Campaign Organisation in Salesforce and Pardot

Frustrated at your current campaign situation in Salesforce and Pardot? Whether you are setting up your campaigns for the first time or looking to improve, here are some things you can implement to make your campaigns easier to find, manage and report on.

Naming convention

Having a standardised naming convention, that the whole team sticks to, will be your friend. Not only will it make searching for campaigns easier, but it will help with your reporting.

But what should your naming convention consist of? The main thing I always tell customers is to pick a naming convention that mirrors the structure of your business and marketing activities. There’s no point putting a fancy naming convention in place if the structure does not work across your organisation.

Here are some handy tips outlining the type of content conventions that could work for you:

• Dates (this is a key one, whether you choose to go by campaign launch date or simply which financial year it’s in)
• Type of campaign (e.g. is this a webinar / event / white paper)
• Short description of the topic (this could also be a product line within your business)
• Regional information (this is a great one if your business is multi-regional)

For example, if I was going to be running a Pardot webinar this year in Germany, my naming convention might look something like this:

FY20_WEB_Pardot_DE

There may be other conventions you want to include – just make sure they make sense in the context of your business.

You can continue this naming convention right down to individual folder structures and assets in your Pardot instance too. For example, if I was going to be sending out an email in conjunction with this campaign, which sent prospects to a landing page, my naming conventions might look like this:

FY20_WEB_EM_Pardot_DE

FY20_WEB_LAN_Pardot_DE

Campaign hierarchy

Creating a campaign hierarchy is a great way to group your campaigns into categories. It will also enhance your reporting. This method utilises parent and child campaigns, up to five levels in total. A parent campaign is the top tier, and child campaigns sit underneath the parent campaign.

Let’s take a look at a couple of ways this could work for you.

1. Group campaigns based on your marketing strategy

In this approach, the top level parent campaign would be an overall strategic focus, for example looking at one product line of your business. Your next level down would be a specific campaign around that product (e.g. an up-sell of this product to existing customers). Your final level would be the specific marketing efforts that have gone into that campaign.

• Product 1
  • Up-sell of product 1
    • Product 1 up-sell webinar campaign
    • Product 1 up-sell email campaign

2. Group campaigns based on large marketing efforts

In this approach, the top level parent campaign is a large marketing effort. For example, if you are running an annual event, your parent campaign would be the event itself, and child campaigns would be the supporting marketing efforts.

• Large Annual Event
  • Event Launch Email
  • Event Follow up Email

Both the first two methods involve creating different campaigns for each of your marketing efforts, which can be time consuming, but does allow you a really granular level of reporting.

Let’s have a look at taking a slightly different approach in our third option below.

3. Group campaigns based on time period

In this approach, the top level parent campaign is the current year, and encompasses all marketing efforts for one area that year. Your child campaigns then become quarterly focuses, and the final level is the individual marketing efforts.

• FY20 Events
  • FY20 Q1 events
    • First Event
    • Second Event
    • Third Event

This approach is great as you can report on how your events are performing both in the whole year, but also comparing specific quarters and individual events. It also saves you having to create individual campaigns for each type of marketing effort.

Campaign types

The ‘Type’ field on a campaign defines the sorts of campaigns you run. There are standard values already in play in this field, but you can set up your own and make them relevant to your business.

I’d be really careful here not to get too overexcited when choosing which values you should keep and which to get rid of. It can be really easy to fall into the trap of having too many values, which will make your reporting harder. It also makes it harder for your teams to specify which campaign type their campaign should sit under. As a general rule, I’d try and keep this list under ten values.

Member statuses

A campaign member status describes the level a Lead/Contact has engaged with your campaign. For example, for a webinar campaign, your statuses might be:

• Invited
• Registered
• Attended
• No Show

It’s really important here to make sure you only have one set of member statuses per campaign you run. Member statuses are super useful for reporting on response rates of your campaigns. However, if you use different statuses for your email campaigns (for example to indicate that the email was opened), it becomes harder to get a single report of how many emails have been opened across all of your campaigns.

Remember you can also follow up with prospects using Pardot Engagement Studio, and personalise their journey based on their campaign member status.

What next?

Setting up your campaigns for the first time? Need help with organisation? Are you rolling out a new campaign hierarchy? We can help with all of it. Just get in touch with us here.