Hey Sherin:
There are a many benefits of keeping local assets within Marketing Activity programs—here are a few:
- You can create program templates that contain all the right assets for certain types of programs (Content, Online Advertising, Email Blast, Lead Nurture Cast, List Purchase, etc.).
- You can use program tokens or .my tokens with local assets on landing pages.
- It's a much cleaner way to structure your Marketo instance where you don't have to repeat names everywhere, and all emails/landing pages/lists are all in nicely organized buckets that everyone can understand at a glance.
- It makes archiving and deleting entire marketing campaigns and content programs in a few clicks as opposed to spread out many different places.
- It's much faster to clone programs and not have unique names for everything when you have local assets within programs. Names of assets are concatenated with the program name, so you can name a landing page "LP" within a local asset as opposed to "landing page for webinar on 3/12/2015 with Cisco."
- Acquisition Program is assigned automatically if you're using local assets such as landing pages and forms. This is a great way to do easy first-touch attribution without the headache because it's automatically assigned.
- Progression Statuses are easier to assign within programs. You need these for campaign reporting and program reporting to prove that your marketing and sales efforts actually bring in leads, how many, at what cost, and how much revenue they create.
The exception I use is that we generally have global forms that we repeatedly use in the Design Studio and a Universal Fulfillment Email that resides within the Design studio. We tokenize both of these and reference them within the actual Marketing Activities programs, because they're kind of ghost-assets that can inherit token values even when they're not within an actual program itself. With the Universal Fulfillment Email that is tokenized, you won't be able to run separate email performance reports by the triggers, so that's a little bit of a nuance, but pays off overall.
Cheers,
Edward Unthank | Founder, Etumos