Scale Your Marketing with Marketo Programs

How do you scale your marketing efforts? This is the quest of the modern marketing operations professional, whether it's through creating repeatable processes or training teams on self-service martech.

In the search for novel solutions, we often overlook the options in front of us. For Marketo users, the key to scalable marketing campaigns is using Marketo programs. They are the workhorse of your Marketo instance and can dramatically scale marketing efforts. For example, did you know you can combine Marketo tokens with a program to dynamically populate content, such as for a webinar?

Understanding how to use programs is a key tenet of marketing ops in Marketo and can be a way to instantly level up your automation. Let's take a deep dive into Marketo programs to learn how to scale your marketing ops.

What is a Marketo program?

A Marketo program is a single or focused marketing campaign used to house assets, automation logic, and program-specific reports. Marketo programs are organizational assets stored in folders within Marketing Activities. Programs may also contain subfolders to organize assets for easy reference.

If you think of programs as campaigns, you’re on the right track. The terminology can be confusing, especially if you integrate your programs with Salesforce Campaigns. Each program is its own campaign, and Marketo allows comprehensive reporting on each program in your instance.

Types of Marketo Programs

There are four types of Marketo programs:

• Email Programs
• Engagement Programs
• Event Programs
• Default Programs

Let's start with an overview of these program types and then a deeper dive into each one.

Email Programs

Represented by the classic mailbox icon, the email program is a staple for marketing users in Marketo. It is often used for campaigns such as newsletters, product updates, or special offers. It's control panel makes it easy to quickly set up and schedule an email campaign.

You may not know this, but they can be nested in event and default program types to offer greater control over email sends in a larger campaign. Besides the control panel, nesting email programs also gives access to the performance reporting dashboard and A/B testing functionality.

Engagement Programs

Marketo engagement programs are the go-to program type for lead nurturing and automated email delivery. Engagement programs come with key features such as:

• Content Streams: Provides users with the ability to organize content to be sent to recipients.
• Cast Events: Schedule the automatic sending of emails from the program on a recurring basis.
• Content Exhaustion: See when leads have received all content within a stream.

A key aspect of engagement programs is the ability to define transition rules. These rules can be used to apply lead qualification logic such as moving leads from one stream to another based on their lifecycle stage. Using content streams like early, mid, and late stage, you can effectively personalize content based on the customer journey.

Content streams can also use Default Programs. This is a more sophisticated use case that can allow you to do things like sending certain emails to different segmentations, adding extra flow steps such as lead scoring or notifications, or sending out different emails to subgroups.

Event Programs

Event programs are used for both online and in-person events such as webinars, trade shows, and meetups. They are designed to track interactions from invitation to attendance, helping your marketing team deliver a great experience at every touchpoint. The unique program statuses associated with the event program can help you track stages such as registered, attended, and no-show.

If you create a webinar event, you'll have the option to sync with an event partner. This is a powerful feature of this program type as you can ensure event registrants are tracked and synchronized across both systems. For instance, you can register attendees by updating a program status or capture registrants that fill out a registration form provided by a third party.

Default Programs

Default programs in Marketo are multi-purpose; they are flexible enough to be used for operational purposes like lead scoring, nested programs in engagement programs, or web forms. When will you use a default program? Pretty much anytime you aren’t using an Email, Event, or Engagement program.

Default programs are designed to be flexible. When creating different types of tags in Marketo, you can define unique program statuses. These statuses can allow you to customize reporting and program logic to fit your exact use case. For example, a SaaS company may use a default program to coordinate product-led growth efforts during a free trial period.

Channels and Programs in Marketo

Program types determine the baseline functionality of any program you create. If you create a program with an Engagement Program type, it will have the ability to set up content streams, set transition rules, and schedule email casts. Channels in Marketo work with programs to fully customize your programs to your specific needs.

When you create a channel in Marketo, you will specify the program type and its analytics behavior. Channels and program types work together to help you create a reporting system that accurately reflects your marketing activities. Each channel can have its own statuses and progressions. You can customize the order of program statuses and determine which step constitutes success.

The benefit of creating custom channels in Marketo is that you can set up a template for how campaigns should be set up. Program statuses can be used in smart triggers in Marketo meaning you can key off data value changes easily to set up automation.

Using tags in Marketo programs

Marketo provides a robust tag system to help you organize your marketing activities for reporting purposes. Just as you can create channels to create customized programs, you can create custom tags to distinguish between different programs. The primary use case of tags is to help with organization and reporting.

You can use tags in different and creative contexts. For instance, you could create tags to organize email programs based on theme, content type, or purpose. This would make it easy to see how all your newsletters perform across your Marketo instance.

When setting up a tag, you can make it required or optional. If you're going to adopt a tagging system, we recommend that you develop a consistent convention that can be understood and applied by everyone on your team.

Using Program Statuses in Marketo

Program statuses are one of the most important components of programs in Marketo. They are fairly simple to set up and use, but can be utilized for powerful automations. In my experience, one of the strongest reasons to create a custom channel is to use statuses that map directly to your marketing funnel or customer journey.

If each program is a microcosm of your lead lifecycle, then each program should have statuses that reflect that journey. Your Marketo instance comes with this out-of-the-box with "Member" and "Influenced" as a basic journey map. However, more sophisticated journeys may require multiple touchpoints. Webinar programs, for example, will take a lead from invited and registered to attended or no-show.

The power of Marketo is its flexibility. As you know, your marketing activities don't always fit in predefined boxes – you need customization to optimize your marketing efforts. To build on an example from earlier, you could set up a channel to trace your product-led growth marketing initiatives during a free trial. You may set up stages such as "Acquisition," "Engagement", "Activation, "Retention," and "Referral."

Each of these stages may map to specific product actions or milestones which can trigger personalized content appropriate for the user. Marketo is a great tool for user onboarding and can respond dynamically to what users are doing. Program statuses are a great way to track this activity as they are easy to use in Smart Campaigns.

Creating Program Templates in Marketo

If you're on a quest to scale your marketing operations, then creating and using program templates is going to be your first stop in Marketo. I recommend every team create a set of standard program templates for any marketing campaign that is regularly repeated. For instance, creating a standard template for webinar programs is a necessity. Program templates improve brand consistency, standardize operations to improve reporting, and ensure your team is efficient.

Creating program templates in Marketo is straightforward. Marketo's clone feature allows you to clone a program and all its assets including emails, landing pages, reports, and Smart Campaigns. As you can imagine, this is quite powerful.

For marketing operations, you can configure program status changes and follow-up automation, such as sending emails or notifications. For content teams, you can create Marketo email and landing page templates that require minimal editing to be ready for production. More advanced users even use Marketo tokens to prepopulate most of the content in a campaign.

Supercharging Programs with Email Templates

Marketo programs are a key component of scaling your marketing operations – as we saw with the concept of program templates, it's possible to rapidly scale programs to meet your team's campaign needs. The next level to program templates is combining this process with a tool like Knak to design, deploy, and optimize your Marketo email and landing page templates.

Knak is a pivotal tool for creating responsive, well-designed asset templates – these asset templates can be added to any program in Marketo for pitch-perfect campaigns. By pairing Knak-designed assets with Marketo program templates, you can create optimized, scalable processes. A key benefit is that you can pre-approve assets and templates, then have your team rapidly deploy them based on specific marketing campaigns.

Combining Marketo's automation features with Knak's no-code email and landing page capabilities is a big win for scaling your marketing efforts. Curious how this works? Watch our no-obligation demo here to learn more.