4 Actionable Ways to Prepare for a MAP Migration

April 5, 2023 Stan

Let’s face it. Organizations will continually make strategic changes to optimize, enhance, and support their business objectives and goals. When it comes to the marketing automation journey, that change may also include a digital transformation decision to change its marketing automation platform (MAP). Marketing departments may decide to change a MAP within their own department or as part of an organizational shift (e.g., Adobe to Oracle products) to align with business technology stack strategies and/or solve a business problem. Whatever reason it may be for an organization, preparation will be important. Migrating from one MAP to another can be tricky, requiring lots of planning and strategy.

Here are 4 ways to prepare for a MAP migration

Align your teams

A migration is a very complex and time-consuming process. It’s key to involve all your key stakeholders from the beginning. Sales, Marketing, and IT will need to work in tandem to ensure your migration is successful. Assigning a Program Manager to oversee the entire migration process from initiation to post-migration will ensure a smooth transition.

Along with providing a high-level overview of the migration effort and common outcome, providing each team the Who, What, Where, When, Where, Why, and How, will be helpful in gaining buy-in and clarity for each team’s roles and responsibilities. Establishing a strong stakeholder matrix and identifying the decision makers will also be helpful. There will be times of team collaboration and the Program Manager will need to know who gets to say “Yes,” so the decision can be logged, along with the pros and cons of the decision, and move the team forward.

Not involving key stakeholders at the start of a migration may create gaps for the project team. This could include uncovering processes or dependencies too far in the project that could cause rewriting requirements and rework. Hitting those discoveries during testing could also delay the launch timeline.

Documentation and use case

Documenting your current marketing requirements and creating use cases will help you define your objectives and formulate the right migration strategy. You can then evaluate your business initiatives and practices to understand what’s working and what’s not.

Remember the stakeholder matrix you created? That will be most helpful when establishing who is part of the requirements gathering process. Which team members to include in the detailed requirements session versus which stakeholders need to review and approve the requirements will help eliminate any meeting confusion and wasted time.

Also, as you prepare for a MAP migration, identifying the similarities and differences between the platforms will also help formulate a framework for requirements gathering. This will also be helpful in preparing for data mapping sessions needed for any system integration(s) work.

Full asset audit

Before beginning the actual migration, you need to carefully audit your current platform. Use this audit to clean out the “junk.” This helps you prioritize the assets you only want to use at launch and speeds up the timeline.

Then, as part of phase 2, you can then bring in any assets you may want to use in the future. We recommend only bringing over active campaigns, ongoing nurtures, and templates. You really don’t need a campaign and its assets for something that ran/completed more than a year ago.

As a part of the audit, you will also need to document system rules and programs that must be replicated in the new MAP. Taking time to document these will also help prepare for regression testing and ensuring existing processes are working as expected.

Develop a plan

Based on your requirements and objectives, you will then need to create a timeline, allocate a budget, and assign roles to your team. As a part of the planning process, you should account for a cut over plan. This should detail when your current MAP will be turned off and your new one turned on. You may also have a freeze period based on your email campaigns and schedule, where no emails are to be sent from the former MAP.

Finally, building out a strong communication plan will help ensure everyone is on the same page throughout the project. Pieces of this plan could include establishing status meetings (e.g., attendees, cadence/frequency, content, agendas.), status reporting, and determining the best collaboration tool for communications, project tracking and logs (risks, decisions, etc.) and documentation sharing.

Planning is key when you prepare for a MAP migration. Relationship One can help you navigate through the migration process – contact us today!

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