There’s a little trap people fall into when they start using both HubSpot and Salesforce. The word “campaign” shows up in each system, and on the surface it feels like they should mean the same thing. But they don’t. Not even close.
And if you try to force them to match, you’ll just end up frustrated and your reporting will be a mess.
Each tool uses campaigns for a different purpose.
A Salesforce campaign tracks people and their path to revenue.
A HubSpot campaign tracks marketing assets and how they perform together.
Once you see them as complementary, not competing, it gets a whole lot easier to know when to use each one.
HubSpot campaigns: built for marketers
When you build a campaign in HubSpot, what you’re really doing is creating a container for your assets - emails, landing pages, forms, and social posts. It’s the marketer’s way of keeping everything tied to a goal in one place.
If you want to launch a new product, for instance, you can create a HubSpot campaign and attach every touchpoint to it. That way, you can measure the combined lift of your landing page, nurture emails, and social posts. It enables visibility into open rates, click-throughs, form fills, and overall engagement.
A key limitation: HubSpot campaigns don’t nest. If you’re running 12 webinars this year, you’ll have 12 separate campaigns. Rolling that into a clean “Webinars 2024” view takes extra reporting work. HubSpot campaigns are flat by design - great for asset tracking, less great for roll-ups.
HubSpot recently added campaign templates (Welcome, Onboarding, Nurturing, etc.), which hints at how they expect teams to use this feature. You can start from scratch or from a template, build your assets and workflows, and everything will live under the campaign for unified reporting.
Salesforce campaigns: built for sales
Salesforce campaigns focus on people. Leads and contacts get added as campaign members, and you track their journey all the way to closed-won revenue.
This is where Salesforce shines. You can see exactly how many attendees from that trade show became opportunities, how many progressed through pipeline, and how many turned into customers.
Salesforce also gives you hierarchy. You can set a parent campaign for “2024 Webinars” and then create child campaigns for each individual event. It’s structured in a way that makes it much easier to look at the big picture and zoom into the details.
One important note: in Salesforce, Campaigns and Campaign Members are two separate objects.
- Campaigns hold the details (budget, costs, parent/child setup).
- Campaign Members connect those campaigns to leads and contacts, with statuses like “Invited,” “Registered,” or “Attended.”
That separation is what makes the revenue attribution possible.
Key differences to remember
Purpose:
- HubSpot → tracks how assets perform.
- Salesforce → tracks how people progress.
Structure
- HubSpot → flat, no nesting.
- Salesforce → hierarchical, parent/child campaigns.
Data
- HubSpot → open rates, clicks, form fills, engagement.
- Salesforce → member statuses, pipeline influence, ROI.
It’s less about which one is “better” and more about which questions you’re trying to answer.
Why they don’t sync natively (+ workarounds)
They don’t sync because they’re built on different objects, there’s no direct way to make them line up.
HubSpot has nowhere to store member statuses, and Salesforce has no concept of grouping assets.
There are three primary ways of getting Campaign data in HubSpot.
- Native Sync:
Native sync gets the Salesforce Campaign ID to flow into HubSpot. But that’s it. You’ll see the campaign name attached to the contact, but it won’t carry over member statuses.
No “Invited,” no “Attended,” no “Responded.” Just the label. If you treat it as anything more than that, you’re going to be disappointed.
- Workflows:
This is where you actually have some control.
You can set up HubSpot workflows to add or update Salesforce Campaign Members. Say someone fills out a HubSpot form; you can have them land in a Salesforce campaign with the status “Registered.”
That’s about as good as it gets, because now you’re using HubSpot’s front-end automation to keep Salesforce updated. But it’s on you to build the logic right and keep it maintained.
- Custom Objects (Enterprise only)
If you’re paying for HubSpot Enterprise, you can mirror Salesforce Campaigns and Campaign Members into HubSpot as custom objects.
It gives you a little more control over your reporting but it’s not a true sync. Records cap out, updates don’t push back to Salesforce, and any custom fields you make in HubSpot stay trapped there.
- Static Lists
Last option - import Salesforce Campaigns into HubSpot as static lists.
It’s basically a screenshot in time. You’ll know who’s in the campaign that day, but it won’t update, it won’t show statuses, and it won’t scale.
It’s fine for a one-off, but don’t try to run your ops off this.
The integration can be really powerful but Campaigns are not designed to match each other. And that’s fine, as long as you’re clear on what each system should own.
Best practices for using both
So, how do you make this actually work without going crazy? We suggest;
- Use HubSpot for Marketing Performance. Group your assets, see how they’re working toward a shared goal, and optimize based on engagement.
- Use Salesforce for Sales and Revenue Tracking. Add people as campaign members, use statuses, and tie it back to pipeline and ROI.
- Bridge With Workflows. Don’t try to mirror campaigns. Use HubSpot workflows to enroll contacts into Salesforce campaigns when it makes sense. That gives you the best of both worlds without fighting the systems.
A retrospective
Think of it this way: HubSpot campaigns tell you what content worked. Salesforce campaigns tell you who responded and how much revenue it drove. They’re different lenses on the same go-to-market motion.
The mistake is assuming they should sync seamlessly. The smarter move is to split the responsibilities: let HubSpot own marketing performance, let Salesforce own sales influence, and connect the dots with thoughtful workflows where needed.
If you’ve been brute-forcing campaigns between HubSpot and Salesforce, you already know how messy it can get.
If you need hands-on help with your integration, send us a note and we’ll help you scope a setup that makes it easier for you.
