As a marketer, you've likely been asked to discuss the success of a given campaign. Unfortunately that's not always an easy question to answer. In today's post, we're going to look at a very simple way you can use Salesforce campaigns and your marketing-automation platform of choice to create clear and insightful pipeline-marketing reports in Salesforce.

The three reports we'll be looking at are:

• Opportunities generated by campaign
• Opportunities generated by campaign type
• Revenue generated by campaign

Leverage Salesforce campaigns to demonstrate the success of your pipeline marketing efforts

Use a 1:1 Salesforce-campaign-to-marketing-asset ratio

Before we create our first campaign, we're going to make a quick update to the Salesforce campaign types. Make sure they include all the different types of assets the marketing team uses, including webinars, white papers and contact-us forms. Here's an example of what that might look like:

(You can find this view in Salesforce by navigating from Setup>Customize>Campaigns>Fields>Type)

Next we'll go into the Campaigns tool and create a Salesforce campaign for each of our marketing assets. Take this campaign associated with our Definitive Guide to SaaS Marketing for example:

For these reports to be effective, there are a few key fields we'll want to be sure to fill out. I recommend naming the campaign with the exact name of the asset. Then, confirm the campaign is marked as active and the Type property (we just worked on) is set appropriately. The status should be set to "In Progress." For greater ROI analysis, you can input both expected revenue and actual cost to produce the campaign.

You don't have to use a hierarchy to create these reports, but if you wanted to group a number of assets under one campaign initiative, you should. It really depends on the organization and whether that level of granularity is going to be a preferred method to create the reports. For example:

• SaaS Marketing (Parent)
  • Definitive Guide to SaaS Marketing (Child)
  • Free Trial & Cohort Analysis Template (Child)

The final hack I'm a big fan of on the Salesforce-campaign side is customizing the member statuses to illustrate the action taken by a lead. For example, "Downloaded" is probably a better description for our e-book example than the Salesforce default "Responded." Bizible has written a great post on how to accomplish that, available here.

Once you're done creating the campaigns you should have a list that looks similar to this:

Note: In this style of reporting, we'll only assign an "end date" to the campaign if it has a discrete timeline. For content that is going to live on your website indefinitely, we can leave the "end date" undefined.

Map your Salesforce campaigns to HubSpot landing pages

This part is really easy. With all the Salesforce campaigns created, all you need to do now is update each of the landing pages housing your marketing assets and assign the appropriate Salesforce campaign to each. You can do this by opening the form editor on the landing page and selecting the campaign from the appropriate drop-down menu:

There you have it! If you've been using the HubSpot and Salesforce integration prior to version 2.60 you'll be able to navigate to the HubSpot integration dashboard in Salesforce and see all three of these reports. There, you can determine exactly what marketing initiatives are responsible for sourcing opportunities and revenue! If you installed the integration after version 2.60 was released you'll need to create these reports in Salesforce from scratch. Here is a great how-to post from HubSpot detailing the steps needed to set that up. And of course, if you run into any issues in that configuration, feel free to give us a shout or leave your question in the comments below.