Best practices to organize a new Marketo Engage instance

Hi, I’m Jackie and I’m currently a technical support engineer at Adobe. I’ve been using Marketo Engage for two years, I’m a Marketo certified master, and I’ve been working with our marketing automation customers for two years as well. When you first start working with Marketo Engage, organization is key. Staying organized in your instance will make it easy for you and your colleagues to keep track of campaigns, programs, and assets. If someone takes over your instance, for example, if you are promoted or move on from the company, the goal is that they should be able to easily understand how it is organized. In this tutorial, we will review folder structure, program naming conventions, and how to document instance setup and naming conventions for internal users. There are many ways you can organize your navigation tree in marketing activities. Marketing folders can help separate different types of programs and keep your instance organized. Here’s how I suggest structuring your navigation tree. Use a folder titled Active Marketing Programs to house active marketing campaigns, for example, email sends, events, newsletters, nurture programs, web content, and web forms. Utilize a learning folder for training and testing. An operational folder can contain lead life cycle, scoring, and data management campaigns. If you have sales insight in your subscription, create campaigns related to this feature in a sales insight specific folder. Make sure you have an archive folder to hold programs that are no longer in use. I suggest reviewing your programs at a regular cadence, for example, quarterly, and archiving those that have marketing initiatives that are no longer active. Note that archiving a program does not deactivate the live assets inside. Be sure to deactivate the live assets first. Organizing old programs retains program data and is a better alternative to deleting old programs. Marketo Engage users should also utilize folders to organize the assets, campaigns, and reports that a program has. For example, in your programs, it is best practice to create the following folders, local assets, campaigns, and reports. Let’s take a look at this event program as an example. An event has a lot of moving parts, and best practice is to keep everything organized in folders. The event program is in the Marketing Activities, Events, Webinar folder. In the program, I recommend creating a campaigns, local assets, and reports folder. The campaigns folder holds all relevant smart campaigns, for example, sending event invitations and reminders. The local assets folder contains emails, landing pages, and forms folders. The reports folder contains reports specific to the event. Creating a standard naming convention for programs will ensure that Marketo Engage users can locate programs easily. Following naming convention best practices will also make it easy to determine exactly what the program is. The recommended way to name a program is the following, an abbreviation of the program type, followed by the year, month, and optional date, as well as a brief description. For example, an email send program that runs in June of 2023 and contains information regarding your new product would be named ES 2023 06 21 product intro. Similarly, a newsletter that is sent during July of 2023 would be named NL 2023 07 newsletter. To keep your team aligned, create an internal document for each abbreviation, ES for email send, NL for newsletter, WBN for webinar, NUR for nurture, and so on. Keep program asset names simple. This is because the parent program name is used to reference the asset when choosing it elsewhere. Name an invitation email in a webinar program invitation as opposed to 2023 August webinar invitation. For example, my email invitation for my webinar is just named email invite. When I reference the email in a smart campaign, the parent program name is included. The email is referenced as WBN 2023 05 23 product demo dot email invite in the flow steps of the campaign. Admin users can provide guidance and encourage organization by suggesting that other Marketo Engage users clone programs. Cloning keeps program shells consistent. For example, let’s say you host webinars regularly. Once your first webinar program is created, you can clone it for future programs. The clone will contain the same folder structure, campaign setup, and assets as the original. You can customize the assets and campaigns in the clone to be specific to your new webinar. Marketo Engage users can find pre-built programs in the Marketo Engage program library. Just use the import program functionality. Programs can also be imported between Marketo Engage instances. For example, if your team has a sandbox and a production instance, a program can be built in the sandbox for testing and then later imported to production. Workspaces allow Marketo Engage users to keep marketing assets like programs, landing pages, and emails separate from each other. For example, if you have a global marketing team, workspaces may help keep your instance more organized. In this scenario, Europe, Asia, and North America marketing departments each get a workspace. Using it via workspaces is useful when the marketing assets are completely different. Keep in mind that access to workspaces is controlled at the user level. A user can access more than one workspace so admins should ensure users are only added to appropriate workspaces. Now you are ready to create programs and keep your instance organized with the information you learned from this tutorial. Remember to use folders, create standard naming conventions, and utilize features such as cloning so you and your team can easily work in Marketo Engage.