Guide to Switching Marketing Automation Platforms

A challenging yet common task faces marketing operations professionals: switching marketing automation platforms. Many businesses undertake this transition to access new features, better integrations with data sources, or improved tools for content management and distribution.

Migration isn't simply about vendor costs—it's a multi-month commitment of team resources and organizational focus. While we might wish platform migration was just a technical switch, it often demands significant organizational effort, requiring months of planning and execution.

This process can impact multiple teams and workflows, calling for a thorough audit of nearly everything in your marketing operations system. You'll also need to maintain existing marketing campaigns during the transition. As one Reddit user described it, you'll be in the challenging position of running two automation platforms simultaneously.

​​“During the transition period, both systems will operate simultaneously. The old system may maintain some lead nurturing… while the new system begins collecting new names with fresh forms and landing pages." Pardot User - The Spot

Despite these short-term challenges, there's a strategic purpose behind switching platforms. This change can boost your business outcomes by adding scalability, efficiency, and competitive advantages you wouldn't otherwise have.

Rather than avoiding this transition, let's discuss a framework providing a goal-based methodology to deploy your new marketing automation platform more quickly, efficiently, and with less pain.

Evaluating the Need for Migration

When considering a switch to a new marketing automation platform, it's essential to look beyond attractive user interfaces and experiences. Focus instead on identifying pain points directly connected to business outcomes and build a clear case for whether a new platform is truly necessary.

Begin by creating an assessment tool for your organization to evaluate platform frustrations. This tool should capture information about:

• Usability
• Performance
• Integration capabilities
• Scalability
• Content management
• Analytics and reporting

Though challenging, develop an ROI calculation methodology. Some organizations report an average ROI of $5.44 for every $1 spent on marketing automation. Provide a formula that accounts for both hard costs and soft benefits you expect from a new platform. This approach helps identify:

• What you need in your new platform
• Pain points in your current platform
• Metrics to evaluate migration success

Next comes platform comparison. Create a comparison matrix outlining key features of potential platforms weighted against business priorities. Consider platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and other marketing automation vendors. Review information, examine customer reviews, and speak with users to determine which features are must-haves versus nice-to-haves. Your scoring matrix will provide a solid understanding of what each platform offers and whether it fits your needs.

Stakeholder alignment is critical for this project, which may take months to a year depending on your contact database size and number of assets being migrated. Secure early buy-in from executives in your department and others affected by the change. Technical resources who'll assist with integrations are particularly important stakeholders.

Sometimes this process reveals that migration isn't necessary. One Reddit user shared that after reviewing various platforms, they discovered their current marketing cloud deployment was actually the best fit. Their boss decided to rebuild the instance rather than migrate elsewhere.

“We are frustrated by many ‘quirks’ of Marketing Cloud… but the unanimous feedback I received was that MC is far superior… my bosses decided to rebuild our instance rather than migrate elsewhere.” Marketing Cloud User - Reddit

Marketing Automation Platform Migration Assessment Tool

Pre-Migration Planning Framework

So you've decided to switch marketing automation platforms. You've selected your platform and have a clear vision of the goals, objectives, and features you want to utilize. Now it's time to organize your team.

Start by establishing a solid team structure with detailed roles for everyone involved in the project. Identify:

• Technical leads
• Content specialists
• Project managers
• Marketing operations team members
• Sales operations team members
• Key executives across the organization

Ensure you understand what each stakeholder needs, what approvals you'll require, and how you'll communicate with them throughout the process.

Next comes developing a timeline. This can be challenging since marketing automation migrations often take longer than expected, partly because you'll need to maintain your existing system until the new one is operational. Set realistic timeframes based on your enterprise's capabilities and past experiences. If possible, review your previous marketing automation platform deployment project for insights on expected timelines.

Data and Asset Audits

One of the most critical steps in migrating your marketing automation platform is auditing your existing data and content assets. Marketing automation platforms are powerful because they serve as a comprehensive repository for assets and data—forms, landing pages, emails, customer list segmentations, and analytics.

Your audit must be comprehensive to avoid leaving behind valuable elements. This will be essential for data migration, ensuring contacts are enhanced with the right information to maintain functionality like personalization and segmentation.

Catalog all your content, including emails, landing pages, forms, and any other assets used by the marketing automation platform. This can be accomplished through various methods—you might use a web crawling tool like Screaming Frog to scan assets, or check analytics platforms and databases to account for data syncs and sources, identifying where they'll exist in the new platform.

Conduct a risk assessment to identify potential issues such as data loss, timeline delays, budget overruns, and adoption challenges. This allows you to develop specific mitigation strategies for each risk factor.

The Migration Process Timeline

Plans rarely remain intact when facing real-world challenges—this applies directly to marketing automation migrations. While detailed plans with clear objectives are essential, you must prepare for unexpected developments. Focus on covering technical requirements, data migration, content migration, and parallel platform operation during the transition.

Let's examine a potential five-phase process for your migration:

• Strategic planning
• Technical preparation
• Data migration
• Content and asset migration
• Parallel operation management

Phase One: Strategic Planning

Well before migration pressures mount, complete your strategic planning. Establish your governance structure, define success metrics, catalog assets, run data migration audits, and prepare your stakeholders.

Phase Two: Technical Preparation

At this phase, address authentication setup and integration planning with CRMs and other systems. Data mapping is critical—preserve existing data while developing a strategy to collect additional data points in the new system. Configure a test environment if possible to reduce risk and provide a testing ground before publicly launching your new marketing automation platform.

