Level at which you split out Channels

[Stijn_Heijthuij]

Hey guys,

We've been working on building out our instance and are now looking at different channels. We do a lot of events both in store, on location and at tradeshows or hosted events. Would you split these out into their own separate channels, or keep one 'events' channel?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Stijn Heijthuijsen,

2 considerations here :

1. Program workflow & management : you should use the same channel when the event process is the same. For instance, you may consider that a webinar and an in-house seminar are quite close in the way you manage them (targeting, then inviting people, validating invites, sending reminders and follow-up communication), although you will not be able to use the same channel for a webinar and a seminar if you want to use the Launchpoint webinar integration on one hand and the ipad app on the other. on the contrary, you may consider that an in-house seminar is very different from having a booth on a tradeshow (for the later, you have to factor booth visitors, or import the list of tradeshow registrants that did not come to your booth). If your channels statuses are not fine enough to enable a proper management of the program, you still can use lists, but it is not as easy to use. Also factor the connectors. At the end of the day, IMHO, the comfort and efficiency of the Operational Marketing person managing the event should be the ultimate criteria here.
2. Reporting : programs with the same channels can be compared on a status level in program performance reports, which will enable you to draw in depth stats on what worked and what did not. Also do no neglect success definition...

So at the end of the day, it's a trade off between the possibility to group your programs for reporting and managing them with enough precision. I personnaly usually set different channels for each type of event, but try to avoid statuses that would be to fine-grained and induce to much complexity (such as "invite email opened", "invite email clicked"), especially when these statuses can be handled otherwise (with email performance report, for instance).

Also remember that your statuses in Marketo will translate in member statuses in campaigns in SFDC if you synchronize the programs with campaigns, which may provide interesting reporting capabilities in SFDC as well.

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, split out each major Event channel.

• Webinar
• Tradeshow (or Third Party Event)
• Roadshow (or whatever you like to call an Owned/Hosted event)
• others as needed for reporting.

Also remember that you can add Tags to each Program that might talk about the type of Event, Audience, Region, etc...