How to get the most from your Marketo instance? Train, train, train.

In the last post of this series, “Marketo building blocks that everyone should know, but they don’t!”, we covered how and why you need to define, and agree upon, marketing channels, program status values, and success steps, in your Marketo instance.

To recap, you and your compatriots should gather together and discuss each type of marketing tactic you do, and all the layers of interaction and engagement that those people can have with each one of those marketing efforts, including the purpose or goal for each of those tactics. You may or may not want to bring in some pizza (and beer, duh).

In this post, we’ll discuss how and why to educate your team of Marketo users on these channels and statuses. It’s critical for them to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing before they learn how to do it.

By not having solid comprehension of the logic behind a program and its build, it’s easy for someone to fail to see the gravity of not building it correctly. The downstream effects of improper program structure are inaccurate reporting, incomplete scoring, misinformation sent to the sales reps, and lack of visibility into marketing performance and influence.

After the channels are established, every member of the team should be educated on what a program is, what a channel is, what the statuses are, what successes are (and why they are important for influence reporting), and the importance of using the correct channels while setting members to the correct statuses.

By selecting the correct channel and applying the correct status to a member, a lead will successfully be scored based on their engagement, their interaction will be visible to a sales rep by way of their mirrored SFDC campaign member status, and your ability to measure that program’s effectiveness will be flawless.

Knowing the ins and outs of programs will enable your team members to have a much better handle on order of operations, too. One of the most common troubleshooting scenarios is when a program’s processing smart campaigns are not activated prior to list import or email send.

At Digital Pi, we receive many questions like, “I know my lead Joe Smith clicked the link and registered, but his status still says, “invited””. If your team is properly trained and grasps the concept, many errors and hours spent troubleshooting will be spared.

The best way to achieve this wisdom is to hold a deep-dive training session for your Marketo users in which programs get the center stage. You’ll likely need to dabble in a few related areas to connect all the dots (nothing in Marketo operates in a silo), but there’s nothing more productive than a live review.

In addition, I recommend you record and document all the details for your team to revisit and reference, as well as to include in onboarding for new hires. In our third and final blog post of this series, we’ll discuss what sort of documentation and templates you should build to ensure consistent, standardized, and correctly built programs.

Watch for our next in this series of blog posts entitled, “Why Marketo program templates and solid documentation are key to long-term success!”

Your marketing technology experts.

At Digital Pi, we use technology to connect revenue to marketing efforts. We fuse marketing strategies, processes, data and applications to make marketing technology solutions work for clients' businesses.

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