If you haven’t learned the art of “sparking joy” in your life through the organization of your clothes and other household items, you must not have been on social media or Netflix recently. It’s all the rage! Marie Kondo gives viewers a process to basically clean and purge their entire home of items they no longer need/want in order to create the organization needed for what they choose to keep.

How many times have you stared blankly at your kitchen junk drawer or the back corner of the bedroom closet (don’t even get me started on the sports equipment in my garage) and thought to yourself, “There must be a better way?” This is exactly how many organizations feel about their marketing automation instances. Perhaps the business has been through more phases than anyone can count. Or, changes have left existing marketing teams with inherited marketing technology not aligned to the current business. Eventually, the instance can prove cluttered, messy, and downright disorganized – much like my garage!

What is working well? What isn’t working at all in the way that it was intended (sometimes even detrimental to the business objective)? Where do you even begin? As you start to peel back the layers of the mess;

  – It feels like you’re going to empty everything out of the junk drawer and never find enough time to sort through and put it all back; and

  – You’re not even sure what is okay to purge/archive because you don’t know if it is connected to something else important.

What you do know is that you want to feel ownership, that you know what is available, and what you need to focus on.

Once you are willing to empty the junk drawer – either yourself or with help – below are a few organizational tips to maintain the cleanliness of your system:

Folder Structure:  There is not a “one size fits all” solution to folder management. However, looking at the way your organization or marketing team is structured will generally guide the folder structure that makes the most sense for your organization.

Naming Convention:  As with folder structure, this will also be tailored to your needs. Based on your team’s structure and, in some cases, how you plan to handle reporting, your team can define a naming convention that will make it easy to find the assets you are looking for and to easily sort and group your campaigns/programs for reporting.

Archiving:  Establish a timeline in which it makes sense to archive assets, campaigns/programs and set a reminder on your calendar to do a regular review. Optimize your efforts by holding collaborative discussions with other marketing teams you depend on to fuel your instance, such as Design and Branding teams.

Documentation:  If you document how programs are setup, what assets are to be included, and what programs link or run in the background, it will serve as a digital roadmap to anyone who walks into your instance from the outside.  This is often an afterthought, and does require extra work, but proves an important final step for the long-term success of your system.

Database Management: Ever heard this before – “Your marketing is only as effective as the data you keep.” It is essential that data is housed when it serves as actionable to your company’s communication and business strategy. These pieces of key data points are likely integrating with other systems inside marketing and in other departments that support company successes. Every piece of analyses you produce will be built upon the data housed in your marketing automation system, so cleanliness and accuracy are key.

When executing any of the tactics above, a very important piece to organizational success in marketing automation is to monitor and enforce it! Direct oversight will ensure guidelines are followed, errors are corrected, and that consistency of your guidelines are adhered to.

If “Marie Kondo’ing” your marketing automation instance is too much for you, our team at Definitive Results gets it, and we’re here to help. We often audit instances for those that inherited a platform (or multiple) from former team members, or that have gained ownership of instances that have survived many phases of a company’s life. With 30+ years of combined marketing automation experience in a variety of marketing automation tools, our team can help you to identify what is working well, what requires some attention, and help you clean up and optimize. Not unlike Marie Kondo, we will teach you how to create the organization you need in order to clean up your instance and maintain that organization with confidence moving forward.

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