A marketing migration is what you need when you’ve found that the marketing tools you’re currently using no longer meet the marketing needs of today and tomorrow. When that time comes you need to find a replacement solution and move over everything that has been built to ensure you don’t lose any valuable content.

The process of a marketing migration is pretty straightforward, but with all of the moving parts it can easily get out of hand. Here is the standard process you will need to go through.

1. Find the new software solution and ensure that all of your needs are met. Many times a solution is chosen that misses a big chunk of the requirements and it will take additional work and potentially additional software to solve the problem.

2. Determine the migration path. This step often depends on your needs as an organization and if multiple tools are being consolidated into one. Plan the path at a high level of what is going where. When it is a simple email -> email tool migration it’s easy, but not all scenarios are like that.

3. Outline all of the content that needs to be migrated. How many templates, content pieces, pages, workflows, etc. need to be moved? Dig through your old tools and find everything that you want to keep - you’ll be surprised what you find!

4. Move everything to the new tool. Make sure you don’t forget to move the asset files like images, PDFs, and so on. We see it all the time; email templates get moved but still reference images on your old tool - then it gets shut off and you have broken emails.

5. Roll it live. Please don’t do it all at once! Start with one or two email campaigns and make sure you didn’t miss anything. Start linking to the new landing pages from your homepage and see the leads flow through. Once you feel comfortable with the setup, then make the full switch.

6. Don’t forget the redirects. Most of the time your URL structure for any pages will be changing a bit. Go through and ensure all of your old links still work by setting up 301 redirects. This makes sure that all of your shared links don’t break and that Google can find your new pages.

Going through a marketing migration is definitely not an easy task. The part that most people miss is staying organized throughout all of the steps. If there is a large marketing team in place, this can get to be a bit more difficult and the organization is even more important.

Don’t be afraid of working with external resources when it comes to a marketing migration. If you have an existing marketing agency they might be able to help or reach out to us and we’d be thrilled to help make the transition painless.