What is the purpose behind Campaigns

A campaign, as defined by HubSpot, is a strategic and organized effort to achieve a specific goal. The objective of a campaign is to track all stages of a prospect's sales journey, gaining a better understanding of conversion points and potential areas for improvement, as well as the original traffic sources of both contacts and leads.

Often, teams (especially Sales & Marketing) gather information from various sources to create content. This content is then shared with prospects and customers, frequently driven by individual team goals rather than a unified company objective.

HubSpot's campaign feature offers a centralized platform to consolidate team resources, leveraging existing tools and customer data. Furthermore, it provides in-depth insights and ROI tracking, enabling performance optimization and a clear view of KPI performance over time:

HubSpot vs. Salesforce Campaigns

HubSpot and Salesforce campaigns help organize marketing and sales initiatives.

HubSpot campaigns bundle marketing assets (e.g., emails, landing pages, social posts) to measure their collective impact on goals like lead generation, automatically linking contacts via interactions for easy segmentation. They are ideal for inbound strategies, emphasizing metrics such as views, clicks, and conversions.

Salesforce campaigns work differently: they add leads or contacts as members, track engagement through statuses, connect to opportunities through Opportunity Contact Roles for ROI insights. They support hierarchies (parent-child) and suit outbound tactics like events or direct outreach.

When to use

HubSpot only: For marketing-heavy digital efforts needing quick asset performance data and audience segmentation. For example: tracking marketing assets such as landing pages, marketing emails, ads from either social media accounts like LinkedIn or search engines like Google or even Webinars or Trade shows through Marketing Events in a single place.

Salesforce only: For sales-oriented tracking of individual responses and revenue impact, or tracking sales-sourced leads. Salesforce only campaigns can still use HubSpot to enroll contacts.

Both: For the majority of touch points, including hybrid initiatives, like a content series feeding into events (HubSpot handles execution and early metrics, Salesforce closes the loop on outcomes). This setup provides comprehensive attribution but requires workflows to bridge the gap and avoid data silos.

By integrating campaigns with a Lead Score, they can personalize their sales approach while effectively tracking lead sources.

Campaigns offer an excellent method to organize and monitor content within the platform by consolidating outreach efforts. This allows forms, email and social media communications, workflows, and lists to be grouped under a single "Campaign" umbrella. This consolidation directly links contacts to their origin and subsequent actions that led them to become a lead, ultimately aiming for a closed-won deal.

Main KPIs

The HubSpot Campaigns module offers a comprehensive view of marketing investments and their corresponding revenue returns across various platforms. It directly impacts three key performance indicators (KPIs) related to Marketing Channel ROI:

1. Lead Generation: Measures the number of contacts created through each campaign and how many convert into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). MQLs are identified either by a direct "hand-raising" action (e.g., filling a contact form) or by accumulating points in the Lead Score through marketing interactions.
2. Pipeline: Creation of plausible sales opportunities based on product interest. It specifically focuses on MQLs that are actively progressing through the sales process.
3. Closed Won Bookings: Number of successfully closed-won sales and their monetary value, which is crucial for calculating ROI.

By focusing on these three KPIs, marketers can analyze campaigns individually or in groups. Individual campaign analysis allows for examination of the ROI of a single campaign, the performance of specific assets within it, or the effectiveness of different social media channels (e.g., LinkedIn vs. Facebook) for a particular message. Group analysis enables insights into which campaigns generate the most profit, the number of deals each campaign brings, and the total leads created over a period (e.g., 30 days), identifying campaigns that drove  conversion.

Ultimately, campaigns provide valuable business intelligence. They help answer critical questions about customer preferences: What do my ideal customers want from me? What content are they looking for? What interests them enough for me to make a sale? This understanding allows for effective guidance of prospects through the designed sales process, leading them to the desired conversion point.

In addition, marketing campaigns are useful for understanding how marketers utilize their budget and time, and the return on investment they achieve through their chosen channels.

Questions to ask before implementing

Effective campaign implementation, internal or client-facing, requires a strategic foundation before technical execution. Address comprehensive questions before any technical work begins.

We categorize these questions  into "must-asks" and "nice-to-knows." It's important to recognize that clients may not always have immediate answers. In such instances, we are expected to provide guidance and identify optimal solutions, always adhering to established best practices.

Our ultimate objective is to establish a streamlined and scalable system that allows clients to readily assess their ROI.

