Multiple program channels for every campaign?

[Dan_Stevens_]

We've been very comprehensive in setting up our instance of Marketo.  Including creating and defining every possible channel in which we go to market.  Most of the time it's via website promotions, online advertising, search PPC, email, and social.  Therefore, it seems like it only makes sense to create a separate program (along with multiple smart campaigns within each) for every one of these channels for each campaign (e.g., promoting a whitepaper).  But now that I've done that, I can see this being a very labor intensive process for each and every campaign.  For our recent campaign we have all of these programs necessary so that we can measure the effectiveness of each channel (program analyzer will show us that):




Are any of you taking this same approach?  There must be an easier way to measure channel attribution.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Hi Dan,

That's how we do ours. We have a separate one for our sponsorships and events too.  

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Michelle.  How would this would work for a webinar program?  Let’s say we set this up initially as a webinar program, with all assets contained within the webinar program – including the landing page/registration form.  The webinar program would be where the event coordinator would look to see who has registered (under “Members”).  Also, success isn’t achieved until someone has attended.  If we create this many programs for a webinar, I see the following issues:

• The event coordinator will need to check program membership of every program
• Once we have the attendee list, we’ll need to manually check to see which program attributed their response and then upload those members to the respective programs

Also, when a webinar program is used, the email is executed from within this program vs. creating a separate program to track email effectiveness.  If so, how would we measure the email channel when it’s part of a webinar program/channel?  Even Marketo’s own training – which uses a fictitious webinar as an example – places everything within a single webinar program.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Hi Dan,

I'm not sure how to answer your question, but let me see if I can use a different example than what you have above.  So for our events department, they have 4 different types of conferences and the channel I set up for it is conference and all 4 events are in 5 different programs based on the event name.
vip-americas
vip-europe
vip-asia
infrastructure
NextGen

All 5 programs have different segments, different email campaigns, and white paper content.  The success is when they register.  There's 1 form they share except for NextGen, and 5 different landing pages and thank you pages. There's also suppression lists for all 5 programs. 

Because these 5 events will happen again the next year, we can easily clone the previous year's program.  Our programs/campaigns are synced to SFDC and the event partner we use is cvent.  We have not run into the problems that you mentioned above.  We don't treat our emails within the program as a separate channel.  

[Dan_Stevens_]

OK, so the call-to-action is to download the white paper, which would be considered success.  Now let's say you're also promoting this white paper program using multiple channels (in addition to email): social media, online display advertising, search PPC, promotional banners on your website, etc.  Do you have each of these channels defined in your instance of Marketo with defined progression statuses?  For example, a "search PPC" channel has three progression statuses:

1. Clicked Ad - Visited Landing Page
2. Filled Out Form/Registered (success)
3. Engaged (success)

The success step "engaged" can be used for all different types of activities - in this case, "engaged" would be when they register or download the white paper.  If your goal is to measure channel effectiveness (and utilize Marketo's Program Analyzer properly), you now need to create a separate program for each channel.  If you're using four channels to promote this white paper, are you essentially creating 20 separate programs for those 5 events (4 x 5)?

[Anonymous]

Dan,

What I'm planning to do with my new instance in the new year is to set up "Operational" programs that contain the basic elements for whatever the "incentive" is (trigger smart campaigns, autoresponder emails, landing page, form if necessary) and make sure that there is no period cost associated with the program. I then set up channel-based programs as "listeners" that use triggers based on source/referral URLs and include any period cost (even if zero) so that they show up in the analyzer. I use a combination of channel and lead source to break it down, rather than creating individual PPC campaigns for each whitepaper, webinar, etc.

[Michelle_Tizian]

@Dan and @jason, what Jason described above is what I do for our our marketing department.  For marketing we have a program that nurtures those leads who came from PPC channel, LinkedIn, Twitter and the website.  The latter 4 is what captures the lead, and the main nurture program is sending out the emails to convert them to paying customers.  Our sales, mark those who purchased from the 4 channels that they came from as the lead source and not from the program that nurtures them. When our sales mark them are purchased from one of the channels, they are removed from the nurture program.  

For events it's sort of similar to the above, but that department doesn't put every channel they used for lead generation in Marketo, but I put a 0 cost for now until I nag them.  Which makes my life harder.   They just pull a particular segment from SFDC and they correspond to the 5 event programs that we have.  Although they use white papers (our own and our event sponosors' white papers) as part of the program, it's an assest that belongs within those event programs and we use them for measuring their level of interest in the related events, and they are scored based on those downloads, and they are not gated.  But next year we are doing some LinkedIn ads, and website as the lead generation channels for our events.  The main 5 event programs are still going to be the conference channels and all of the registrations and list import and program acqisition will use, but the lead source will be either LinkedIn ads or website if they came from them or if they already existed from the previous event program. 

[Anonymous]

Jason's solution is what we've done for our Webinars. We hope to eventually have a way to make the "operational" Program a true parent to the other channel Programs (or at least have some sort of container structure) where we can clone that parent container once and all the Smart Campaigns' cross reference mapping, spread across different Programs, will remain intact.