How to Use Campaigns in HubSpot and Salesforce

A Campaign is a collection of assets or activities we create to work toward a single goal. In marketing, this would mean all points of contact (like emails, a landing page, and social media posts) building up to one offer.

Regarding the HubSpot Salesforce integration, it’s challenging to use the word “Campaign” because Campaigns work differently and are built differently on each platform. And spoiler alert, they don't sync how you might want them to.

Today, we'll discuss why that is and how to best use HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns.

HubSpot Campaigns Compared to Salesforce Campaigns

In HubSpot, a Campaign is closer to what we briefly mentioned above, focused on assets and driven by marketing. Campaign performance is measured by how your assets perform toward your goal as a group. And most importantly, each Campaign is its own entity, meaning there’s no nesting one Campaign under a larger one. Let's say we want to track our webinars for the year. In HubSpot, each webinar would have an individual Campaign, so you’d have to track overall performance through multiple reports. 

Conversely, a Campaign in Salesforce is a revenue-driven set of activities focused on driving sales. Salesforce Campaigns can have a hierarchy, meaning that in the example above, you’d create a Campaign for 2024 webinars and create child Campaigns for each individual webinar.

In Salesforce, Campaigns and Campaign Members are two separate objects. The Campaign object is a child object of Opportunity.

To make a long story short, there isn’t a linear way to connect a Salesforce Campaign with HubSpot Campaigns.

Creating a Campaign in HubSpot and Salesforce

First, regarding the HubSpot Salesforce integration, you can only create HubSpot Campaigns in HubSpot. There is no way to make a Salesforce Campaign in HubSpot. You also cannot sync HubSpot Campaigns to Salesforce.

That said, Salesforce Campaigns sync to HubSpot natively through the Salesforce Campaign ID property, and you can add and update Salesforce Campaign Members from HubSpot using the Workflow tool.

In HubSpot, you can start a Campaign from scratch. They recently released the option to start from a template, which gives you insight into HubSpot’s intent regarding this object. There are templates for Welcome Campaigns, Onboarding, and Nurturing, among others. Once you create each asset and the corresponding workflow, they will live together under the Campaign tool. Similarly, your Campaign performance is aggregated into a Campaign report.

In Salesforce, when you go to create a Campaign, a window pops up in the center of the screen, and you have the different data you can put in, like the Campaign name and parent Campaign, which creates the hierarchy, budget, and costs.

When to Use Each Tool

Many people approach Campaigns in the integration from the perspective of trying to mirror one another. But as we already covered, HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns are entirely different and have different objectives, so instead of mirroring one another, it’s best to think of when you would need each.

Use HubSpot Campaigns for marketing-driven Campaigns and to track the performance of your marketing communications. And choose Salesforce Campaigns to create revenue-driven efforts with sales goals.

Getting Campaign Data from the HubSpot Salesforce Integration

There are three primary ways of getting Campaign data in HubSpot.

First, the HubSpot native sync has the Salesforce Campaign ID property. It doesn't have to be mapped or managed. But this property has one shortcoming. It shows every Salesforce Campaign by name that somebody is a member of in Salesforce, but it doesn't show their status. So, there’s no way to see the Contact’s status regarding the Campaign.

One cool thing you can do with the native sync is filter or set Salesforce Campaigns in a HubSpot workflow like you would set up any other workflow action. As long as that HubSpot Contact is in sync with a Salesforce leader contact, they'll update that campaign member status and either create a campaign member or update it on the Salesforce side.

HubSpot Custom Objects are the next level of getting Salesforce data in HubSpot. Salesforce Campaigns can be represented by two Custom Objects in HubSpot: Campaigns and Campaign Members.

Salesforce Campaign Members are a junction object, meaning they connect Campaigns with Contacts or Leads in Salesforce. To get that connection in HubSpot, we need to mirror the two objects when we sync and associate them.

You’ll need to have HubSpot Enterprise if you want to take this route, which lets you map up to 10 Custom Objects in the integration. Furthermore, it’s important to note that anything you create in HubSpot with a Custom Object won’t sync to Salesforce, including the properties you update on said object. Another limitation is that you can only have 500,000 records on any given custom object. While you likely won’t have 500,000 Campaigns, you may run into the limit by having 500 Campaigns and 1,000 people on each.

The final workaround is to import Campaigns as a static list in HubSpot. Similar to the native option, doing this won’t allow you to differentiate by status either. To do this, go through the regular Import Data flow in HubSpot, aka Import > Import Object from App > Salesforce > Standard Objects and Campaigns. You can select the Campaign and then import it into HubSpot, and it will create a static list of people in that Campaign at that time.

The HubSpot Salesforce integration is a powerful tool to ramp up your sales and marketing. When used smartly, you can unlock new levels of efficiency in your CRM. But that doesn’t mean everything syncs apples to apples across platforms. Campaigns are one such example.

Master the HubSpot Salesforce Integration

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