HubSpot Ideas

alivia

Attaching Offline contacts to a campaign

Hey,

We need to be able to attach contacts we upload to a campaign in Hubspot.

Let's face it, not many companies are 100% online, we all go to events and attend conferences where we get contacts, or even do hosted paid and are given lists of contacts (who have downloaded our content, not outbound).

Salesforce allows us to attach contacts to a campaign with a workflow, could be an idea.

 

It would also be useful to be able to attach contacts to a campaign for "deal source" purposes > when we send an MQL to an SDR, they get in touch, and the person forwards them to someone else in th company, so we can also attach that person to the source campaign!

 

Because I don't have this posisbility, I have created a set of altnerate custom sources to track my marketing activities ROI and it is not fun.

 

Please find a way of doing this!

Cheers,

Alivia

 

154 Replies
SimonH_Demodia
Participant | Elite Partner

I see that HubSpot launched a new beta Campaign Centre recently. The new UI, etc looks great, but it's still missing offline users as far as I can see. Big opportunity missed...

gepot
Contributor

Another voice for this critical feature.  Your profile of customers has changed Hubspot, you need to recognize the fact that most companies run a mix of inbound and outbound marketing efforts, and you are helping nobody by restricting the ability to manually assign campaigns.  We have no practical way to reliably measure the journey that offline contacts took if we can't attach them to a campaign, which makes your reports useless.

 

This is not a nice-to-have, this is a market differentiation feature!

mark-franken
Participant

Agreed gepot, but I would say this functionally is not a differentiation feature, it’s a base requirement. HubSpot is choosing to invest in new products (Service Hub) at the expense of completing baseline marketing functions. If this isn’t announced as an improvement at Inbound this year, I think it’s time to leave the platform.

Rgagnon
Member

What are your thoughts on other platforms?  I'm ready as well.  I've been hanging in there with Hubspot for 9 years now but this is getting ridiculous.  They roll out useless changes (without any notice) that no one wants and won't act on the most basic.  When I started with Hubspot, they were a category of one.  I see many other options today.  I would like feedback as my subscription renews in December and I'll spend the last half of this year getting ready to change vendors.

jeremypyles
Participant

@Rgagnon we just cancelled all of our Salesforce licenses except for one. i think i may need to move back to Salesforce in order to know how my offline marketing campaigns are performing. We have so many ONLINE *AND* OFFLINE marketing initiatives that we need to be able to track...really disappointed that Hubspot just doesn't get it when it comes to seeing the world as more complicated than strictly digital marketing.

gepot
Contributor

@mark-franken You are right.  This is such a fundamental thing it is unthinkable that it isn't available. The funny thing is that Hubspot already does this association, otherwise we won't see the results in the Campaigns report, but they choose to exclude those associations from the interface and API, so we don't even have a means to programmatically work campaign associations in a visible way.

 

For now, I added a custom field where we will just add options for each newly registered campaign.  I will then use the API to pass the value on to deals from contacts so that we can track conversions.  It is a schlep, but this is not the first time we had to build a solution around Hubspot's glaring limitations.

 

 

pweston3
HubSpot Employee

Hi everyone -- I'm here to provide an update on associating contacts with a campaign. 

 

We hear you loud and clear, and we agree that this functionality is important. We're currently making some infrastructure improvements that will take campaign reporting and associating capabilities to the next level. 

 

You may have noticed some of the recent campaigns updates in this post, the good news is that these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are some exciting improvements on the roadmap for the campaigns tool, including the ability to associate contacts / offline sources. 

 

We'll be sure to update this post when more information is available. Thanks!

mark-franken
Participant

@pweston3, it is great to finally see a formal reply from HubSpot on this. Can you offer some ballpark timing on these infrastructure improvements?

 

I hope parent/child hierarchial campaigns may be part of this as well. Please refernece this idea thread: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Parent-Child-hierarchy-feature-for-campaigns/idc-p/27...

 

Again, I veiw these as all baseline requirements now for any automation platform.

 

pweston3
HubSpot Employee

@mark-franken  The infrastructure improvements are actively in development. I don’t want to over or under promise in terms of timing, but we absolutely agree that these features are important and are working toward making them a reality.

In terms of the other idea thread: Parent/child campaigns are also something we’ve discussed as part of our roadmap. There are many exciting improvements on the roadmap for the Campaigns tool and we’ll provide updates as progress is made!

mark-franken
Participant

@pweston3 Will it roll out in 2019? 

pweston3
HubSpot Employee

@mark-franken We are currently evaluating potential solutions with our engineering team, but we do intend on delivering in 2019.

aericks2
Member | Platinum Partner

This is a definite short coming of the campaign tool.  Ultimately, we're trying to link leads to a campaign right?  So why not be able to add manually? 

