As a follow-on to my post about Salesforce Marketing Campaign Architecture, I wanted to deep dive into the setup of Salesforce Campaigns. This post will be focused on thinking through how to implement a campaign hierarchy for our fictional SaaS company Vibetrack.

Vibetrack Company Summary

The Vibetrack product is focused on providing companies with real-time visibility into organization health and employee sentiment - leading to positive employee retention, engagement and overall satisfaction. Vibetrack is rapidly scaling marketing efforts across many platforms and channels. The table below shows a high level overview of marketing channels.

Campaign Hierarchy

The first step to building out campaigns in Salesforce is to think through how you should structure your campaign hierarchy. The hierarchy is important for a few reasons:

1. Organization and Discoverability: Vibetrack has a extensive collection of channels, programs and campaigns that it runs. Implementing a campaign hierarchy helps us organize and find the campaigns we’re looking for.
2. Reporting: Building an intentional hierarchy allows us to more easily build rollup reporting. While we can achieve flexible reporting with campaign level fields or even integrations downstream, a clear hierarchy makes it easier to build these reports.
3. Multi-touch Complexity: For a company like Vibetrack, multi-touch strategies introduces complexity. A campaign hierarchy helps us make cross-campaign associations which can help with attribution.

Defining the Hierarchy

There are a number of different ways to define the hierarchy for your business. I’m going to deep dive into defining the Webinar & Events campaigns for Vibetrack.

Discovery Questions

Let’s workshop our campaign hierarchy by focusing on the Vibetrack business. Thinking through our hierarchy from this perspective ensures we build a mold that makes sense for our business model.

1. What is the Objective, Key Result and Tactics that are driving this channel?
   1. Objective: Grow our online and offline events as a Growth channel that drives brand awareness, user engagement and qualified pipeline in 2024.
   2. Key Result: Generate 2,000 MQLs per month, resulting in $2M closed-won opportunity influence.
   3. Tactics
      1. Sponsor Transform Las Vegas and obtain a keynote slot
      2. Run Education webinar series: “The Science of Team Sentiment”
      3. Host an executive dinner in San Francisco
2. What are the metrics that we’re looking to track?
   1. Event level interactions (Invited, Registered, Attended, Badge Scan, etc.)
   2. Pipeline Metrics: Leads, MQLs, SQLs, Opportunities, Opportunity Influence by stage, Pipeline ($)
   3. Cost: Event cost, Cost per pipeline stage
3. Who are the target audiences/personas for these campaigns?
   1. Departments: HR, People
   2. Titles: C-Suite, HR Business Partners, People & Culture
4. What platforms are we leveraging for this channel?
   1. ON24 for online events
   2. Pardot (Account Engagement) Forms for in-person events
   3. Pardot (Account Engagement) for pre and post-event invites or follow up
5. How does our team report on performance for this channel?
   1. Weekly Business Reviews
   2. Monthly Pipeline Reviews
   3. Post-Event Performance Readout

Recommended Hierarchy

Based on the information above, I would recommend the following hierarchy. I’ve chosen to loosely align these to our OKR model. This approach allows us to ensure our campaign structure and reporting will lend itself nicely to how we operate and measure our marketing efforts.

1. Level 1: 2024
   • At Vibetrack, our Webinar & Event OKRs are defined and refreshed on a yearly basis. For this reason it makes sense for us to have the ability to group these campaigns by the year that they are active. This also enables yearly rollup reporting and introduces better organization - one day we’ll have hundreds of webinar campaigns that may become difficult to sort through.
2. Level 2: Webinars & Events
   • This will represent our 2024 KR to “Generate 2,000 MQLs per month, resulting in $10M closed-won opportunity influence.” All relevant campaigns should roll up to this parent.
3. Level 3: Specific Events & Webinars
   • These are your tactics that drive the KR. These should represent actual events or webinars that you’re sponsoring, attending or hosting.
   • The naming convention here is flexible, you just need to stay within the 80-character limit. I recommend keeping it structured but simple - if there is crucial campaign context you need to track you’ll have an opportunity to do so within the campaign data schema.
4. Level 4: Sub Tactics
   • Sometimes an event will have “sub-events” that should be tracked. Examples of this could be a session at an event, your booth interactions, follow up emails and more.
   • It’s up to you how granular you want to get with each different interaction. I have chosen to track these as separate campaigns but you could also leverage member status to track these interactions (keeping in mind each user can only have 1 status).

The screenshot below shows how this would look within the Salesforce UI.

Summary

There are many different ways to define and implement your campaign hierarchy. The approach will change based on how your business functions, what metrics you’re looking to track and how granular you need your tracking to be.

As you think through how to apply this to your business, the following high level questions may be helpful to define your approach:

1. How does your organization measure success?
2. What are the different channels and campaigns you need to track?
3. How granular do you need your campaign tracking to be?
4. What kind of reporting do you need to enable in order to make this campaign data actionable?