Until now, campaigns in your marketing automation platform have been separate from Salesforce campaigns, regardless of the marketing automation solution you used. Now, exclusively for Pardot users, Pardot marketing automation campaigns can be connected to Salesforce campaigns.
With the power of Salesforce, marketers can utilize customizable and flexible Salesforce campaign functionality to help plan and execute campaigns and easily attribute marketing ROI, all in one platform.
To show you why this is so valuable, we’re honored to share Bailey Wilson’s story. Bailey is the Senior Marketing Operations Analyst at nCino and is a true Trailblazer in B2B Marketing. Bailey participated in our beta program last quarter and was one of the first Pardot Admins to connect her Pardot and Salesforce campaigns.
Here are the three ways Bailey and the nCino team have made the most of Connected Campaigns:
1. Manage campaign stages and lifecycles with Campaign Path
With Campaign Path, the nCino team created a customizable path for each campaign. Now, their campaigns are well organized and consist of Planned, In Progress, Completed, and Cancelled stages. Campaign Path makes it easy to see which stage their campaigns are in directly from the top of the page.
With Campaign Path, marketers can also create guidelines and required steps for each stage of a campaign. For example, for an email campaign during the Planned phase, you may need to
- Meet with your stakeholders to iron out your target audience and timeline
- Loop in the content team to finalize content details
- Check with the design team for graphic assets, and
- Create a proof to be sent back to your stakeholders for final approval
This process can be listed as “Guidelines” for the Planned stage in Campaign Path. Bailey showed us how her team even took it a step further and created an approval process where certain members are notified, and specific steps are required before moving to the next step. This process includes the completion of certain custom fields her team has created for specific campaign types, including Campaign Goal, Product, Ad Agency, Partner Name, and many more.
With Campaign Paths, Bailey and her team are now able to stay in step throughout a marketing campaign’s lifecycle.
2. Report on marketing influenced revenue
With Salesforce Campaigns tied to efforts in Pardot, it’s clear which efforts matter most. This allows Bailey and the nCino team to keep doing what works, stop doing what doesn’t, and start trying new things that they didn’t have time to do before.
When Bailey utilizes Salesforce campaigns, she also uses B2B Marketing Analytics to look at Campaign Influence and Customizable Campaign Influence for deeper insight into her marketing efforts. With Customizable Campaign Influence, she can leverage three out-of-the-box models, including First Touch, Last Touch, Even Distribution, or setup her own custom model to fit her business needs.
Below are some of the options that nCino laid out when planning their strategy:
With this functionality, Bailey and her team can get deeper insights into how their campaigns are performing from three very different perspectives:
- First Touch, the source campaign, helps identify which efforts are bringing in the most new leads
- Last Touch shows the last campaign before an Opportunity was opened
- Even distribution provides an overview of all of the campaigns that influenced a deal throughout its lifecycle
Below are some examples of the reports Bailey built with campaign influence models:
Using an even distribution model, on the left, Bailey has insights into the total number of opportunities that had at least one influential campaign. On the right, she can see the total amount of won revenue associated with those opportunities that were influenced.
According to Bailey, “With insight into the campaigns that are most influential to revenue and at which stage, we can better plan our marketing efforts around what is working and will be the most impactful to the bottom line.”
3. Monitor performance and budget to better plan campaigns
When campaigns are connected across both Sales Cloud and Pardot, marketers can add in the budget for each campaign, how much was actually spent on the campaign, how much revenue is expected to be influenced, and how much revenue the campaign is impacting over time. These fields are available by default on Salesforce Campaigns, but additional fields can also be created to track custom metrics. These can then be easily reported on for planning purposes.
A great example of how this data can be leveraged for planning purposes is shown below. In the “Lead Source” report, Bailey can see which Pardot campaigns are driving the most new leads at nCino. On the right, “Marketing Campaigns Actual vs. Budget” Report shows how Bailey reports on all of her campaigns actual cost vs. the budget she allocated.
Bailey explained, “In this example, we were able to determine that conferences really helped us drive a lot of pipeline from a first touch perspective. When we compared that data to our budget allocation data, we realized we could be spending more on our conferences to drive even more pipeline in the future, as well as justify why our spending on conferences was over budget for this time period.”
Ultimately, connecting Pardot campaigns and Salesforce campaigns provides a single-source of truth and makes it easy to track and customize all of your marketing efforts in one place. We hope you’re inspired by Bailey’s incredible examples above, and that you’re able to start blazing your trail with Connected Campaigns today!
Have you started using Connected Campaigns in Pardot? Tell us how you’re using it in the comments below!
