Having worked with organizations of all sizes across my career, a common difficulty that is faced is finding files in a sea of databases and platforms. While folder structures may work well on a local hard drive to find things quickly, this idea does translate well to online marketing automation platforms like Hubspot or Eloqua. The answer to solving this lies with the creation of a solid naming convention.
Elements of a Good Naming Convention
When considering how to build out a naming convention, I usually recommend clients start with a date formatted like YYMM. There are two key reasons for including the date with your naming convention. First, is that it tells you when the asset was created. So if you were to attend a trade event every year, you could tell which campaign was related happened when. Second, it provides a way to sort your files quickly to find the newest assets when you need them.
The next piece to look at is the customer experience journey. For instance, useful parts of the inbound journey are the stage: attract, engage, delight. By separating out your assets in that manner, you can also organize your linked assets. For instance, a landing page in the attract stage of the journey should have a form that is also in the attract stage so that you are only asking for pertinent information on the landing page.
Lastly, get back to basics and think about your product or solutions offering. Let that drive what this campaign is related to. Is it related to a specific vertical market, or maybe it is related to a specific product or solution you have. No matter how you organize your business, keeping that same level of organization in files is important.
Final Thoughts
It’s very possible that you might have other pieces of your naming convention, but remember, this isn’t about overcomplicating or micro-managing your campaigns. Rather it is about keeping your assets easy to identify and organized. This helps your team not only find assets they are looking for quickly, but if you need to report on those objects this makes grouping your objects for reporting simpler as well.