Must-ask questions

• What are all the different ways that Leads are being created into your CRM? Most of the time, they’ll have different sets of sources that bring in leads: manual creation by sales reps, marketing sources such as marketing emails or social media posts as well as their website (either organic or direct traffic based on their SEO), and offline sources like imports of data enrichment tools or trade-shows/events. This will help us keep track of their tech stack and lead creation sources. Recommended reports to build would be:
  
  • Speed-to-lead,
  • Lead creation  per source,
  • Contact creation per source,
  • Contact funnel,
  • Campaign breakdown: most viewed, most interacted with, how many deals were attributed to each campaign (note: this can require additional automations).
• How and where are you seeing ROI? Directly tied in to the previous question. If they run a paid campaign via Google Ads or LinkedIn, then where are they seeing the ROI of said campaign. If it isn’t in HubSpot (i.e Looker Studio, Google Analytics, Looker Studio, Power BI, Meta or LinkedIn Ads Manager), then we’d have to translate it to the platform (using the Ads tool or filling in the Budget in the campaign and then assigning the corresponding dollar amounts to deals). Recommended reports:
  
  • Deals created by campaign (amount generated both in quantity and in dollar amounts).
  • Deals closed by campaign (amount generated both in quantity and in dollar amounts).
• What are all of the places that marketing is diverting budget and would like to track ROI? To determine what should be tracked in a campaign and what might be overkill, a helpful exercise is to discuss with marketing all of the places they are funneling their budget/resources and if they would like to be tracking the return. This may be as clear as PPC spend or more vague, like hours spent writing a blog post every month.

Nice-to-know questions

• How many of the created Leads are Inbound vs. Outbound? This will help us know if we need to do additional research and/or automations of offline sources that generate leads or if they have everything already living in the platform.
  
  • If a significant portion of their leads are outbound, we need to investigate their origin. This will allow us to accurately name and automate these sales-related sources, ensuring they are not categorized generically as "offline”. By doing this, Sales leaders can see how effective their lead-generation sources are.
• Do you have automations that are specific to channels? Are there automated processes unique to each channel? This helps us understand what affects the platform, preventing workflows from accidentally overwriting information.

Tools involved

Marketing Hub Campaigns and also almost every asset HubSpot offers:

• Content Assets:
  
  • Blog Posts: Individual blog articles related to the campaign.
  • Emails: Marketing emails sent as part of the campaign.
  • Landing Pages: Specific landing pages created for the campaign.
  • Website Pages: Pages on your website that are part of the campaign's overall effort.
  • Social Posts: Social media content designed to promote the campaign.
  • Forms: Forms used for lead generation or sign-ups within the campaign.
  • Calls to Action (CTAs): Buttons or links that encourage specific actions within the campaign.
• Advertising and Ad-Related Assets:
  
  • Ad Campaigns: Ad campaigns from the ads tool can be associated to sync spend data.
  • Tracking URLs: You can create tracking URLs within the campaign to monitor traffic from specific assets, like ads embedded within a blog post. To use tracking URLs, a campaign needs to exist:

• Interaction and Engagement Assets:
  
  • Calls: Manually logged or HubSpot-generated calls can be associated with campaigns.
  • Workflows: Communications and actions triggered by workflows can be grouped with a campaign.
  • Lists: While workflows and lists can be associated with multiple campaigns, individual lists of contacts can be included as part of a campaign's effort.

Phases of the project

1. Discovery: understanding the client’s business and how they keep track of it. 75% to 80% of the project is exactly this. Asking the questions (both Need-to-know and Nice-to-know), understanding their Lead generation process and how the client wants their reporting to look like (what data to use and how it should be displayed).
2. Campaign creation: start by creating essential marketing campaigns with as much information as possible (if the client were able to provide an approximate budget, that would be ideal).
3. Content association: go on and start associating the needed content to campaigns so that we organize their CRM.
4. Automation: creating personalized Contact, Lead & Deal sources to be able to trace the overall road that the contact embarks on. We’ll be using the original traffic sources native to HubSpot to automate the personalized ones we create.
5. Reporting.
6. Fine-tune: once implemented, we can make suggestions to the client based on performance of their campaigns (i.e.: doing email marketing A/B testing based on open-rates).

Project: Step by step

This guide outlines the strategic approach to creating a HubSpot campaign, emphasizing foundational planning before diving into technical execution.

1. Define Campaign Objective & KPIs (Discovery Phase)
   
   • Strategic Goal: What is the overarching business objective? (e.g., increase MQLs by X%, drive Y amount in Closed Won Bookings, improve brand awareness).
   • Target Audience: Who are we trying to reach? What are their pain points and interests?
   • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): How will success be measured? (Refer to "Main KPIs" section: Lead Generation, Pipeline, Closed Won Bookings).
   • Existing Lead Sources & ROI Tracking: Leverage insights from the "Must-have questions" to understand current lead generation methods and how ROI is tracked outside of HubSpot.
2. Content & Asset Planning (Campaign Creation Phase)
   
   • Message Proposition: What problem does this campaign solve for the target audience?
   • Content Inventory & Gaps: Identify existing content that can be repurposed or new content that needs to be created (e.g., blog posts, emails, landing pages, social posts, forms, CTAs).
   • Channel Strategy: Which channels will be used to distribute content? (e.g., email marketing, social media, paid ads).
   • Budget Allocation: If applicable, determine the approximate budget for paid advertising or content creation.
3. Campaign Creation & Structure

For more information, refer to this knowledge base article.

