In today’s marketing landscape, marketing automation has become indispensable for businesses seeking to optimize their marketing efforts and boost efficiency. As your company’s needs evolve, you may need to migrate to a more advanced platform. This guide will walk you through the critical steps to ensure a successful migration, maximize your investment, and minimize any disruptions.

Why Migration Matters

Platform migrations are not for the faint of heart. They usually start with an assessment of your needs. As you assess those needs, you understand what capabilities, and processes need to be maintained and what functionality needs to be added to your tech stack.

What are your areas of focus in the assessment? There will probably be more than one—it could be improvements in productivity, analytics, targeting, integrations, cost-savings, or modernization.

Once the assessment is complete, the next step is an RFP for vendors that meet your changing needs.

So, how do you set your team up for success?

Get the basics done first. Depending on your company’s size and the complexity of your marketing operations, you may have to engage finance, procurement, and IT infrastructure before any work starts.

It starts with the team. Identify the team members and stakeholders that will be integral to the entire process – including those that would lead any migration effort. After the team is identified – define their roles and responsibilities for the entire process. As your team starts the assessment and the RFP:

Know what you have. Understand your tech stack (including data sources). If you are looking for another solution, make sure you understand the current setup you have and how your team uses it. What are the pros and cons of your current solution?

• What are the connections, dependencies, and processes tied to the current solution?

Define clear objectives. It all starts with identifying your objectives and goals and making sure the platform that you are reviewing aligns with your overall strategy.

• What enhanced features does your team need?
• Is scalability important for a new solution?
• Are you focused on cost reduction, efficiency gains or both?

Buy for the future. As you develop your RFP, you start from what you know of your current tool and setup (strengths and opportunities). What functionality do you need to maintain? What capabilities need to be added? Are there any upcoming tech stack changes that need to be factored in?

Scrutinize potential new platforms for: 

• Feature set and functionality
• Vendor support and ecosystem
• Integration capabilities
• Data management
• User experience and interface
• Scalability and future-proofing

When is the right time to discuss migration?

When meeting with prospective vendors, ask what they offer in migration support and what their timelines for migration are—that is critical, their answers will influence your team’s decision.

Timing

There’s a lot of pre-work to be done before you submit an RFP to a select group of vendors. Identifying your team, and laying out clear roles and responsibilities is the first step. Followed by knowing your existing setup and data sources – as well as identifying the functionality you need to maintain and the new capabilities your strategy will need.

It’s likely you’ll have already collected a shortlist of vendors/solutions that you’re interested in evaluating. If you don’t, that’s fine too. We recommend using sites like G2 to compare various solutions and get access to customer reviews.

That’s already a sizable book of work that could take several weeks to complete — there are still critical tasks that will demand your team’s attention.

Next steps

Your team should develop a comprehensive migration plan in parallel with other activities. They know your infrastructure and systems better than anyone, and you want to use that knowledge to create a preliminary plan before signing with a new vendor. That migration plan can be finalized after vendor selection. Here’s a short list of things to consider.

• Timelines: Establish a realistic timeline for data, asset, and workflow migration. You’ll also need to have a launch date in mind.
• Alignment: Your migration plans need to align with your broader business strategy.
• Identify your resources: Since you’ve already identified the team members and stakeholders for vendor selection, that could be your starting point for selecting the team for migration.
• Plan for training: In your vendor conversations, identify what they offer to train your team on the new system.
• Integration plans: You’ll need to plan for integration with your existing systems (CRM, CMS, DAM, etc.). Your internal resources can also be members of those teams. They can help with recommendations on other team members to include and serve as a central point for internal communications.
• Data and Data Security: Ensuring data protection during the transfer process or at rest, as well as factoring in compliance with data protection and privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR).
• Processes: A successful migration depends on identifying every internal process you have in place to manage your operations. If you haven’t documented them already, now is the time to start.
• Testing is critical: As your team migrates solutions – you need to test every aspect of the migration, so start working on test plans early on.

Depending on who and what your team is evaluating, it could take weeks or a couple of months to get to a final selection. Once a vendor/solution is selected, the work begins. You will need to manage the vendor engagement and migration like you handled the RFP and selection process – with the right stakeholders and plan. After conferring with your broader team – have a date in mind for the completion of the migration activities and plan accordingly. Once the plan is set – you need to realize any delay – or failure pushes that date out.

Are you overwhelmed yet? This entire process can be daunting – your team needs to anticipate and plan for these challenges. The right planning, project management, communication, and leadership – can make the difference in vendor selection and migration.