Marketers often don’t understand the difference between HubSpot campaigns and Salesforce campaigns. This article highlights what I believe are the main differences, and how HubSpot campaigns and Salesforce campaigns can actually work together if you are using both HubSpot and Salesforce.

Explanation of HubSpot campaigns

HubSpot campaigns are primarily for tracking analytics of marketing assets like forms, email templates, landing pages, links, etc. HubSpot campaigns act like buckets for associating marketing assets based on some commonality, like an overall initiative with a desired outcome that HubSpot calls Goals.

For example, you might create a HubSpot campaign about an upcoming trade show, and include all related marketing assets such as email invites, event registration forms, event landing pages, and such. And your Goal for this campaign might be to get a specific number of new qualified leads from the trade show.

Your HubSpot campaign reports can show all contact activity with the related marketing assets within the campaign, i.e. emails with clicks, form submits, landing pages viewed, etc., and can show which activities and campaign members led towards your Goals for the campaign, such as new contacts or won deals.

HubSpot campaigns are only available with Marketing Hub Professional, which costs in the neighborhood of ~$900/month (annual contract required). HubSpot campaigns are not available just by purchasing CRM Hub, even on the Pro plan (this is certainly due to the way that HubSpot campaigns work primarily with marketing assets). Note that HubSpot is known to negotiate pricing towards the end of the month, and even more so at the end of the quarter, and on larger deals. So it is sometimes worth contacting your sales rep before purchasing.

What are HubSpot campaigns in HubSpot’s own words, Understand Campaigns: “The HubSpot Campaigns tool helps you create, manage, and report on a single marketing campaign using multiple assets in one place. For example, you can create a campaign to use social posts and ad campaigns to raise awareness of a new product or an event. After setting up your campaign, you can track the performance of these assets collectively or individually in the campaigns tool.”

Notice that HubSpot refers to HubSpot Campaigns as “HubSpot Campaigns tool” (see below how Salesforce refers to campaigns differently).

You can set up campaign Goals and how you want to measure the success of your campaign in HubSpot. You can start by using one of a dozen of HubSpot’s provided campaign templates to achieve your campaign Goals.

HubSpot campaign templates

If you are using HubSpot AND Salesforce, see below how you can add HubSpot contacts to Salesforce campaigns using HubSpot workflows, and use Salesforce campaign member status to track each contact’s engagement level within each campaign.

How Salesforce campaigns work

Salesforce campaigns are used to track initiatives and to track which contacts or leads are associated with the campaign.

Each campaign generally relates to an initiative (or marketing effort) that you want to track engagement activity against like a webinar that has an email send and a related registration form, and to track which contacts/leads engaged with those assets and initiatives.

Unlike HubSpot, Salesforce campaigns are not a “tool”, but an Object, similar to how Contacts work in the sense that campaigns are an object that has records, custom fields, layouts, record types, permissions, etc.

Unlike HubSpot campaigns which require paying for Marketing Hub Professional, which costs in the neighborhood of ~$900/month (annual contract required), Salesforce Sales Cloud’s Campaigns feature is included in all versions of Sales Cloud (Salesforce CRM), starting as low as $25/month. We recommend the Sales Cloud Professional (or Pro Suite) plan for around ~$100/month (paid annually). Note that your Salesforce rep may negotiate pricing on larger deals, especially towards the end of the quarter.

Salesforce campaigns are hierarchical, meaning they can have up to five levels within a hierarchy (however, we recommend no more than three levels). You can assign a Parent Campaign to any campaign to place it within the campaign hierarchy. So you might have a webinar campaign, and a child campaign for the webinar registration form (where the webinar is the parent), and another child campaign for the webinar invitation, and another child campaign for the webinar landing page.

Example of Salesforce campaign hierarchy

Salesforce campaigns can optionally have a Cost dollar amount (manually entered) so later with a Campaign ROI Report you can compare revenue generated to cost for any campaign or any campaigns within a certain level of the campaign hierarchy. This is particularly useful for campaigns like PPC (pay per click) advertising when you have a known direct cost to your campaign (not so useful for campaigns like email marketing).

