Episode 12: Best Practices

TL;DR

• Invest in enablement early so your whole team is set up to use the tool well.
• Remember there are three places to set permissions: users and roles, the Lightning app, and your CMS.
• Keep a working document of everything you set up so you can troubleshoot later.
• Be humble, time your steps carefully, and watch for dependencies before you act.
• Lean on what you already know, and enjoy the small wins like UTMs out of the box.

You made it! This is the last episode of the Marketing Cloud Next guide, and we can hardly believe it has been 11 episodes already.

If you have followed along the whole way…congratulations!

You have gone from setting up your instance and configuring Data Cloud to creating emails, forms, and running your campaigns. That is no small feat.

For this final episode, we are stepping back from the step-by-step builds to talk about best practices and the things you really want to be aware of when working in Marketing Cloud Next (MCN).

Start With Enablement

One thing we have come back to again and again is enablement. 

It’s a big part of any migration, especially if you have a large team or people scattered across different time zones. Enablement is what sets your team up for success, because it’s how they learn to actually use the tool instead of guessing their way through it. So get the guide into their hands and give them time to learn.

And we’ll be honest with you; MCN humbled us. Even coming in with regular, hands-on experience across several different marketing automation platforms, the learning didn’t come naturally for this one. 

This is especially true if you are an admin. Take your time to understand how Data Cloud works and how all the pieces fit together, because this is not your typical, bread-and-butter marketing automation platform. 

It’s so closely in sync with Salesforce that you can’t rely on the intuition you’ve built up from other MAPs. It really is its own thing.

Know Your Three Permission Areas

Permissions trip people up, so this one is worth committing to memory. In Marketing Cloud Next, there are three separate places where permissions live:

• Users and roles, where you set people up as admins, managers, or viewers, and decide who can view reports.
• The Lightning app, where you grant access according to each person’s role.
• Your CMS, which has its own layer of permissions.

If someone on your team says they can’t see something, the most likely cause is a missing permission in one of these three spots. So when access issues come up, check all three.

Document As You Go

It’s so easy to take documentation for granted. We tell ourselves we will do it later, or that we will just remember how things were set up. Spoiler: you will not remember!

Keep a working document open as you move through your migration. Anytime you do a custom setup, write it down, so that if an issue pops up later, you know exactly where to look. We learned this firsthand migrating off Pardot. We built one big Excel spreadsheet that captured everything in our old instance, what needed to come over, and what we could let fall away. A migration can be a lot, and having it all written out made a real difference.

Be Humble and Time Your Steps

MCN is still a brand new marketing automation platform. Plenty of things are still being figured out, and there aren’t nearly as many resources online as you would find for established tools like Marketo, HubSpot, or Pardot. So don’t assume you can solve everything quickly, and respect your dependencies.

A mistake we made (that you can avoid) is that we fixed our DKIM before we sorted out consent. As a result, we could no longer send emails from the old platform, but we didn’t have the data to send from the new one either. For a stretch, we had no way to send at all. So time your steps and identify the dependencies before you move. A single wrong move can leave you without any marketing for a week or two.

But that said, it’s not the end of the world. MCN can be a beast, and a very powerful one, but so much of it builds on familiar ground. You have a database, which now comes from Data Cloud. You have Flows to build your automations and your CMS to build your assets. And you still have your campaigns. The advice that helped us most was to stop comparing MCN to our usual MAPs and start embracing it for what it is.

Enjoy the Small Wins

There are some genuinely fun surprises in MCN too. One of our favorites was discovering that you can see all of your UTM sources and mediums from the original origin right out of the box, because the script already captures it for you. With most platforms, you have to configure your UTMs and get them persisting across first touch and last touch yourself. MCN hands a lot of that to you for free. These small wins are real, so embrace them.

A Couple of Final Reminders

Two last things that will save you headaches.

First, set up a good naming convention and stick to it. It helps you navigate the system far more easily, and it matters a great deal with content management.

Second, pay extra attention when you are building forms and setting up Flows. This is where things get tricky, and it’s easy to fall into a loop of test forms and never-ending “Do Not Use” forms cluttering your instance. That is where DNU comes from, by the way. It stands for Do Not Use, and let’s just say we created our fair share of DNU 2s and DNU 3s along the way.

That’s a Wrap

And that brings us to the end of the Marketing Cloud Next guide. Congratulations again on making it all the way through! You now have a solid foundation to build on.

Take your time, work through the docs, be humble, and have fun with it. And if you ever have questions or just want to pick our brains, reach out anytime. We are always happy to help.

Thank you for watching and for following along with the entire guide!