Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

katie_cort
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Campaigns: Tips and Tricks for Running An Effective Inbound Campaign in HubSpot

Hey everyone! I wanted to take some time to talk about the Campaigns tool in HubSpot. Working with customers every day as an Onboarding Specialist, I am often surprised to find many of my customers are not using the Campaigns tool in HubSpot and have no idea what it is/what the purpose is. Hopefully this post helps boil down what exactly the Campaigns tool is, the purpose, and some of the amazing reporting power it can unlock🔓 If you are using Marketing Hub Pro and up, you should definitely read this post to understand more about the Campaigns tool, common use cases, examples and pitfalls I see in my day to day. Let's get started 😁⬇️

 

What is an Inbound Campaign

 

  • The Definition of a Campaign in HubSpot: a set of related marketing pieces that achieve a common goal for a specific period of time.
  • Tools that can go into an inbound campaign include: Landing pages, Blog posts, Forms, ads, Call to actions, social media posts, workflows, emails, static emails (not active) and even external content.
  • A "campaign" in other systems, for example in Salesforce, means something completely different. A Campaign in Salesforce is more of an outbound list you may send to. The idea of a Campaign in HubSpot is more of an "inbound" campaign because you are associating things like landing pages, social posts, emails etc targeted to your buyer persona to better understand the contacts you are bringing in/ influencing via marketing efforts!

 

Why Create a Campaign in HubSpot

 

  • Consolidate marketing efforts. Instead of needing to bounce around HubSpot tool by tool to understand reporting, this tool will tie all of the tools together so you can see reporting in one spot!
  • Understand ROI on your marketing efforts in one spot
  • Organizational reasons
  • Track deadlines in a calendar view, especially helpful if you run multiple campaigns at once (fun fact- you can also color code campaigns!🌈)
  • Create smart goals and hold yourself accountable to results
  • Easily collaborate with teammates on one campaign (for example, you can @ mention certain teammates, leave comments, tasks and more!)

 

Common Types of Campaigns+Goals🗓

 

  • Brand Awareness: Increase website traffic, engagement on social channels
  • Event Invitation: Get new leads, re-activate passive leads
  • Product launch: Education, qualify opportunities, close deals
  • Seasonal: Delight customers, sell themed or limited offers

These are the four most common types I see, but by no means is this an exhaustive list! There are so many types of different campaigns you can think about for a range of purposes.

Tips and Best Practices‼️

 

  • Campaigns are not the best for evergreen content, although you can do this if you want. The main utility of campaigns will be if you have a specific goal and a start/end date of when you want the campaign to run for.  At the beginning when you create the Campaign, be sure to add in the start/end date, Audience, Goal so that you can look back on your campaigns and understand specifically what each one was for. After you add the campaign, make sure to click Acitons->Edit goals to add in the numbers you want to hit for sessions, closed deals etc
  • Think about your target audience and buyer persona of course! HubSpot will always ask you for the Audience you are targeting. This is important because it may make sense to create 2 different campaigns if you are targeting 2 different personas. This is because at the end of the day, you are associating content pieces like landing page/social media posts, and if the messaging per content piece will differ based on audience, you definitely should create two campaigns for streamlined reporting. If you are running an email campaign but emails will be different per vertical- ie one set of emails for Healthcare, one set for Education- create two different campaigns and associate assets accordingly. You may even have different goals per vertical as well!
  • Order of operations should be: First create the campaign. Set your goals, budget, audience etc. Then, build out your assets-> the forms, CTAs, landing pages, emails etc. As you build out the asset, you will notice in Settings a dropdown that says "Campaign" so that you can easily associate the asset to the Campaign that has been built. The tracking is not retroactive, so associate your assets to the campaign ASAP, especially when you launch everything!
  • Even if your asset is not created in HubSpot (think-guest blog post, other social media platform like Quora not natively tracked by HubSpot, even QR codes-see comments below) you can still associate the tracking back to the campaign! Make sure to generate a tracking URL for these which can be associated back to your campaign

 

Reporting and Smart goals‼️

 

Screen Shot 2022-10-24 at 4.58.12 PM.png

 

Screen Shot 2022-10-24 at 4.58.19 PM.png

 

 

  • Set specific goals to each of the metrics to see how you are comparing (as shown above)
  • When building a campaign, think about SMART goals.
  • For example, "we want more leads" is not a smart goal. A smart goal would be: We want to generate 100 qualified leads by the end of this quarter (when the campaign is set to end)
  • The KPIs in the center (hint: all definitions explained hereare your main metrics. This is what helps you understand how marketing efforts are impacting business and bottom line. Really helps marketing prove their stuff!
  • Campaigns also allows you to see all of the deals created and specifically deals that have closed, leading to attributed revenue back to the campaign.Obviously ROI should ideally be more than your budget

  • You also get a breakdown of individual channel performance as you scroll through the page

 

Attribution tab

 

We have built in Attribution Reports in the Campaigns tab

Screen Shot 2022-10-24 at 4.59.32 PM.png

  • 3 lens to look at attribution: contact create, deal create, revenue
  • Built in attribution reports. Asets by contacts created-> this report allows us to understand how many contacts were created by interacting with each individual asset
  • Revenue: each individual asset that drove revenue towards the business 
  • Can also leverage different attribution models-> Linear, first interaction, W Shaped, time decay depending on the question you are trying to answer
  • Or you can jump into the builder and explore the data from there
  • Can hit the compare campaigns future (up to 5) side by side, can also compare sets of assets against each other one by one
  • Can also go to the email analyze tool and filter by the campaign

 

Resources

 

*Campaigns Sales collateral

*Creating a Campaign Academy (14min) and Analyzing Campaigns (7min)

*Campaigns FAQ

*The Ultimate Guide to Campaigns blog

*Brilliant examples of Email Marketing campaigns

 

 

 

3 Replies 3
kvlschaefer
Community Manager
Community Manager

Campaigns: Tips and Tricks for Running An Effective Inbound Campaign in HubSpot

This is brilliant! Thanks for sharing this with the community, @katie_cort! 😊


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christopher-RVO
Key Advisor | Diamond Partner
Key Advisor | Diamond Partner

Campaigns: Tips and Tricks for Running An Effective Inbound Campaign in HubSpot

@katie_cort  I LOVE THE CAMPAIGNS FEATURE - whenever I run demos I always make sure to cover this in detail as it is so valuable. One of the cool features that I make sure to highlight is the ability to generate custom UTMs in the Campaigns tool. 

For those that are running booths at tradeshows and have QR Codes on stands, I always recommend linking the QR Code to a HubSpot generated UTM to track the scans from the booth as a lead source. Super valuable data and an easy way to track an offline source in a campaign!


Christopher Barnett - VP of Revenue at Aptitude 8


katie_cort
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Campaigns: Tips and Tricks for Running An Effective Inbound Campaign in HubSpot

Me too @christopher-RVO !! Generating custom UTMs is such a great call out; I actually edited this post to include this feature because it can be fundamental for tracking, even if the asset is not created natively in HubSpot. The QR codes is a perfect use case 🙂