Just as birds fly south for the winter, marketers often find themselves flocking to a more comfortable, welcoming location: a new cross-channel marketing platform. Ok, sure, it’s a different type of migration, but the metaphor still holds.

If the idea of migrating to a new cross-channel marketing platform makes you take a huge deep breath—one laced with panic and stress—have we got the guide for you.

Let’s look at the silver lining of embarking on a platform migration: you have a clean slate. You get to start fresh, clear away any cobwebs, and configure the most effective and efficient martech stack.

This guide outlines the key steps you and your team should take to help you get there:

• Defining Your Goals and Quick Wins
  • Quick wins are all about the goals you can achieve as you move to a new platform. In the long term, consider what business outcomes you can tie to a successful use of the new platform.
• Organizing Your Team and Your Campaigns
  • The first step before you move forward with any platform migration planning is identifying the specific stakeholders who will be involved—a tiger team of sorts. The team you put together is contingent upon the type, size, and organizational structure of your business.
• Standardizing Your Data
  • Collecting and documenting data needed to support your campaigns and use cases may not be the most glamorous task, but it is necessary to have a clean foundation to leverage the data that powers your personalization and segmentation needs.
• Owning Your Technical Integration
  • The fact of the matter is no two technical integrations are alike. There are simply too many factors in play to create a universal process for each and every integration. However—there are ways to mitigate risks and keep your technical integration on track