How to Get the Most Out of Your Marketo Program

For all day to day marketing activities in Marketo, you start with creating a program. Marketo programs are a very powerful tool to manage your marketing assets and track campaign performance. To get the most out of your Marketo programs you need to make sure you have set them up properly.

Programs represent a single marketing initiative. You can think of it as a container with all the stuff that you need to make the program work – these are called local assets and include landing pages, email, smart campaigns, and more.

Based on my experience across ~20 Marketo instances, there are a few things that need to be set up before you even click the "create a new program" button. In this post, I'm going to reveal some best practices and things you should know.

Program Channel

Whenever you create a new program, you have to select a channel. Channel here represents the way you are going to target your audience/prospects — the delivery mechanism, like Webinar or Sponsorship or Online Ad. I have seen many instances with a long list of channels including duplicate entries like Email, Email Blast, Email Campaign etc. and channels they don't even use. If you do not have proper channels set up, it will ruin your reporting. Keep a clean list of channels.

Program Status and Progression

Along with channels, define meaningful and unambiguous program statuses for each channel. The best way is to look at the user journey on that channel and the expected outcome. The different stages of the user experience become your program statuses and the final status is the success of your program. Assign a weightage ("Step") to each status so a user can't go backwards in the journey by accident — people can only move to a higher or equal status.

Program Tags

Tags are necessary for reporting. You can assign multiple tags to a program — by country, region, segment, financial year, marketing team etc. Tags help organize programs while channels assist in gathering data for reporting.

Period Cost

Period cost is necessary to calculate the ROI of your campaign. You can define different costs for different time periods for the same program, allowing you to measure ROI over time. With program cost defined, you can measure (by program, channel and/or tag):

• Cost per Member — Average cost per member of the program
• Cost per New Name — Average cost per lead acquired by the program
• Cost per Success — Average cost per lead who achieved success in the program's progression
• Cost per Success (New Names) — Average cost per lead acquired by AND successful in the program
• Program Cost — Total period cost of the program

Tip: At the start of a program, enter forecasted costs. Once the period completes, edit the period cost with the actual cost for accurate reporting.

Analytical Behavior

Analytics behavior defines which programs are available for RCA reporting. There are 3 types:

1. Default: included in Analytics only if there is at least one period cost (even zero dollars).
2. Inclusive: available for reporting regardless of whether a period cost is included.
3. Operational: does not show up in revenue explorer or analyzers.

Program tokens (My Tokens)

Used effectively, My Tokens improve team efficiency and speed up development of program assets (emails, landing pages, forms, smart campaigns). My Tokens are defined within a program and begin with the my-token syntax. Types include Calendar File, Date, Email Script, Number, Rich Text, Score, SFDC Campaign and Text.

Tip: Define the token at the campaign folder level and all programs inherit it automatically; override per program by creating a token with the same name and type.

Acquisition Program

Every business wants to understand where they spend money and how it helps acquire customers. When working with programs, it's necessary to associate new leads with the appropriate program as acquired leads. The Acquisition Program tells you which program actually generated a particular lead — critical for RCE, the Program Analyzer and Program Performance reports. When a new name enters as a program member, Marketo automatically sets that program as "acquisition", establishing First-Touch attribution credit.

To ensure every lead has an acquisition program, use Marketo's built-in "No Acquisition Program" smart list. If you see a lot of records there, fix it immediately — see how to fix acquisition program in Marketo.

Summary

Marketo programs are a powerful tool to prove how marketing generates revenue. Follow the above and you'll see improved program organization, reporting, team efficiency, and a stronger relationship between Sales and Marketing.