Salesforce Campaign Custom Member Status

Use “custom member status” to track campaign member engagement within each campaign.

What makes Salesforce campaigns so powerful is the ability to track contact/lead engagement within each campaign using “custom member status”. You can edit the available member status for each campaign to suit the kind of activity you want to track.

For example, for a webinar campaign you might have campaign member status like:

• invited
• registered
• attended
• did not attend

For an email campaign you might have campaign member status like:

• sent
• opened
• clicked
• form submitted

For one or more member status you can mark it as a “Responded” engagement, which is used to identify which contacts/leads actually responded to your main CTA (Call To Action) within your campaign. In our above webinar example you would probably mark “registered” and/or “attended” as “Responded” engagement, then later you can report on “Responded” engagement for that campaign.

You can add contacts/leads to Salesforce campaigns as campaign members using Salesforce Flows, Pardot automations, HubSpot workflows, Marketo automations, or manually from a Contact or Lead record. When you add a contact/lead to a Salesforce campaign you associate the contact/lead to the Salesforce campaign and select the appropriate member status for that contact/lead based on their engagement (Salesforce creates a Campaign Member Status object to join the contact/lead to the campaign with their custom member status).

The strength of Salesforce campaign member status is that you can add a contact/lead back to the same campaign at various stages of engagement.

For example you would initially add a contact/lead to the webinar campaign with member status of “invited”, then if they register by submitting a webinar registration form you can add that same contact/lead back to the campaign with member status of “registered” to track their deeper level of engagement with your CTA.

Then later you can report within Salesforce on how many (and which) contacts/leads engaged at each level of your Salesforce campaign based on their member status, i.e. the number registered to your webinar, the number attended your webinar, the number that didn’t attend, etc.

Campaigns by Member Status = Responded

And ultimately you can also tie campaigns to revenue using Campaign Influence Reports which ties contacts within campaigns to Salesforce Won Opportunities so you can see which marketing initiatives actually influenced revenue.

Salesforce report: Opportunities with Campaign Influence

The Salesforce Influenced Pipeline report is also very useful to see which campaign types and which campaigns helped add Opportunities to your sales pipeline.

Salesforce Influenced Pipeline report

All in all the way Salesforce campaigns work is pretty brilliant!

Using both HubSpot and Salesforce?

If you are using both HubSpot and Salesforce you can have the best of both worlds, or platforms as it were. In this case you are probably using Salesforce for CRM, Opportunities, Campaigns, Flows, and maybe Service, Custom Objects, Reports and Dashboards, integrations, and perhaps much more. And you are probably using HubSpot for Marketing, Campaigns, Reports and Dashboards, and maybe syncing Opportunities to HubSpot Deals, and maybe using HubSpot Workflows, integrations, perhaps more.

Using them together can allow you to utilize the strengths each platform has to offer. Regarding using campaigns on each platform, as you can see from this article HubSpot marketing assets can be put in  a HubSpot campaign for reporting on measuring marketing engagement with each marketing asset towards your Goals, while Salesforce campaigns can be used to track initiatives and member engagement which can ultimately be used to track revenue attribution based on campaign influence on revenue.

So using campaigns in a smart way between both platforms, HubSpot and Salesforce, you can build a system for tracking Marketing Attribution and Revenue Attribution based on marketing’s contribution.

Summary

So HubSpot campaigns and Salesforce campaigns act very differently, and actually have different purposes and strengths. How they work together will depend largely on what data you are syncing between platforms, your set up, and how your marketing team uses each platform.

And if you are fortunate enough to have both HubSpot and Salesforce platforms, if you have a good strategy, a good set up, and proper process to use the platforms effectively, they can work together to help you get the robust reporting that you need.

Let me know in the comments if you find this article useful, or if I missed anything worth mentioning.

Related articles:

• Best Practice: Salesforce and Pardot campaign setup
• Salesforce Campaign Attribution Models and Campaign Reporting