6 Internal User Adoption Strategies for Your MarTech Stack
When onboarding your team to a new technology, you want to get the most value out of your purchase as quickly as possible. Dealing with business cases, procurement, infosec, and other internal processes can prevent you from achieving the value you need to reach—and surpass—your goals. By the time you’ve actually gotten your hands on it, you’ve had to jump through more hoops than a Labrador Retriever at the puppy bowl. It can feel like an impossible hurdle to overcome when getting started, but there are ways to increase internal user adoption without making it your full-time job.
To get more people invested in the value of a given martech solution or platform, you need to have a game plan for how you will roll out and evangelize the new technology across the company. Organic marketing is a team sport, and the most successful Conductor customers invest in comprehensive onboarding for their teams. This means ensuring your account is configured properly, aligning users to relevant use cases, and getting them trained from the start so you can hit the ground running.
Get your internal team members up to speed and drive user adoption internally with these six tips.
1. Become a subject matter expert
Every platform needs a power user or “admin.” This person’s responsibility is to know the ins and outs of the platform and help others find value in the solution as well. When team members have questions, the internal SME can provide guidance around the platform's functionality and assist others with their specific use cases.
Becoming an internal subject matter expert is critical to scaling successfully with any platform, especially with Conductor. Those without one often have a difficult time getting the full value out of their adopted martech solution. Become an on-site subject matter expert, and great things are sure to follow.
2. Identify users and give them access
Odds are high that many members of your team outside of the core user group can benefit from proper adoption of a new technology. As you are onboarding, create an excel sheet and begin the process of identifying relevant, core users that would find the most value in the platform. Add their roles and provide specific use cases. Once you have done this, provide them with early platform access and offer a quick internal training to walk these users through the platform so you can answer any questions they have. This is one of the most important steps, yet it is often overlooked. By getting a few core users bought in and already using the platform to its full potential before rolling it out to the larger team or organization, you’ll have an easier time getting other team members to recognize the value and invest their time in learning the platform.
At Conductor, we lead with a customer-first philosophy. Your customer’s problems should be at the heart of your business, and organic marketing is all about better understanding your customer’s needs. This is why having access to, and deriving insights from the freshest possible SEO data is invaluable to today’s marketers. Content, product, eCommerce, demand generation, and paid media specialists all benefit from insights derived from first-party data to strengthen their own content and campaigns.
3. Socialize platform value to individuals
The value of a new technology platform is even more compelling when users understand how to harness it for their specific job function. Spending time educating and surfacing use cases relevant to each department or team member is helpful in showing them how a particular platform can impact and enhance their job specifically.
At Conductor, this strategy helps garner interest in the data and insights we provide customers and get more team members involved in the SEO process. Openly discussing insights you’ve uncovered from the platform, like audience search behavior, how your competitors are executing their content strategies, or how this keywordKeyword
A keyword is what users write into a search engine when they want to find something specific.
Learn more or page is important to review regularly, is a great way to drive interest, get buy-in, and ultimately increase internal platform adoption.
4. Integrate technology into your internal workflows
Martech platforms, at their core, are meant to automate processes and increase efficiency across organizations. When platforms are leveraged exclusively by one team, the efficiency benefit of the platform is limited.
Successful marketing teams don’t operate in silos. An effective marketing strategy requires collaboration and execution across several teams to get it right. Team alignment is key to maximize your website’s performance. Integrating Conductor into your internal content creation, page optimization, and technical implementation processes is vital.
Using the Actions integration with JIRA, Asana, and other supported task managers in Conductor, you can easily move from insight discovery to content development, internal review, and publishing content—all while maintaining project alignment with all involved stakeholders. Your users need to have a firm understanding of the workflows needed to execute on these processes. Whether you are identifying new topics, creating content briefs, or sharing those content briefs with the broader team, each step of this process is important for everyone to align on so you can reach your organic marketing goals together.
5. Hold your teams accountable to education
You have to crawl before you can walk, AKA everyone has to start somewhere. The most successful adopters are the ones who invest in their team’s education. Without an internal education-focused process on how to best use the platform and corresponding accountability around this, it’s very difficult to gain user adoption within an organization.
Executive sponsorship is one way to hold your teams accountable to their ongoing education. Have your leadership team send communications advocating for the platform and set targets for your team members to complete online training by specific deadlines. All users should join initial onboarding training sessions as well. Between hands-on training sessions, new users should be completing additional online trainings and identifying questions they have for the next virtual training. By holding team members accountable to ongoing education around platform functionality and best practices, you can help increase their understanding of the platform and its value.
6. Communicate insights and wins across the organization
Last but possibly the best way to drive adoption of a new technology is to share insights, data, and—most importantly—wins across your organization. The more practical use cases you can display that demonstrate impact, show progress against goals, and display ROI, the more engagement you’ll have from team members eager to leverage the platform for their own benefit.
As the Conductor platform becomes more integrated into your day-to-day, you should be reviewing your keyword and traffic performance data to get a sense of how things are going. If you find that you’ve moved into Page 1 for any business-critical keywords that are driving traffic improvements or more conversions, it’s important to communicate these wins to leadership, marketing, and the organization overall. Breaking into the top five organic positions in SERP for any given keyword is no easy feat, so being diligent about sharing regular results and updates is vital in continuing to evangelize the platform and the overall organic channel. You will undoubtedly get some good questions when sharing insights and receive positive feedback in return.
Work with your marketing team to create and distribute regular communications (company-wide emails, newsletters, etc.), automatically schedule and send exported PDF reports to decision-makers without leaving Conductor, or draft your own personal emails sharing screenshots and stats that tell a compelling story. All of these are effective ways to get your users' eyes (and interest) on the organic channel and increase platform adoption.
Want to learn how Conductor customers successfully evangelized the platform within their organization and surpassed their organic marketing goals as a result? Explore our latest customer stories and see for yourself what worked best.
