With so many different analytics platforms being used by marketers, it’s hard to get a complete picture of your marketing results. Many marketers use different platforms for tracking SEM marketing, content marketing, events, social, email, etc. The issue with most of these platforms is they don’t give great insight into what happens after a lead interacts with your marketing. For example, Google AdWords gives you analytics on click conversions, but it can’t tell you if that person converted to an opportunity and later turned into a paying customer.
Enter the Salesforce campaign object. Salesforce campaigns can be a marketer’s best friend, yet this amazing functionality goes largely unnoticed. Campaigns connect your marketing initiatives with your CRM to give you the complete picture on how your marketing activities are driving results. This gives you insight into how marketing leads are converting to actual revenue, instead of conversion metrics like clicks and form fills. Marketers can use this to measure the ROI of all their marketing efforts and tie revenue back to specific marketing initiatives. As a Salesforce user, you have access to this great tool and may have used it, but there are a few tricks to really get the most out of the campaign object.
Set Up Campaigns Early
The earlier you set up your campaigns in Salesforce the better. Doing so after an event takes place could cause you to lose out on some crucial attribution. If you set up a campaign after something like a trade show or a webinar, you could lose the association of an opportunity to a campaign. Opportunities can automatically be associated with a campaign, but only if the contact becomes a campaign member prior to their association with an opportunity. This is a safeguard to provide true revenue attribution to each marketing activity.
Associating an opportunity to a campaign is done through the campaign influence feature. This is something that you need to manually turn on, and the sooner the better. This gives you the ability to associate multiple campaigns with an opportunity and enables you to see how different marketing efforts are affecting an opportunity. Another requirement for this to work is to have contacts associated with opportunities. If your sales team does not add contact records to all of their opportunities, then they are preventing marketing from being able to accurately report on campaigns.
Automate Campaign Membership
Salesforce does not provide a way to automatically associate leads or contacts with a campaign, so it is up to you to add your members. Salesforce gives you the ability to add leads and contacts to a campaign in a few different ways. You can add members on an individual lead or contact detail page, but this is not an efficient way to add multiple campaign members. You can add members in bulk through Salesforce reporting with the simple Add to Campaign button. Or, you can use the campaign update wizard to upload a CSV file of campaign members. This is not a very timely method for managing campaign membership, and if you add a member just a minute late you could lose out on valuable attribution.
Automating the process for adding leads and contacts to campaigns can save a lot of time, as well as a lot of headaches. When leads and contacts are added at the appropriate campaign automatically, opportunity attribution works flawlessly. Without having to touch anything, your Salesforce campaigns will track campaign members as they progress from a lead to contact, as well as connect the proper opportunities. Many marketing automation platforms will provide functionality allowing you to add members to Salesforce campaigns. Marketing automation is great for tracking online campaign interaction, but when prospects go offline, standard platforms can’t track this. With voice-based marketing automation, you can capture all voice interactions driven by your marketing using call tracking. By combining online and voice, and then automating the tracking of each using Salesforce campaigns, you can get a complete picture of how successful your marketing efforts are.
By automating campaign membership, you will also be able to track responses to your marketing efforts. This means that when a lead is added to a campaign because you sent them an email, their campaign status will automatically update when they open your email and hopefully then click within the email. This is extremely helpful information for marketers and can help you demonstrate that those who click your emails are more likely to convert to a paying customer than those who just open them.
Create Campaign Hierarchies
Do you report on individual trade shows as well as trade shows as a whole? What about events as a whole? What about reporting on paid search as well as individual search engine performance or campaign performance? Well, with Salesforce campaigns, this is all within reach. Campaigns have the amazing ability to set up parent-child hierarchies. A parent campaign combines all of the data from the child campaigns to present it at an aggregate level. This gives you the ability to report on your overall marketing efforts, your individual channels, and each activity within a channel. You have the ability to create five hierarchy levels, but this is overkill for most marketers. Campaign hierarchy allows for big picture reporting as well as easy drill-down capabilities.
Use the Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities Report
As I mentioned earlier, the campaign influence is something that you have to go and turn on yourself, but boy is it worth it. Reporting on the source of an opportunity is one thing. Being able to determine that an opportunity was created by someone downloading a white paper, then further influenced by visiting your booth at a trade show and seeing a paid ad online is every marketer’s goal. This is exactly what the Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities campaign report can do for you. This can show you what marketing efforts are best at not only capturing new leads, but also which are best at pushing your opportunities through the funnel. The Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities report is pre-built by Salesforce and ready to use, just waiting for you to discover it. In addition, you can view which campaigns had an impact on specific opportunities by adding the Campaign Influence related list on the opportunity detail page.
The Salesforce campaign object may not be the star of the show, but for marketers, it can have a huge impact on your reporting. This allows you to easily track, measure, and report on how your marketing efforts are actually impacting your company’s bottom line. With campaigns, you can easily determine the ROI of your entire marketing effort as well as attribute revenue back to specific programs. By associating the analytics from all of your different sources with your CRM data, you can easily gain insight into how leads are being generated and then do what it takes to get them to that closed-won finish line.