Phase Three: Data Migration

A marketing automation platform migration offers an opportunity to examine your database, remove old contacts, and evaluate overall database health. Data migration requires multiple steps: preparing clean data for the new system, identifying critical segmentations for analytics or personalization, and managing data syncs between your CRM or CDP. Account for behavioral data loss between platforms and develop strategies to mitigate the impact, such as capturing lead scores from the old platform and transferring them to useful fields in the new one.

Phase Four: Content and Asset Migration

Enterprises often develop hundreds or thousands of assets—some driving high-volume campaigns, others hosting content downloads across websites. Marketing automation platforms frequently serve as content repositories, which presents challenges when identifying active content assets. Platforms like Knak allow you to establish a content repository and quickly identify and migrate assets. Many customers find this beneficial during migration as emails and landing pages exist outside the core automation system and can be synced to different platforms with relative ease. Map out publicly available assets and implement a redirect strategy if URLs will change.

Phase Five: Parallel Operation Management

During the transition period, both systems will operate simultaneously. The old system may maintain some lead nurturing while ensuring leads reach sales, while the new system begins collecting new names with fresh forms and landing pages. Clearly indicate which programs run in each system and establish signals when programs migrate to the new system. This prevents overwhelming customers with emails and minimizes confusion.

Content Migration When Switching Marketing Automation Platforms

One of the most challenging aspects of switching marketing automation platforms is migrating your content from one system to the next. If you've used a platform for several years across numerous campaigns, you likely have accumulated many assets. There's always concern about whether you've identified all customer-facing assets—after migration, you don't want users finding 404 pages or broken links.

At the same time, many assets are probably ready for archival and won't affect your migration. The key is implementing a strong auditing process to identify active campaigns and assets currently being served to your market.

This is where a platform-agnostic tool like Mac proves especially helpful. It provides a central repository for your templates and assets, making them portable across different marketing automation platforms and reducing migration complexity.

Each platform has its own unique components. Let's look deeper at that.

Marketing Automation Platforms: Content Features Comparison

Enterprise Migration Case Study

A global tech company with hundreds of marketers faced a breaking point with their marketing automation platform. Their systems couldn't handle worldwide operations, and campaign creation had become "a tedious, manual process involving multiple team handoffs" through documents and spreadsheets. With a mix of internal and commercial platforms across divisions, standardization seemed impossible.

Their approach started with securing marketing operations buy-in upfront. The team recognized they were "spending too much time on tactical execution rather than strategic enablement." Rather than just swapping technology, they reimagined their entire campaign creation process, establishing clear metrics and developing a realistic migration timeline that acknowledged the complexity ahead.

Content migration presented their biggest challenge given thousands of marketing assets spread across platforms. Instead of attempting direct transfers, they implemented a platform-agnostic content solution that became their central hub. This provided a no-code interface that empowered marketers while maintaining brand consistency—critical for their global presence.

The implementation followed a methodical, phased approach instead of an immediate cutover. They orchestrated a careful transition that kept existing campaigns running while building new ones in the updated environment, integrating personalization tools and translation platforms for international scale.

Results transformed their marketing operations with "dramatic reduction in manual tasks and campaign turnaround times" while supporting global teams without adding headcount. One leader noted, "This wasn't just about technology—it freed our team to shift from tactical support to strategic enablement." The thoughtful migration created a more efficient foundation that improved both marketing performance and team morale.

“Marketo is one of the most powerful marketing automation tools out there but with that being said it isn’t the easiest to pick up. That shouldn’t be the sole reason though to keep or discard the tool.” Marketo User - Reddit

Post-Migration Optimization

You've made it! You've successfully migrated your marketing automation platform. But your work has only just begun. The key is to put your success measurement framework to work.

Make sure the migration was effective. Hold your team accountable for the objectives they set and continuously iterate to improve the platform's performance.

Adopt a methodology of team training. Ensure everyone on your team becomes proficient with the new tool. Provide them with training resources such as Marketo or Pardot learning materials to help them master the platforms quickly.

You now have the opportunity to build on workflow refinements, ensuring your automations run smoothly while identifying new optimization opportunities. Continuous improvement cycles are the heartbeat of marketing operations. A well-tuned machine is both efficient and scalable.

Consider adopting a platform-agnostic approach to content and data architecture. Having portability makes it easier to integrate with other platforms and analytics providers, enhancing your data insights while enabling additional integrations that support your go-to-market efforts.

Platform-agnostic content strategy offers significant benefits. With a no-code email and landing page solution, you can create a central repository where everyone reviews assets and syncs them to your marketing automation platform for campaign execution.

Don't forget to conduct a post-mortem on the migration. Review what worked well, what didn't, and areas for improvement. The lessons learned can apply to your current stewardship of the new platform and provide insights for the next generation of marketing operations professionals who may undertake similar migrations in the future.

Future-Proofing Your Marketing Automation System

Marketing automation platform migrations are complex but often necessary undertakings. One of the most expensive and time-consuming aspects is migrating your content to the new system. Much of this content is already active in marketing campaigns and programs, making it critical to get this piece right.

Migration isn't just about moving assets—it's ensuring their design, brand elements, and rendering are all preserved. Platform-agnostic content solutions like Knak provide the ability to store all your templates for landing pages and emails in one location and then sync them to any platform you need.

This approach works well even when operating multiple platforms in your organization, greatly simplifying parallel operations. Knak is often used during migrations to both upgrade to a more scalable content system and ensure parallel operations with brand-approved assets.

One of the key trends in marketing operations is the move toward self-service. Whatever platform you choose, ensure it's highly usable and scales well with your existing marketing campaigns.