Marketing Automation Platform Migration Guide

Investing in a marketing automation platform is a big decision for your business. As the head marketing leader, your performance, and perhaps career, depends on how well you set-up and manage your marketing technology and automation.

This guide is designed to help you understand:

• Prerequisites you need to prepare for the migration
• Strategise for  your marketing automation system migration
• What you need to setup the new automation system like time, effort, resources 
• What else you need to consider like integrations with other business tools or training your users
• Testing your new sistem
• Start running with your new marketing automation system or platforms

Before you decide to migrate, you should understand the steps involved in making the switch. At NNC Services, we specialise in the technical aspects of marketing technology migration. Think of us as a moving company you’ve hired to move to your next home. You need an experienced company that presents options understands the details and moves your content without losing (or breaking) anything essential.

Prerequisites

The first step is to conduct an inventory of your marketing assets.

• How much stuff do you have? In the marketing world, we’re talking about contacts, email templates, landing pages, and workflows. All of the components that go into your inbound marketing campaigns. Then we ask the critical question.
• Do you need it all, or can you throw some away? Perhaps some of the older stuff can be recycled or put into storage.
• You also need to know how many people in your business are moving tot he new system  and how well they know the new marketing automation platform. Do they require extensive training or just a little bit of hand-holding?

Migration Strategy

Some migrations are straight forward, others more difficult. Are you looking to make a fast transition or take your time to get all of the details correct before the move? Do you have existing campaigns to convert? Will you maintain parallel systems, and for how long? All of these questions need to be asked and addressed before your migration begins. 

Another question is, who is going to manage the migration? Do you have an internal champion, or does it make sense to work with an outsourced partner to manage the details? 

As you can see, there are many details involved, and having a partner with experience migrating inbound marketing solutions will add a lot of value to the process.

New System Setup

When you move into a new home, there are a million small details to handle, from hanging curtains to figuring out how to turn on the microwave oven. You have the same list of activities to do when setting up a new inbound marketing platform. Things like setting up users, configuring security settings, and creating new campaigns all take time and include a myriad of details to complete. 

Integrations

Connecting marketing automation platforms to other applications improve productivity, lower costs, and create more streamlined internal processes. Integrations can also be time-consuming and expensive to set-up during a migration process. Many inbound marketing platforms automate specific integrations like connecting Gmail or Outlook emails, calendars, and Google analytics. Other integrations can be more tricky. CRM integration is essential but can also be problematic, depending on the number of custom properties and naming conventions. Working with custom objects is also challenging if the same objects are not available in the new system. Then you have home-grown or specialized applications. These are the most challenging integration if the systems do not have a common application programming interface (API). A qualified partner has experienced developers who can modify or even develop new APIs for integration purposes.

Prepare and Train Users

Marketing automation adoption is a problem for most businesses. Preparing and training users is an essential step of the migration process. Administrators need to understand their role and how to set-up and manage other marketing and sales users in the system. Users need to be trained in both the software tools and understand the inbound marketing methodology and how to use it within their own sales process. 

Testing

Now that the boxes are unpacked, and the furniture is assembled, you need to conduct one final review to ensure you left nothing behind. Testing your platform confirms that you set up all of your assets and connections correctly before launching new campaigns.  It is much better to catch mistakes in the testing phase than to send the wrong email or have broken landing page links. 

Launch the New Inbound Marketing Platform

Congratulations! Your shiny new marketing automation platform is ready to go to work. You can turn your workflows on and launch your digital ad campaigns and wait for the leads to pour in. While it’s not always that simple, it can be if you work with the right partner. NNC Services has been launching new marketing automation platforms for over 14 years. We have a full staff of qualified inbound marketing consultants, writers, developers, and QA engineers to make your move a worry-free experience. Request a free migration assessment.

This is just a brief guide to get you started on your marketing system migration. Getting specialised help in evaluating the different options and the best fit for your new marketing system and how to best migrate, to get a clear timeline on your migration  to get the best licensing according to your needs can save you a tone of money and headaches. If you need help with identifying the best marketing platform for your company or just ant advice on what is a good streamlined migration process for your marketing automation needs book a time to strategise directly with one of our seniour marketing automation consultants.

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