Organized, institutional testing is critical to operating a stable, scalable martech stack. Lead generation, and ultimately the health of your business, heavily relies on airtight system infrastructure. As your stack continues to grow, it’s important to build on a stabilized and vetted environment to identify gaps within any existing or newly added implementation. Understanding the impact of operational changes can seem impossible without a solid infrastructure to test against. ​

But what is it that you should be testing?
Start by defining the key aspects of the process you want to test. Let’s use the example below:​

Over the past few years the use of Agile Marketing has grown immensely, and for good reason. From this surge in popularity, a number of practical agile marketing concepts have surfaced, yielding great transformation in enterprise organizations alike.

But first, what is agile marketing and -- why all the hype?

Chances are most of the content you’ve seen thus far has been focused on one piece of the puzzle: the delivery framework.  However, before building a high performing agile marketing delivery mechanism we must understand the three distinct layers that make up an effective agile ecosystem.  ​

I spent much of last week, with my team at Marketo RKOM getting connected to the Marketo LaunchPoint Partner network and many of the Marketo Account Managers. It was was my first glimpse into the Marketo world that I have heard so much about, and it was a great first experience. ​Steve Lucas was kind enough to pose with me in our Automaton "Chi Chi's Up" tee shirt (we didn't give him enough time to let it sink in...)

Steve Lucas, SVP, Marketo an Adobe Company & Laura LoPresti, Director of Marketing, Automaton

If you have the unlimited budget to outsource testing operations or your marketing operations team is sitting around looking at cat memes waiting for something to do, this post isn’t for you.  I’m looking for the folks who are scrapping to get it all done. It’s the people who never have enough time in the day to do ALL THE THINGS. Some call them marketing magicians, I just call them: almost all marketers ops people I’ve ever met. A lot of this comes from my experience in migrations, before automated testing, when you had to decide what got migrated to the new instance and tested first.

Even if you are using automated testing, you still need to prioritize what you should do first (see above reference to no one having time to do ALL THE THINGS). Each effort has a cost. It costs time, dollars and creates noise for your team every time you test. Most marketing ops leaders need to pick frequency and prioritize order of creation to reduce the chaos.  

Testing?  Who has time for that?  Not many marketers. That's the unfortunate truth.  With email campaigns, webinars, landing pages and advertising campaigns piling up, you're probably testing one thing and moving on to the next to keep up with demand. It's all fun and games until something breaks. Then you you need to contend with the proverbial evil-looking steampunk cat in the room and spend hours troubleshooting errors, fixing setups, corresponding with platform technical support, and giving updates to angry demand gen or sales departments. GOOD TIMES.