Marketo programs vs marketing programs

[Anonymous]

Hi. We are looking to reorganize our program structure from the ground-up, and I'm having some difficulty understanding the best way to slice up my overall marketing activity,

I think of marketing programs as general sets of activities. A good example would be "Lead-gen emails." This is one group of activity that I may want to compare to, say, AdWords ads.

But as I understand it, that's not how Marketo programs slice, is it? Do I have many different lead-gen email Programs, and then just tag them all with the same tag to be able to group them as lead-gen, as comparfed to a different tag for my nurture Programs?

Is there some sort of best-practice guidence on this somewhere that I'm not seeing?

Thanks!

[Kristen_Malkov1]

I use a tag to distinguish between lead-gen vs. operational emails. Channel tags differentiate between the types of programs, but custom tags allow you give high-level labels that will assist you with reporting on your channel activities. 

You're on the right track with "Do I have many different lead-gen email Programs, and then just tag them all with the same tag to be able to group them as lead-gen, as comparfed to a different tag for my nurture Programs?"

If you use channels to distinguish the different ways in which your marketing, and a lead-gen/nurturing/operational tag to distinguish what's going on within the programs, you will be able to pull the reports you're describing.

[Josh_Hill13]

Marketo programs are set up to deal with certain types of channels and/or types of offers:
whitepaper downloads
Online Advertising
Webinars
Operational (collections of campaigns.

So you can use the Program Tag, and the custom Tags as Kristen suggests. Marketo can use those tags to filter reports in RCE and Analytics.

I usually think of a Program as a related set of activities and assets for one campaign.