Organizing your marketing program in Marketo is essential for maintaining efficiency and ensuring seamless collaboration within your marketing department. Utilizing expert Marketo consulting services can be a valuable in establishing a clear and consistent structure that optimizes your marketing automation efforts. Let’s dive into some best practices for organizing your marketing activities:
Recommended Folder Structure:
The first step is to establish a clear and consistent folder structure. Notice how each folder in the example has a unique name. You can have folders with similar names within programs, but it’s crucial to keep them distinct at the root level.
Naming Schemes:
Marketo Campaign Naming:
When naming programs, it’s important to create unique and descriptive names. As we can see here, the abbreviation of the program type, year, month, date, and program title is a best practice. This format ensures clarity and consistency in communication for your entire marketing team, especially when collaborating across diverse campaigns within your marketing automation platform.
Local Asset Naming:
For local assets within the program, simplicity is key. Just name your asset something like “Invitation” without adding unnecessary details as the parent program is automatically included in the name when selecting it somewhere within your Marketo instance.
Using Tokens:
Tokens are a powerful way to set variables for use in landing pages, emails, and other assets. By using folders in the program structure, we can efficiently manage tokens within your marketing automation efforts. For example, we can place inherited tokens in the event folder so that they apply to all the events, simplifying the updating process and reducing the need for multiple edits across various campaigns. This streamlines content creation and personalizes the user experience.
Organizing Event Programs:
Events often consist of invitations, landing pages, forms, thank-you emails, and smart campaigns. Organizing these components by the phase of the event is a best practice. We can also add more tokens at the program level, further enhancing the efficiency of your marketing automation for events.
Organizing Nurture Campaigns:
Nurture campaigns play a significant role in your marketing strategy. Organizing them with folders is also recommended. We can create subfolders for emails, smart campaigns, lists, and reports. This compartmentalization allows for easier management and analysis within your Marketo instance, optimizing your nurture strategy.
Operational Programs:
Operational programs are used for tasks like data cleanup. To organize them efficiently, create folders based on actions and dates. This clear structure ensures a smooth workflow for background tasks within your marketing automation.
Cloning Programs:
Cloning is a standout feature in Marketo. Cloning programs allows you to set up program templates with smart campaigns and emails, and then duplicate them for future marketing initiatives. This is a time-saving feature offered by Marketo that allows you to leverage past successes and streamline campaign creation within your marketing automation strategy. Let’s walk through cloning an email program from templates for an announcement. Simply right-click on the program you want to clone and select “Clone.” Here, select the destination folder (e.g., a campaign folder named “Email_2023_11_04_ChinaLaunch”) and add a description if needed. Click “Create” to complete the cloning process.
By following these best practices, you can create a well-organized Marketo program structure that fosters efficiency and collaboration within your marketing team. This optimized structure empowers your marketing automation efforts and allows you to focus on strategic initiatives that drive growth.
