First project in Marketo, want some help on how to organize everything

Forgot to ask, when I create a New Program and pick a Channel, is this just for organizational purposes, or do your choices impact features/capabilities you have access to?

Channels definitely have an impact. Depending on what you choose, the statuses your leads go through in the program will change accordingly. Statuses won't makes sense for an event program, for instance, invited/attended if you're using the channel to say, gate a whitepaper on your website.

As for organization, folders are helpful for each program you run and within that folder, keeping specific elements of a program together like an assets folder for emails and landing pages, a smart list folder for any and all smart lists you have associated with the program. It also depends on your work flow and needs too but I think these are pretty good basic guidelines.

Hi David!

I'm also a little new to this but I recently learned some things that might help you. 

Choosing a channel helps when you do ROI reporting later on. In your Marketo instance under Analytics there are a ton of reports! One of them is the "program analyzer." That report lets you look at your chanels in a variety of ways to determine what chanel generates more leads. We find that important because we are a small company so we need to know where we should spend our marketing money. 

I've slowly learned that when I go to set anything up in Marketo I should ask myself about what type of reports I would like to see when it's done. Many things don't need to be filled out for the program to run but they do need to be present to run certain reports - such as chanels! 

As for the layout: its up to you! My customer success manager advised me to adopt a naming convention and stick to it. The programs add up quickly so that's my advice to you too! Pick a convention and stick to it. Don't waiver on naming and organization just because you are in a rush it ceates possibilities for human error. We organize it like this: Folders are high level programs or sometimes just the chanel. They are things like Email, Events (and events drills down to trade shows, webinars, etc), and Web Content (which drills down to white papers, brochures and so on). Each folder has a naming convention like WB-date-initials of rep WB standing for Webinar.

I hope that this helps you a little. 

Eunice,
I'm confused about your suggestion to create a folder of smart lists used within a program and how that would work.

For example:

We've been creating smart lists to launch email programs leading to a form or forms. The smart list is the first campaign piece of the program, as it defines the lead recipients who'll recieve an email.

The next smart campaign begins with a smart list that includes everyone who recieves the email and clicks in the email,.
The flow of the smart campaign, updates the program status of those email recipients.

The next smart campaign begins with another smart list for everyone who completes the form. The subsequent flow step updastes their program status to converted.

How would we put the lists in a folder if they're being used within the smart campaigns? Would we design the smart lists first?

Thanks for your help!
Lynn

Generally speaking, I organize my folders by type of program (IE Webinar, Tradeshow, etc), and then have subfolders that correspond to each quarter. This helps with my reporting in particular, because when my boss/manager wants to run reports, they can simply select that quarter's folder. It also makes it easy for when you want to run something cumulatively by channel type.

For your new program, be sure to select the program type as "advertisement". Adjust the progression steps as needed in the admin section. Then be sure to host all assets within the program. Keeping all of your assets within the program will help save you loads of time. Simultaneously, be sure to save more "global" assets in the design studio (IE Thank you pages, global forms, etc). 

Hope that helps!

One thing I would throw in for this conversation is that while you need a good naming convention so your folders and programs are separate, assets within those programs can be named the same.

For example, if I have 10 white papers on my website, each white paper will be an individual program. Each program contains a landing page that I simply call "iFrame Landing Page" or something similar. Don't be concerned that this might be confusing, because the actual name will append the program onto it... so if my program is named WP / Example 123, and I want to add that landing page to a smart list, Marketo will actually call it "WP / Example 123.iFrame Landing Page"