10 Things to cover in your Marketo Audit Report

Whether you have inherited a new Marketo instance or drafted plans to optimize your current setup, you need to know how things currently stand. Wish there was an easier way in Marketo to find out what is there, what is working, what is broken, and what needs to be updated? Overall, you need the audit to streamline marketing-sales processes and improve marketing ROI with more visibility into campaigns & customer lifecycle.

Here’s a simple list of items you need to include when auditing your Marketo instance, and build reports for making the right business decisions.

1. Define Objectives and End Results: This may sound old school but is very critical when you start with Marketo audit. With clearly defined objectives, you can ensure audit goes in the right direction, without spending too much time on things with less business impact. Some of the objectives I like to follow include:

• Identify which lead generation efforts are driving revenues
• See all traffic generating activities and nurtures – whether or not they’ve had an impact on revenue
• Review how sales is working on different leads, which leads are followed up and which are rejected
• Determine the right number of sales reps based on lead volume
• If the volume of sales-ready leads is insufficient, determine the best action to take – Adjusting lead score, increasing top of the funnel marketing activity, or more nurturing
• Check if the current marketing processes are scalable

2. Nomenclature: Look at the two images below. What type of naming conventions do you have in your system? Having a clean naming convention is very critical and helps everyone in finding and managing different programs within the instance.

Typically, I would recommend using the following naming convention for different types of programs:

• Webinar: WB-2016-Jan-{Date}-{Name of the webinar}
• Whitepaper: WP-2016-Jan-{Name of the whitepaper}
• Tradeshow: TS-2016-Jan-{Name of the tradeshow}
• Field Event: FE-2016-Jan-{Date}-{Name of the event}
• eBook: EB-2016-Jan-{Name of the eBook}
• Newsletter: NL-2016-Jan-{Title of the newsletter}

3. Structure: Just like your dressing defines your personality, the structure of the program in your instance defines your expertise in building programs. I have seen most companies do not use a program template, even when it’s provided by Marketo right from the start. With an undefined program structure, the efficiency for building programs in Marketo decreases for everyone. Moreover, everyone tries to create programs in a different way, which may increase the clutter in your account.

4. Setup: Setup is strictly different from the program structure. While the structure is more about how you organize assets in your programs, setup is about building the programs in the right way. Tasks like using program level tokens, setting up proper alerts, adding leads to the SFDC campaign with right status, updating different values, establishing program success are all parts of the setup. Proper setup ensures all the results are properly tracked, and your leads are flowing through the funnel in the desired way.

5. Lead Flow: Big question for every marketer – What happens to a lead when it is created in Marketo? Marketers continue to run new campaigns regularly to generate more leads and turn them as MQLs. However, there is a low visibility on what actually happens to a new lead as soon as it enters the database. The way a new lead is processed and assigned to a Sales Rep can determine how satisfied the sales team is from incoming leads. When reviewing the lead flow, you should check if you are filtering leads with junk data, competitors, partners, and existing users. A good lead flow ideally includes a contact washing machine, set of Exclusions and proper campaigns for Lead Assignment to Salesforce.

6. Sales Insight & Interesting Moments: Sales Insight may be a little complex for companies who have recently started using Marketo. Sales Insight gives more power to your sales team and provides them with more visibility. If you are not using Sales Insight, you should install it immediately. If you have been using it, make sure you have configured Stars & Flames, Interesting Moments, Sales Insight Emails, and marketing campaigns, which can be triggered from the Sales Insight in Salesforce.

7. Lead Source: In a recent audit done for a Marketo User, we saw 112 different lead sources being used. That was almost insane and driving the marketing team crazy. Lead Source is one of the most important items to track for calculating ROI from your campaigns. So, it is important that you do not have more than 10 primary lead sources, and do not overwrite lead source value. In addition to the lead source, I would recommend using Lead Channels and Offer Type as well. Here’s an example: If you are running a paid marketing campaign for an eBook promotion across different platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, your Lead Source should be Paid Advertising. Under this, you should use Lead Channel = Twitter or LinkedIn, and Offer Type = eBook.

8. Lead Scoring: In simple words, Lead Scoring drives sales and marketing alignment in your company. Whether you are using just the lead score field or separately using behavior & demographic score, you need to ensure that your sales team is using them. As a best practice, I would recommend using behavior score and demographic score separately, and then adding them to calculate a lead score or use them to assign a lead grade.

When reviewing your lead scoring, answer the following questions:

• Are the leads with high score converting to an opportunity?
• The number of leads passed using the lead score threshold is sending enough leads for the sales team to work efficiently
• Is the sales team using Stars and Flames based on the lead scores?
• Has your lead scoring model been updated on a regular basis, depending on the won deals?

9. Data Health: How can we talk about an audit without talking about the data inside Marketo? As a Marketo user, we are paying for the number of records we have in the system. But do we really need all the records? Here’s a sample report that you can create to identify records which should be deleted. This would reduce the Marketo subscription cost and increase the engagement rate from your marketing campaigns.

For identifying Duplicate records, you can build a report like this:

10. Performance Reporting: How many different types of reports do you use in Marketo? I am sure the standard ones would include Landing Page Performance Report, Email Performance Report, and Email Link Performance Report. However, there are many other reports which can be created in Marketo. Going through the Marketo user community, I have seen many users aren’t not happy with limited reporting capabilities in Marketo. However, if created properly, there are more than enough reports you would like to see as a marketer. Some of the recommended reports would include:

• Leads by Revenue Stage Report
• Program Performance Report
• Program Analyser Report
• Company Webpage Report

A comprehensive audit report can help you in improving the efficiency in your instance while you can focus on high priority items. I hope this list can get you started with an initial audit report.
If you have too much on your plate and would like to get an audit, drop us a line at [email protected]. Our certified Marketo experts would get in touch with you soon.