The Ultimate Guide on How to Create a Campaign in Salesforce

Marketing is more important for businesses today than it has ever been in the past. About 65.7% of the global population uses the internet, and you need to be able to reach a wide audience if you want to keep up with your competitors.

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool that businesses all over the world use. Knowing how to create a campaign in Salesforce and use it to your advantage will give you an edge that could help you become a leader in your industry. You can gain valuable insights into your campaigns so that you can make adjustments and improvements moving forward.

Using Salesforce isn’t always easy, but this guide will explain everything you need to know about running a Salesforce campaign. Keep reading for more.

Table of Contents

What Are Salesforce Campaigns?

In Salesforce, a campaign is a set of activities that you can carry out to help promote a certain product or service. There are various examples of these, such as:

Blogs
Email Campaigns
Webinars
Newsletters
Product launches
Paid ads
Promotions
Referral programs
Affiliate marketing
Public relations efforts
Trade shows
Conferences

Salesforce campaigns are a standard feature that Salesforce offers. It makes it easier to plan, create, manage, and track any campaigns you run. You can generate details records as it ties the interactions of Contacts and Leads to the Opportunities’ outcomes.

In most cases, marketing teams use Salesforce to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Some companies also have their sales teams and other stakeholders make use of them. Tracking marketing campaigns can help provide information based on performance and return on investment.

Why Should You Use Salesforce Campaigns

Almost all businesses utilize marketing in some way, but some do it much better than others. Something that too many businesses neglect is tracking the effectiveness of campaigns. If you create some marketing content and put it out there, you should keep an eye on how well it performs.

This will help you determine what kind of marketing content resonates well with your audience. You can then work to constantly optimize your marketing efforts to always get the best results. You can prioritize the things that work well, and eliminate the things that don’t.

Salesforce campaigns are invaluable here. They give you a deeper insight into the content you’re putting out and make it easy to analyze it.

In many organizations, there’s some tension between the sales and marketing departments. This often comes down to a lack of visibility. Marketing activities can affect sales opportunities, but it can be difficult to determine the exact impact.

Salesforce operations allow for a holistic tracking approach that allows you to align revenue with the correct activity. The sales team can therefore determine how the marketing team’s efforts are impacting their success, and vice versa. This helps both teams improve their performance and can reduce pressure between them.

How to Create a Campaign in Salesforce

The benefits of Salesforce campaigns make them well worth putting time into. With that in mind, you need to know how to set them up properly if you want to get the most out of them.

1. Create a Campaign

You need to start by creating a campaign. Head to the Campaigns tab which should be in the navigation bar. You can also find it by searching for it in the App Launcher.

If it’s not already in the navigation bar, you might want to add it (especially if you’ll be using it a lot). You can do this by clicking the pencil icon which allows you to edit the navigation bar.

Next, click New to create a new campaign. This will only work if you have the correct permissions set up.

If you have any trouble here, you’ll need to talk to your Salesforce admin. They can edit your User record and authorize you as a Marketing User.

If you want to adjust things, you can edit the campaign object and layout. For example, you can alter the Type field so that it includes the marketing activities you use the most.

2. Give Your Salesforce Campaign a Name

After this, you need to name the campaign you’re working on. You can add free text to the Name field, so you’re free to call it whatever you like. With that in mind, you’ll likely want to come up with a standard naming convention for your campaigns.

This will help you stay organized, and the more campaigns you create, the more important this will be. It’s especially important when using campaign hierarchies.

People often use things like date formats and abbreviations to keep their campaigns in order. You can settle on whatever works best for you. Make sure anyone else within your organization who will be working on marketing campaigns understands the naming convention so that they can also keep things in order.

3. Complete the Other Fields

There are now several other fields that you’ll need to complete. These can vary slightly depending on your preferences and the particular campaign. As such, you can add and remove fields as needed, but some are very commonly used.

Checking the Active checkbox indicates that a campaign has an impact on the Opportunity revenue that links to leads and campaigns. This means new leads and contacts will automatically be added.

The Type field will have a drop-down list of different campaign types that you can choose from. There’s also the Status field which you can change throughout the campaign. For example, you can set it to Planned or In Progress and can also add additional values if needed.

Add in Start and End Dates so you can establish a solid schedule for your campaign. This will help you stay on track and focus your reporting over the desired period.

If you already have values for the Budgeted Cost, Expected Revenue, and Expected Response, you can add these in. This will show how much you expect to spend on a campaign as well as the estimated earnings and the level of response you’re anticipating.

The Actual Cost field highlights how much money running a campaign has cost. You’ll complete this section once the campaign is over.

4. Get Your Salesforce Campaign Hierarchy Right

When completing the above fields, you can choose a Parent Campaign. This is another campaign that sits above the current one in your hierarchy.

It’s uncommon for marketing campaigns to be completely isolated from all others, so you’ll typically want to establish a hierarchy early on. This gives you a more complete view of your marketing efforts.

For example, you might be setting up an event, and you can use email to invite users, record attendance, and monitor follow-ups. Using these fields in a hierarchy will give you a comprehensive view of all of them so you can see how they correlate. This will make it easier to track how successful each activity is alongside the overall event performance.

5. Set Your Campaign Member Statuses

After creating your campaign, you can set Member Statuses. You can do this by heading to the Related tab and locating the Campaign Member Status Related List. Every time you create a new campaign, it will auto-populate two statuses: Sent and Responded.

You can edit these or create new statuses depending on your needs. These will help you determine the degree to which every campaign member has interacted with the campaign.

The Best Performing Campaigns

Another key feature of Salesforce is Campaign Influence. It’s disabled by default, but you can enable it and it will help you track the influence of your campaigns on a specified opportunity.

You can allocate percentages and attribute revenue between your campaigns. It makes it much easier to understand market attribution and helps you break down data. This is incredibly valuable to both your sales and marketing teams.

Salesforce Campaign Reporting

The Salesforce report is one of the most useful features the platform offers. This applies to campaigns as well as other elements of the software. Reports can provide valuable information on things like:

Overall campaigns
Contacts
Leads
Lead and converted lead information
Campaign members
Opportunities with campaign history
Influenced opportunities

These are all standard reports, but as with many other elements of Salesforce, you can create custom reports to meet your needs. It’s important to determine what metrics are most useful to your organization. This will allow you to track them efficiently throughout your campaigns and then take the best actions based on the results.

Using Salesforce for Your Campaigns

Now you know how to create a campaign in Salesforce, you may want to get started. It’s an incredibly useful platform that can provide you with a wealth of data that will help you improve your marketing efforts moving forward. If you truly want to get the best results from your marketing campaigns, Salesforce is one of the best options out there.

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