access it. These guides should be as comprehensive as possible, but can be as simple as a recorded walk-through of your Marketo Engage instance. Ask them what process they have in place to ensure governance documentation is updated and remains relevant.
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Marketer Enablement. Standard training for all users ensures consistency, keeps your instance clean, and emphasizes best practices. It also ensures users have the correct training for their permission sets.
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ACTION: Have your team compile a standard set of enablement materials for all users. This may include interactive exercises to practice working with the platform, courses to complete or quizzes to pass before being granted access, or a list of actions your users are allowed to perform in Marketo Engage. Make sure they document what training is required for new users to gain access and a timeline for completion. Have them establish a cadence for ongoing education.
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Successful Reporting. To enable your ability to create insightful reporting, your team will need to develop standardized naming conventions early.
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ACTION: Consider your business’s needs and how you’ll most commonly report on performance – fiscal quarter, campaign, or product are typical groupings, but you’ll have to decide what makes sense for your organization. Share your expectations, required views, and preferred groupings with your Center of Excellence so they can create standardized names that support insightful reporting
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Brand Consistency. Standard templates that your marketers can clone and use repeatedly ensure all customers have consistent experiences with your brand.
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ACTION: Work with a designer (they can be in-house, or a hired contractor or agency) to create email and landing page templates for your marketers to leverage. Be sure your designer engages with your Brand team early so that you’re not trying to chase them down later after the templates are created.
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Your Role in Success
One of the keys to getting the most value out of your Adobe investment lies with setting up a common technical and organizational foundation. Ensuring that all parts of the organization operate with a common strategy and purpose is crucial for success.
We also understand that leading through change can be daunting for transformational leaders. The journey involves several critical steps: communicating your vision, gaining buy-in, enabling people on new technologies, and instilling new ways of working.
For more detailed guidance on managing the human aspects of change, refer to our guide on Change Management essentials for success. This resource offers valuable insights, practical strategies and even a change toolkit to help you understand the scope and complexities of organizational transformation.