Need to Migrate your MAP? Start Here

This is Blog 1 in our series, “Digital Pi Dives Deep Into Marketo Migration”
After such great feedback on our Migration planning blog, we decided to dive deeper into each of the steps first mentioned there. Click on the links below to check out all of the blogs in the series:

** Anatomy of a Migration WEBINAR **
May 14, 2020 1 PM ET
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Your team needs to migrate out of your current Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) into a new one. Great! Where do you start? 

As you can imagine, there are a lot of moving pieces and a stream of never-ending questions/details that need to be addressed when migrating everything from your current MAP. We suggest that you start by creating a task list/project plan.

Obviously, every migration project plan is unique, but we have found that there are basic groups of tasks that need to be considered for every migration. We have outlined these groups of tasks.

Let’s dive into those areas to determine what needs to be included in your specific plan.

INVENTORY

First, let’s talk about your current MAP – think of all the work you and your team have done! You’ll want to include an item in your project plan for taking a comprehensive inventory. Be sure to include snippets, files, forms, and templates – not just the programs, emails, etc.

SYSTEM SET UP

Next, consider your new MAP, is it already configured? Or do you need to add tasks to the project plan to configure your new MAP?

INTEGRATIONS

We refer to this generically as a “MAP migration”; however, the reality is there are any number of applications in your martech stack that are connected to that MAP. Each one of those will need to be disconnected from the current instance and reconnected to the new one – in a word, “migrated.” The timing and order of moving those connections/integrations also require thoughtful, detailed project management.

CRM CONNECTION

The largest application connected to your MAP is possibly your CRM, is that changing? Frequently it is also being migrated/integrated. You need to ensure that all tasks related to your team’s part in that migration are included in your MAP project plan.

CONSOLIDATIONS

Let’s not forget that rarely is the migration project a straight-forward, move everything, as is, from MAP instance 1 to MAP instance 2; where the new MAP is from the same vendor and there are no other changes to contend with.

Frequently we see one MAP instance being migrated/consolidated into an existing, established MAP instance. Or two MAP instances being consolidated into a third, new MAP instance. We also see MAP instances from different vendors getting migrated. The number of instances and vendor combinations are endless!

NEW SKILL SETS

As we mentioned, vendors change. Is that something you need to address in your migration project plan? Do you and your team need to learn a new tool? And a new set of best practices as well? We recommend including two sets of training tasks in your project plan:

  1. Training for the build team
  2. Training for the other users of the MAP – including WHY you set up your instance the way you did.

We find that people who understand WHY something is set up a certain way will do a better job of following those conventions.

TESTING AND ACTIVATION

Be sure to include tasks in your project plan for testing and program activation. It’s easy to forget these tasks when the focus of the migration is well, migrating! Every single item that was migrated will need a thorough test. Are the images in your emails pointing to the ones you moved into this instance? Are the URLs correct? Did you recreate/define all the folder level/program level tokens?

BLACKOUT PLANNING

Depending on the size of your instance, you might be able to do the final switch from one platform to another over a weekend. Frequently the syncing of data and swapping over embedded forms takes longer;  you’ll want to ensure that everyone is aligned with how sales and marketing will operate during the cutover period. As you can imagine, it also helps to give the teams plenty of advanced notice.

SUFFICIENT TIME

Have you been given a very short timeframe in which to do this migration? Frequently we see teams that have to migrate on a tight deadline based on vendor contract deadlines. We recommend reviewing your project plan based on this timeline to determine which parts MUST be completed first, before that deadline. You may need to take a slimmed-down approach for the first delivery group phase of the migration and then iterate as time permits.

There are many complex tasks that are included in your MAP migration project plan; that’s why we’ve put together a deep dive MAP migration blog series! Be on the lookout for the next blog that takes a deep dive into taking an inventory of your current Marketo instance.

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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