Your Marketo folder structure is seemingly one of the most overlook-able aspects of your Marketo setup. You’re usually more worried about your programs, your forms and landing pages, your SFDC sync, but not much thought is almost ever given on the folder setup in the Marketing Activities section.
You might think it’s not worth the hassle, you might think it’s tedious, boring work, you might even think “oh what’s the point? I can just search for it?” You can search for it, but tell me, how many times has search helped you when you were 5 hours digging into a problem and you just can’t seem to find the marketing asset you’re looking for that could unlock the mystery you’re trying to solve?
And here’s where a good folder structure and naming convention come into play and help you work in a more organized way, and find things easier, and faster, reducing your overall stress levels.
So let’s get into it, and let’s start with some high-level best practices:
An important thing to note is that while folders help group similar assets or programs, you don’t want to use too many folders because this can cause clutter and confusion, so you’ll want to keep the number of folders lower, for maximum efficiency.
For Example:
As you can see for the Events folder, within those folders, we've created more descriptive folders for the various campaigns running in each channel.
And we have several campaigns running in each channel, so we've built out folders to specify by a specified time frame (year and quarter)
Some tips & pointers on Folders:
And let’s not forget we don’t have folders only in Marketing Activities, but also in other parts of Marketo, such as Design Studio or Database, so here are some examples of how those setups can be optimised.
Within the specified time frame folder is where we house our individual campaign folders that contain our programs and other local assets for the campaign. For these folders, I’ve found it helpful to follow a very structured naming convention. This helps to ensure that our instance stays organized and everyone working in our instance knows how to label items.
We recommend using the following naming convention:
[Abbreviation of Program Type] [YYYY]-[MM]-[Optional DD] [Brief Description]
You will need agreed-upon abbreviations of program types to implement this naming convention, e.g.
| EM | Email Send | OA | Online Advertising |
| ENG | Engagement Program | TS | Tradeshow |
| LE | Live Event | WBN | Webinar |
| LI | List Import | WBS | Website Content |
| NL | Newsletter | WF | Web Form |
Of course, there is no “one size fits all” in such particular situations, so if you don’t like our example, or you think your organization needs something different.
Here are some best practices for creating your naming convention:
A good naming convention
Pro tip: Program Names are part of every Local Asset Name as well. Example: “WBN 2022-06 Marketo Webinar.01 - Invitation Email”. This is the invitation email for a webinar about Marketo, held in June of 2022.
