Marketo Audits and Assessments
The goal of a Marketo audit is to isolate key areas for improvement and develop a roadmap that allows you to achieve your marketing objectives and eliminate any obstacles that are in your way.
If you think you can do more with Marketo or are running into some serious challenges you need help with, get in touch and we can conduct a quick and cost-effective Marketo audit for you.
Three-Step Marketo Audit
Our Marketo audits and assessments are custom-tailored to fit your needs, but most will adhere to these three core steps:
- Marketo Requirements Analysis – We perform gap analysis against your vision of what you hoped to get out of purchasing Marketo versus what you are actually getting from your investment in your marketing automation platform.
- Marketo Best Practices Analysis – We compare your use of Marketo against our list of Marketo best practices to identify areas for improvement. This covers everything from data hygiene to content quality to analytics and integration.
- Marketo Roadmap Development – Our Marketo experts work with you to define the go-forwared roadmap to get you to your desired state with respect to your martech stack.
As you evaluate consulting firms focused on marketing automation, make sure you fully understand their audit and assessment process.
If you like our process, give us a try.
Step 1: Marketo Requirements Analysis
We always begin our marketing automation services with the obvious question: Why are you requesting a Marketo audit? What’s not working that you’d like to improve upon?
Companies invest in marketing automation systems to achieve a variety of business goals, so we always start with your business and marketing goals. What are you trying to accomplish and why? What markets are you trying to reach, with what was messaging and with what desired outcomes? What strategies have been defined and what campaigns have been planned out? What KPIs are you measuring success against? Are you getting the results you hoped for, and if not, why?
In conducting our Marketo audits and assessments, we isolate all your Marketo requirements and then work with you to assess which requirements may need attention.
This can reveal gaps in how you are approaching marketing automation. For example, you may be undermarketing to prospects that have been deemed to be high-priority targets in the business plan. You may not have the right Marketo and demand generation infrastructure in place to attribute revenue to marketing activiites. You may be generating leads but the hand-off to Sales is broken in some critical way that limits the impact of your marketing programs on business results. You may simply not be doing enough outbound marketing to generate the results you seek.
In contrast to the assessment approach of many Marketo marketing automation consulting providers, we always start with this business analysis of your Marketo deployment. After all, it’s the business results that pay for Marketo, for all of the marketing programs you manage, and for our Marketo systems audit.
This is an important difference. Many agencies that conduct Marketo audits will immediately dive into the details (e.g. looking for duplicate contacts, etc.) without asking why Marketo was purchased in the first place.
Our approach is always “Business Goals First, Everything Else Second.” While we are experts in Marketo’s mechanics, we are also highly experienced in addressing miscommunications, misunderstandings and missteps within your organization that may be undermining your full potential.
What we typically find is that there are mechanical issues with Marketo (e.g. configuration and execution) but root cause analysis often points to organizational and planning issues, which we can help you address. If there’s a larger issue, like dysfunctional Sales and Marketing alignment, we may recommend addressing those issue first before we dive into low-level Marketo implementation and execution issues, or getting both efforts to improve going in parallel.
When this first phase of the Marketo audit is complete, we present our findings to confirm that we fully understand what you are trying to accomplish with Marketo and we socialize our broader findings with you for feedback. After that, we proceed to a more detailed analysis of your Marketo instance, prioritized based on your business goals.
Step 2. Marketo Best Practices Analysis
Once we understand the “Why” behind your Marketo marketing automation plans, we dive into the details to find out specifically what’s stopping you from being more successful with the martech stack and your marketing efforts in general.
As a result of our long track record in helping companies to make the most of their marketing automation platforms, we’ve developed a marketing automation best practices checklist and a maturity model assessment that can show where your Marketo deployment is strong and where it needs to be shored up. The assessment is broad in its evaluation of your capabilities with respect to Marketo, covering everything from the in-house team’s Marketo expertise to conversion capabilities on your website to GDPR compliance.
It’s best to cover the details of our Marketo assessment methodology with you in person or on the phone, but rest assured that it is comprehensive in nature but tailored to your unique needs. From the marketing automation plan to funnel attribution to content assets to nurture marketing to reporting and analytics, we provide you with a complete assessment on how you are doing against best practices. Whenever possible, we try to quantify what’s being lost due to the weaknesses we identify, ideally quantitatively but at minimum qualitatively. We also isolate what the effort is to fix.
With both the business impact and the effort defined, we can prioritize what fixes and improvements have the biggest ROI for you and create a detailed set of recommendations.
Step 3: Marketo Roadmap
Last but certainly not least, we prepare your go-forward Marketo roadmap. This is an action plan that prioritizes what needs to be done when.
Anything that is preventing you from marketing is fixed first. From there’ we balance business priorities against effort, available resources and timelines to determine the proper sequencing.
Actionable tasks in your Marketo roadmap can be broad in scope, including strategy shifts, hiring plans, improved programs, data health and hygience, better and more precise audience segmentation, documentation of new workflows and staff training. Lots of potential to-do list items, but all with one goal: drive engagement and help achieve its B2B business goals.
About Our Marketo Consulting Firm
Our Marketo consulting agency features a two-time Marketo Champion and multiple Marketo Certified Experts and Marketo Certified Associates. We are actively involved with the Chicago Marketo User Group and many other Marketo communities. Long story short, our network of Marketo experts is wide and vast. In a pinch, we’ve got a network we can draw upon to staff and/or solve every possible Marketo challenge.
Ready to take your use of Marketo to a higher level? A quick discussion with our team wlll determine if we are the right Marketo marketing automation agency for you.
Reach out to start the conversation.