• Campaign Naming: Establish a clear and consistent naming convention for the HubSpot campaign and all associated assets to ensure easy identification and reporting.
• Campaign Details: Select a color, a brand (if the customer has the brands-add on), an owner, a start and end date, an audience (optional, but if the client can provide that information, it would be of great use to have as much detail as possible), a currency (select the default currency the client uses. It will display revenue information accordingly) and notes if applicable.
• Campaign goals: Choose the goal that better aligns with the campaign's objectives from the templates that HubSpot provides. You’ll be able to then modify accordingly:

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• Asset Association Strategy: Plan which existing or new content assets (Marketing Hub Campaigns, Ads, Tracking URLs, Workflows, Lists) will be linked to the campaign. This helps consolidate outreach efforts and link contacts to their origin.

• Create tracking URLs: To measure the effectiveness of campaigns in driving traffic to website's pages.

4. Workflow & Automation Design (Automation Phase)
   
   • Lead & Contact Source Attribution: To accurately attribute contacts to their campaign source, especially for offline or manual lead creation, we will implement automation plans. This involves creating two new custom properties: Lead source: First Touch and Lead Source: Last Touch. These properties will leverage HubSpot’s existing source property while also accommodating personalized sources such as tradeshows, or sales outreach imported via specific integrations. 

• Personalization: Consider how automations can personalize marketing communications based on prior interactions contacts have had with content.
• Salesforce Campaign Connector: if the customer is using Salesforce, this is where you should connect both tools.

5. Reporting & Analysis Blueprint (Reporting Phase)
   
   • Custom Report Needs: Based on the defined KPIs and the "Must-haves questions" section, plan specific HubSpot reports to track campaign performance (e.g., Speed-to-lead, Lead creation per source, Campaign breakdown, Deals created/closed by campaign).

• Dashboard Integration: Determine how campaign reports will be integrated into existing or new dashboards for easy access and visualization.
• Attribution Model: Understand how HubSpot's attribution models (for more information, please refer to this knowledge base article)  will be utilized to give credit to campaign touchpoints and also to the assets inside of the campaigns themselves:

6. Continuous Optimization (Fine-tune Phase)
   
   • A/B Testing Opportunities: Identify elements that can be A/B tested to improve results (e.g., email subject lines, landing page CTAs).
   • Feedback Loop: Implement a process for gathering feedback from sales and marketing teams to inform future campaign iterations.

What are the most common challenges?

• Disorganized Marketing Assets: Clients often lack a structured approach to managing their marketing materials. We’d need to organize their assets for them in different campaigns based on a common thread in the content / context / solution provided through the assets.
• Internal Misalignment: A lack of internal consensus prevents clients from providing essential information, specifically regarding "Must-haves' questions."
• Unclear ROI Metrics: Demonstrating the value of our work becomes difficult without a clear understanding of the client's ROI goals. Set as many meetings as needed to get context.
• Resistance to Change: Clients may be resistant to adopting a new process. It's crucial to demonstrate the individual benefits of the new system to each stakeholder involved. We'd have multiple Workshops sessions  with everyone who’d be involved in the new process to train them and answer any questions that could come up. Firstly, understand their current process and how we can integrate it to the new one following best practices. Make sure that the client is using the new technology fully (this could come up in reports that show tasks to be resolved, meetings booked or held, emails that are being registered or in the last activity dates that users have in HubSpot through the users tab in Settings).
• Manual Process Inefficiency: Existing manual processes are highly variable, and automating them isn’t intuitive. We’d need to standardize clients processes, which would work not only for us but for them. 
• Inefficient Manual Processes: Current manual processes lack consistency, making automation challenging. As mentioned above, process standardization is key to be able to automate existing workflows.
• Incomplete Campaign Setup: When building campaigns, crucial fields (e.g., budget) are frequently left blank, or assets are omitted to skew results (e.g., unlinked ads lowering ROI). When workshopping with the client, be clear on what the effects of not having that information could do in terms of reporting, since they won’t be able to see their ROI, lead generation and attribution related data.
• Incorrect Dashboard Filtering: Applying the wrong filters (e.g., a 30-day rolling window instead of the campaign's actual timeframe) leads to inaccurate dashboard analysis. We’d need to correct their existing reports and show them how to set them up properly using the correct set of properties.
• Sourcing Workflow Complexity: The sourcing workflow is a two-step process. Both steps must be tracked to ensure full visibility into the entire process.
  
  • Assigning a "first touch" at the point of contact creation.
  • Assigning a "last touch" when the contact converts to an MQL (i.e., when a Lead is generated).
  • Note: HubSpot's source system will be used to track sourcing stamping within our new custom property.
• Integration Issues: When HubSpot doesn't integrate seamlessly with the client's tech stack, it can lead to inconsistencies. This needs to be analyzed case by case since it depends on the integration.

Summary

By following the steps outlined throughout this playbook, organizations can significantly enhance their ability to track ROI and streamline the buyer's journey. To be able to properly implement a HubSpot campaign, lead attribution, content distribution, and strong reporting need to be the main points of discussion.

Next Steps

• Implement a Lead Score to work alongside HubSpot Campaigns. By doing this, interactions that the contact has with different assets associated to the Campaign will qualify it, facilitating attribution reporting and sales outreach.
• After creating dashboards and reports, find improvement points: for example, emails with low open-rates. Communicate those findings with the client and share possible solutions (i.e.: enabling A/B testing to improve open-rates based on the subject line.).

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