How to Enhance Marketing Reporting by Using Campaigns
Learn to double down on what's working and what's not
Every time I go to a new company I often wonder how they’ve gotten by without implementing campaigns. It’s the best type of reporting to see what’s working and what’s not.
Campaigns allow you to track three things:
All campaigns run for a single asset. So if you have a white paper that you wrote a blog to promote it, and also did a webinar to further promote, as well as then syndicate it on a third party site, plus ran social ads against it, you can run a report for all campaigns containing that specific asset to see how well the asset performed overall, AND to see how well each campaign performed (which channels gave you the most engagement) so you can double down there.
Best and worst content by asset/content type. If you create a field called “campaign type” you can then see all blogs or all webinars or all white papers, and see which ones had the most leads/MQLs/Opportunities. This is how you can really tell your content story and what’s moving the needle.
Opportunities created/won influenced by your campaigns. If someone was a member of a campaign and that account becomes an opportunity, you can easily run a report to show how much pipeline or revenue a particular campaign has created.
In Salesforce, campaign fields should be like this:
Campaign Name - tells you the name of the campaign. Usually the campaign type + name of asset + date (MM/YY)
Type - is your campaign type, as in is it an RFI form, or a piece of content. Typically you’ll have some overlap in items in both Campaign Type and Content Type but you could also make them unique to be: digital, influencer, thought leadership, or event campaign types and then you’d have less overlap. See example below:
Content Type - Is it a webinar, blog, white paper, video, press release, tutorial, etc. The hardest thing here is webinars. I’ve worked around this by using WC for webinar content (including on-demand), and then WR for webinar registrations. The workaround is mostly for smaller start ups who are not sure if webinars are working and have a lot of questions for the demand gen team. Generally though you only need one content type for webinar. It’s irrelevant if someone consumed it live or on-demand. What’s more interesting is they consumed it and if you really want to dazzle then show on average how many minutes people watched your webinar for (e.g. where was the drop off?).
Active - if you want to track the leads, then this needs to be marked as Active in both Marketo and Salesforce.
Campaign Asset - this is the name of your actual asset which is why the full name doesn’t need to be in the Campaign name. The Salesforce Administrator either needs to give you access to add this or they need to add it. A best practice is to either have the MOPS person work with SOPS as they are setting up the campaign to add it, or to have your content person work with SOPS to add it. It takes less than 30 seconds to add.
Parent Campaign - if you have campaigns that you run for a long period of time (think Google Ad) but also want to run a report on which of your Google campaigns are getting the most engagement and attributing to the most revenue, then you can create a Parent campaign called Google Ads and then name each of your campaigns within it, like Brand campaign (which is usually ongoing), or Enterprise campaign.
You can also add in campaign costs to help with budgeting, but I’ve always done this outside of Salesforce as splicing out, for example, a Google Ad Brand campaign that runs constantly over the entire year, makes this type of thing messy. You’d have to set up new campaigns per quarter and that’s a lot of work to do this for multiple campaigns that run continuously.