2024 EOY Marketo Checklist
It's that time of year where we get inundated with end-of-year planning checklists! But it's for good reason. Many folks have reached out for help with metrics, transparency, forecasting... things that require a lot of backwards cleanup to get current-year visibility.
AS SUCH, my end-of-year checklist includes all the "maintenance" stuff that we have to do to keep the lights on; but, it also includes a list of things to get in order before the year begins to have nice clean reporting in 2025.
Annual Marketo Maintenance
Take advantage of the slow season to get all your ducks in a row. A lot of these only take a few minutes.
Folder Structure and Archiving
This is easy! Create a new folder structure for 2025 and archive folders you are no longer using. Typically I keep the prior year active so I can easily search and reference, but archive anything 2+ years old.
Don’t forget to recreate program tokens that lived in your 2024 parent folder.
Audit Users and Permissions
Have employees or vendors left your company this year? Do they still have Marketo access? Now’s the time to expire or remove their credentials. Even if you expire them along the way, it’s a good idea to look over the list in case anyone was missed.
It’s also a great time to review the active users and confirm their permissions align with their current roles. Does your CMO really need full Marketo admin permissions? (Hint: no!)
Update Copyright Dates
Update your copyright dates in your email and landing page templates, and roll them out across assets that will be active in 2025.
Even better: set these up as tokens or write (cough, cough: borrow) a short script to grab the year from today’s date. Then you can permanently check this one off the list and not have to worry about it next year! Note: look at Velocity script tokens for emails.
Update Key Reference Lists
If you keep key reference lists in your database, such as competitor exclusion lists or target account lists, review them to ensure they are up-to-date.
While you’re at it, is your Marketable list optimized? Marketo charges you for your database size, so if half your database is non-marketable, it’s time for some cleanup. Look for folks with missing or invalid email addresses, who have left the company, or who are completely outside of your target audience (think students, job seekers, interns). Bonus points if you have a 3rd party data enrichment tool that you can use for more thorough cleanup.
Speaking of Marketability…it’s time for a Compliance Audit
GDPR. CCPA. CASL. CAN-SPAM. VCDPA. It seems like every year, there’s a new law surrounding compliance and data processing. Take this opportunity to ensure you’re compliant with all policies and laws applicable to everyone in your database, and to make sure your subscription management program is relevant and working as expected.
System Review
Don’t be a victim of tech debt. Be in the habit of reviewing your system performance, including things like active trigger campaigns, the health of your CRM sync, API errors, etc. Even if you check these regularly, consider a more thorough audit of the following administrative components:
How many active trigger campaigns do you have? Can any be deactivated?
Is your campaign queue empty? Is it regularly backed up?
Do you have any unused segmentations? These can be resource-heavy in terms of system processing.
How is your Salesforce integration? Are you seeing a lot of sync errors?
Are your LaunchPoint integrations throwing API errors?
Any other system notifications that need to be addressed?
Get Ready for 2025 Reporting
Let’s start with the basics
Before we talk strategy, start by reviewing existing reports that you look at on a regular basis, both in Marketo and Salesforce.
Do any of these reports use hard-coded date filters? Do you need to create new versions for 2025, or update date ranges on existing reports?
Set up your programs for success (literally)
Naming Convention. Do you have a solid naming convention that everyone uses consistently? If you don’t, start now. Reporting is exponentially harder without a naming convention to refer back to.
Program Tags. Are your program tags up-to-date? If they are built into your program templates, have they been updated regularly? Nothing’s worse than programs being cloned with irrelevant tag values, and finding out that all your programs were tagged incorrectly because the tags weren’t updated along the way.
Program Statuses. Do your program statuses match your SFDC campaign statuses? More importantly, do they accurately reflect the tactics in your 2025 roadmap? Do the success statuses align with each tactic’s KPIs? You’ll need to confirm this before adding program members if you want to know which campaigns and tactics are performing well.
Period Costs. If you use Marketo Performance Insights or RCE, did you add period costs to your programs in 2024? Start fresh in 2025 by adding period costs and track ROI right out of Marketo! If you don’t have another attribution tool, this is a fantastic place to start.
Know your KPIs and OKRs
Make sure you’re aligned with your marketing team, and your company as a whole, on 2025 KPIs and OKRs. It’s much easier to track against a concrete target from the beginning than to retroactively manipulate spreadsheet data.
Even better, make recommendations to your team based on 2024 performance data (I’m looking at you, MPI).
Here’s to making 2025 the year of transparency in the sales and marketing funnel!
