What’s in a name? Well if we’re talking about names of marketing campaigns, it’s actually more important than you might realize.

Standardizing campaign names in a CRM and/or marketing automation system keeps things neat and tidy, but there are some other things to keep in mind when creating or updating a naming convention. Here are some things to ask yourself about the campaign naming convention in place for your org:

Is it easily understandable by sales?

You may think your abbreviations are a clever way to keep campaign names short (i.e, TS for Tradeshow, CS for Content Syndication), but when a sales person is looking at a lead’s recent history and sees that a lead engaged with a campaign called “2020-GLO-CS-TT-Awesome-Paper” they may not know what that actually means. A straightforward naming convention (even if it may be a little longer) means they can comprehend what campaigns leads are interacting with, without trying to learn marketing’s “secret” codes.

Does the naming convention enable proper reporting?

You might need to use program names to filter reports, so make sure the naming convention allows for that. For example, maybe you want to pull a report of all your web content campaigns, but the campaign names only include type of content (i.e., ebook, case study, infographic, etc.). It could be a lot easier to add a filter to your report that says “Campaign Name contains ‘content’” but instead you have to put in “Campaign Name contains ‘ebook’,’infographic’,case study.” It may not be necessary for your organization, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Is it easily searchable?

Similar to the point above, a good naming convention allows for easy searchability. Have you ever typed “content” into the Marketo search bar and get back a crazy long list? I have. What if you could type in “content-ebook” and get a more filtered down list? Or maybe there are key industries that you target with content, so you search “content-finserv.” When you only have a few campaigns created, it’s easy to forget about the scalability of the naming convention. Picture yourself with 1000 campaigns in your marketing automation platform: how do you want to be able to search those quickly?

Okay, now it’s time to get the whole team on board with using the new naming convention:

We’ve created a handy dandy program/campaign name builder so you can keep your campaign names consistent.

Creating a standardized naming convention is an easy step to breeze by when getting your marketing programs up and running. But, if you take these 3 things into consideration, you could save yourself some trouble down the road!