Marketo Best Practice for organising marketo assets and programs

This post states the best practices we follow in our marketo instance.

Best Practices for organising in folders:

1. Never mix the Operational Folders  with Marketing Activities Folders
2. Always keep the seperate folders for Learning and testing and should never be mixed in with Marketing Activities.
3. Name the folders in such a manner so that they gets arranged in chronological order automatically. Use digits for month, date instead of words (Ex. Use 08 instead of August/Aug)
4. Always have a Archive Folder for the assets and programs that are no longer active.

Folders help in grouping similar assets/programs, but often using too many folder and partitioning too much causes confusion and clutter in the folder tree. Hence it  is advisable to have five main folders hierarchy:-

1. Active Marketing Programs

            a.1) Emails

                        a.2) Events

                                    a.2.1) Live Events

a.2.2) Trade Shows

a.2.3) Webinars

a.3) List Imports

a.4) NewsLetters

a.5) Nurture

a.6) Web Content

a.7) Web Forms

1. Marketo Program Templates
2. Operational Programs
3. Sales Insights
4. _Archived

Fig 1. Sample Folder Structure for Effectively Organising Assets and Programs in Marketo

Folder Structure for Design Studio:

Design Studio

1. Landing Pages

a.1 Templates

a.2 Global Landing Pages

a.3  _Archive

2. Forms

b.1  Global Forms

b.2  _Archive

3. Emails

c.1 Templates

c.2 Global Emails

c.3 _Archive

4. Images and Files

d.1  Logos

d.2  Template Graphics

Always Include a “Global” folders for re-usable Forms, and Emails, and Landing Pages.

Folder Structure for Organising Lead Database:

Lead Database

1. System Smart Lists
2. My Smart Lists

b.1 Exclusion Lists

b.2 Operational Lists

b.3 _Archive

1. My Lists

c.1 Internal Lists

c.2 _Archive

1. Segmentations
2. Field Organiser

• Smart Lists and My Lists are organised by purpose of the lists e.g. Exclusion, Internal, Operational
• Archives will store the leads that are no-longer required.

Marketo Naming Conventions:

Naming inconsistencies reduce the reporting effectiveness, cause marketing inefficiencies and reduce the marketing automation power.

The need for following a standard best practices for naming of Programs and assets in Marketo becomes utmost importance when the same account is used by multiple marketers(users), as not following a common naming convention would lead to poor reporting and analysis.

Consistent program names make analysis and comparison easier. Consistent naming enables advanced filtering to gain custom insights.

When you have a naming convention, you can easily distinguish between marketing activities and compare results. Building and following naming convention would help in streamlining the overall marketo management.

Purposes of following a proper naming convention:

1. Keep your instance free from any clutter.
2. Find items quickly
3. Easily select groups of assets
4. Make reports easy to sort and read.

Best Practices for Naming Convention of Marketo Assets:

• Should allow easy references to the assets
• Should be such that the program, assets get sorted by date,program type and other attributes
• Should make the programs and assets easy to identify
• Should be as short as possible and as long as necessary.

Asset Naming Convention:

Following things are comprised under assets:

1. Emails
2. Forms
3. Landing Pages
4. PDFs
5. Lists

Note:

1. Always have a local Assets folder inside every program where you would have all the local assets pertaining to that program
2. Also create sub-folders for each type of Local Assets

Abbreviations for the assets:

1. Email : EMAIL
2. Landing Page : LP
3. Web Forms : FORM
4. Alert Email : ALERT EMAIL
5. Smart List : SLST
6. List : LST

Format for naming the local assets:

[Abbreviation for the Asset] - [Brief Description of Asset’s Purpose]

Few Examples of naming an asset:

1. EMAIL-Outbound
2. EMAIL-Invitation
3. Email-ThankYou
4. Email-Reminder
5. Email-SendPromoCode
6. LP-SignUp
7. FORM-WebinarRegistration

Fig 2: Managing and Organising the assets with naming convention illustration

Naming Convention for Campaigns:

  Suggested Format for naming campaign:

[Campaign Serial Number]-[Brief Description of the campaign]

Fig 3: Figure illustrates various examples for campaign naming