What is the difference between a Program and a Campaign?

A program is the house that the campaigns live in. I think the words can be a bit synonymous, certainly people with marketing experience (but not marketo experience) call all of them Campaigns. In Marketo a Campaign is specifically something to perform an action. A program is the house that it all lives in.

As a rule of thumb, I don't ever make anything outside of a program. 
There's a variety of ways to use programs and to sort them so that they reflect how you want to report on them. I recommend using a handful of tags to distinguish your various campaigns. There's some documentation in the community on how to use tags successfully. If a 'campaign' for your company is more of a theme or on-going, you can use a tag to distinguish those programs when you're reporting. Or if campaigns are more based around your lead source or particular channels, then separate programs are best per campaign you're running.

Hope that helps!

I always find giving a bit of background about the age before programs helps.  Before Marketo Launched "Programs"  All initiatives and workflows were built-out in Smart Campaigns.  The only way Smart Campaigns had any awareness that they belonged together was when it was built into the actually logic of the flows.  Often you needed more than one smart campaign to execute on the Marketo objective.  For example, you might need 1 or 2 or 3 smart campaigns to meet the objective of your nurture initiative.

A lot of clients gave Marketo feedback that the process felt disjointed and they didn't like having to go to seperate tabs and remember how these smart campaigns tied together.   So when Marketo Programs were launched they solved tons of problems including:

1.  Smart campaings could all sit in a Marketo program. (I like referring to them as child campaigns when they are in this format)
2.  Programs also allowed for Marketo to create LOCAL assets.  Before you could only create emails and landing pages in Design Studio
3.  There are also attribution ramifications with RCA (Revenue Cycle Analytics) but I wont give you unnecessary info given you are new to the platform.

As Adam said .... in the industry ... A campaign is a Marketing Initiative.  A Program is a Marketing Initiative.  In Marketo the tool.  A smart campaign and Program are two different pieces of functionality.  One a subset of the other.

Hope this helps, and welcome to Marketo.
:)

Maneeza

Thanks for the replies! I think I am understanding it. Does anyone have an example they could share with me about the application of Programs with two or more Campaigns in each? I'm trying to imagine how I might do this for a B2B Tech company.

Programs and Campaigns have a specific hierarchial structure.  In addition to expert opinions, like those above, I like to understand Marketo by going straight to the documentation. It's succinct and an easy read.  http://developers.marketo.com/documentation/getting-started/ (see below for a description).  

As for an example, I like to define programs as groups of recurring campaigns or activities, which will vary based on your marketing mix and what program results you want to track and measure. Marketo also provides great documentation on best practices here's one example... https://community.marketo.com/MarketoTutorial?id=kA250000000KyogCAC
 

A Program is the mechanism by which a marketer organizes all their different types of marketing efforts from one central location. An example of a program is an email blast. A lead can take multiple actions/activities related to a given program that become associated with the program. This is known as lead progression. An example progression of an email blast program would record when a lead is sent an email, when the person opened the email whether they clicked through a link in the email.

Campaigns are created to serve a specific purpose and specific goal within a Program. An example of a campaign could be to narrow down a group of leads and send them the email blast, or to notify a sales rep for follow up if a lead clicks through a link within the email blast program.

Thank you! All of these answers are helpful and the last one totally clarified it for me.

...for future reference (and others who come across this question), the User Documentation provides more details... https://docs.marketo.com/display/DOCS/Programs.