 

Also, HS campaigns should sync with SF campaigns imo.  

jeremypyles
Participant

My business group had a speaker yesterday that spoke to me and 14 other CEOs in NYC and he was going over marketing inbound strategies. His firm is a registered Hubspot partner and he was talking about how we all should be tracking our inbound AND offline marketing activities in Hubspot (or any other marketing automation software...) and I raised my hand and complained about the fact that Hubspot after 10 years still refuses to accept the fact that anything exists in the marketing world outside of digital inbound techniques, like trade shows, print ads with custom landing page URLs, etc.

He said you can do it and I argued that you can't. (we agreed to disagree...)


Unless i'm missing something we are all still trying to accomplish a simple marketing task: tying marketing spend in offline campaigns to deal conversions. I need to know if my trade shows or print ads are paying off. (YES we also do other digital inbound marketing techniques also...this isn't EITHER/OR marketing strategy.)

 

My biggest bone to pick with Hubspot is that there seems to be this massive ignorance of the real world and how it operates. We're not all digital software companies marketing only on the web. We have to do offline marketing techniques like direct mailers, trade shows and print. 

Hubspot, i know you find those words dirty and disgusting, but yes people still do mail things with stamps. printers print. we do trade shows. Yes they are petri dishes of disease spread, but they actually work.  I know they do, but i just don't know how much. Should i do more trade shows? less trade shows? I need your software to tell me that campaign effectiveness.

I'm spending marketing budget and i need to know if it working or not.

 

you've all heard the adage: I know 50% of my advertising is working. 
I just don't know which 50% is actually working!

 

HUBSPOT: please wake up. The world is not 100% digital.

SOLUTION: let me assign a lead/contact to a campaign manually so you can tell me if that lead came in via a trade show and then converted to a paying customer.

I gave this up foolishly when we ditched Salesforce (good riddance!) and now are regretting it ONLY for this fact.

 

BTW, Hubspot, if you're listening, I'm the person that told your product managers years ago that i didn't care how many leads i converted to contacts and how many contacts converted to deal...the thing that really matter is how much $$$ are we making! So knowing if our marketing spend is working or effective actually is really important. After a few years you came out with reports and dashboards that now tell me this, but it is just missing 50% of my marketing activities.

 

Just think we all need to continue hammering this home until the powers that be wake up.

All...please chime in and reiterate if you are unhappy about the current state of affairs.

 

Hubspot: everyone on this thread would be ideal candidates to put on a beta list to review any kind of works in progress before it launches (if it ever launches).

 

Yours longingly and lovingly...


Jeremy

Rgagnon
Member

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE your post.  You are 100% on target as are all the marketers that have pushed for this improvement over the years. 

mark-franken
Participant

@jeremypyles  Preach! Heart  The speaker was lying. You're right and I agree with every frustrating word you shared.  HubSpot's @pweston3 replied to this thread a few posts back. Supposedly we will see big improvements to campaigns/attributions in 2019. Just have to wait and see if it is enough.

MdeRada
Member

@jeremypyles Bravo! I'm sure we are all aligned here. Although we are a SaaS company and still we spend half of our budget on trade fairs, so you are absolutely right. 

I don't want to be naive but our Customer Sucess Manager guaranteed me that they are working specifically on this critial problem and they are aiming to launch the solution this year for sure, together with other campaign improvements. I am just hoping this is true and that they also solve other key issues like having parent and child campaigns ( if you also feel that you need this I encourage you to vote here)

Let's be patient and hopefully it will be sorted soon!

RhiannaJones
Participant

Absolutely, this would be very helpful for monitoring the effectiveness of conferences, webinars and suchlike. I pretty much live in Hubspot but I have barely used the Campaigns tool because of this limitation. I would love to be able to make use of it, it looks great!

tjordan
Member

Please can you add this feature - it is so important to showing the success of a campaign in terms of contacts added

SteveMatlick
Contributor

Our Sales team just got back from their first event and we were planning on associating the contacts that attended and visited the booth to a campaign so we can email them post-event, etc. and just discovered that we can't associate contacts directly with a campaign.   

 

There are many reasons to want to do this - post-event marketing, influenced revenue reporting and ROI, and operational measurement of engagement post-event are just a few.

Heikki
Member

I've been now implementing Hubspot for a bit over a year and every month I face the same issue: There is a new event or a offline marketing campaign going on and I don't have a way to track it. 
Even a workaround to this would be most welcome!