This is the third article in our Pardot-or-Marketo series:
Marketo or Pardot Part 1 – Which is a better fit?
Marketo or Pardot Part 2 – How to Breakdown the Complex Process
Marketo or Pardot Part 4 – Learn A Whole New Language
In this video, we talk about longevity and ensuring your instance is ready to work for you for the long-term. Deciding which assets to bring over, and which programs to re-create, is important and can’t be taken lightly. In this PiPointer, Luke Wakefield explains how to approach those decisions and set up Marketo for scale and success.
Jeff Coveney: Data’s always a big challenge with migrations. Right now, we’re going to talk with Luke Wakefield about how to do that with Marketo, some of those considerations about moving over that data. What’s the big aspect that companies sometimes underestimate when doing that Pardot to Marketo Migration, Luke?
Luke Wakefield: Pardot and Marketo, they’re structured in such different ways. You’re not able to just tie into a Pardot campaign and recreate the Marketo program by running a script through the API. It’s possible with Marketo to Marketo Migration, but not so much the case here.
There’s going to be a lot of manual work in order to create your Pardot campaigns within Marketo programs. You really need to just make sure that you’re only bringing over the campaigns that are long-lasting, such as nurture programs, your website, content, forms, landing pages, anything that’s going to be a long-term type of asset. You won’t need to bring over things like a 2017 holiday card or something that was a one-time send, where you could just pull a report on the analytics.
Jeff Coveney: But once you kind of made those decisions, what’s a good process for bringing over that data?
Luke Wakefield: You’ll want to start with only syncing over the necessary fields. You can always go back and bring in more fields and bring in more data. It’s a little bit tougher to take away fields that you’ve already synced over. And it’s also going to keep Marketo efficient. You won’t burden your system with unnecessary data value changes since you’ll only be syncing between the two systems 100% essential data.
Jeff Coveney: Talk a little bit, Luke, about how that works. Do you bring that data, for instance into Salesforce and keep it there, or are you bringing it into Marketo first? What’s the process you’ve seen work well?
Luke Wakefield: The data points that I like to identify first are usually around your forms. Whatever forms or form handlers you’re using within Pardot, you want to take a look at each one of those, identify all the fields that are being used throughout those forums, and just ensuring that those fields are documented and documented for every CRM object or entity where they were in use. It could be both on the lead and contact. The forms are your first one because those are going to be big as far as when you’re bringing data in that you have the right field that it’s mapping to.
Then you can kind of shift your focus to marketers and segmentation. You want to know which fields are essential for your marketers to create a target audience list and make sure that those fields are being created in Marketo. Because once you flip the switch and you train your marketers on using Marketo, you want to ensure that they’re able to target the audiences they want, get analytics around the people that they usually target, and those are fields that are also essential.
And then your last step would be geared more so you’re processing campaigns, and this could be around consent, privacy, anything where you’re doing any type of data normalization standardization. You’ll really want to just ensure that those fields are being synced over from your CRM and mapping in Marketo. This will basically guarantee that these values are always accurate between your two systems.
Jeff Coveney: For larger companies, how does this work at scale?
Luke Wakefield: Just to talk about program templates, in Marketo these programs templates, they standardize the data, they process a lot of items outside of just data. They power your lead scoring, your sourcing, programming campaign membership, and even acquisition reporting. When your marketing teams are growing and essentially your execution continues to increase, you really need an architecture like Marketo that supports it.
Jeff Coveney: Great. Well, thanks for sharing your thoughts today, Luke, on data and scalability with Marketo.
Luke Wakefield: Yeah, anytime. Thanks.
This is the second article in our Pardot-or-Marketo series:
Marketo or Pardot Part 1 – Which is a better fit?
Marketo or Pardot Part 2 – Migrating from Pardot to Marketo: How to Breakdown the Complex Process
Marketo or Pardot Part 4 – Learning a New Language