3 brands - 1 or 3 workspaces?

[MiaGW]

Hi,

I need to pick your brains on how to structure on of the business areas within our organization. They work with three brands in their region, and we're debating whether to set up one or three workspaces for them to manage their work.

Their current data currently combines contacts for all brands in one but each contact is tagged with the relevant brand, so it should be possible to separate the contact data into three lists.

What are the pros and cons to consider here? I'm thinking of data management, reporting, and user access for example.

Best regards,

Mia

[jsiebert]

Hey,  @MiaGW! I worked in an instance with a few brands in one workspace. It was manageable but we didn't do a lot of work with the other 2 brands. My current instance is much larger - 4 workspaces + default. It can become very difficult to manage if you are the only one working in Marketo and I'd really only recommend adding a Workspace if you are planning on builder out a larger marketing team down the line. For a lot of instances, I don't view Workspaces as necessary. A strong foldering structure would suffice in most cases. I'd take a look at this article on workspaces. 

Workspace are great if your brands are separately run and require that data be sectioned off/restricted to certain members of your company. Keep in mind that Workspaces still all sync to 1 Salesforce instance if you are using Salesforce.

Per the blog I linked, I'd suggest not implementing workspaces if:

• Less than 1MM records.
• Small marketing team or a few international marketers. Foldering should be enough.
• The data concerns can be solved with Folders or New Fields to clearly demarcate records. For example, people often ask about multi-brand instances. Many situations can be resolved with Product Interest field or Brand Owner field along with some rules of engagement for communications.

[MiaGW]

Hi @jsiebert,

Thank you so much for your valuable feedback. 

Just to give you some more context. We're a huge company with more than 30 brands in total. Me and my Marketing Automation Specialist are merely the platform/product owners but do a limited amount of hands-on work in Marketo. Instead, colleagues working in our BAs do the actual work in Marketo. That is why we already have around 25 workspaces so that every BA team can manage their own work without interfering with others.

Now we're going to onboard a BA that works with 3 different brands and we're trying to determine what makes the most sense for them in terms on the amount of workspaces.

[jsiebert]

@MiaGW - Thanks for sharing more information on your situation - this sounds like a huge instance! If I were you, I'd keep the same workspace and try and use a strong folder structure and use custom fields to better segment the brands.