Across industry landscapes, marketers are dealing with a similar set of headwinds as it pertains to campaign reporting, particularly in CRM. Answering simple questions like – how did my asset perform across marketing channels? How are my web forms performing? How many campaign touchpoints did this person have throughout their journey? How is my white paper performing in LinkedIn versus Programmatic? Gathering this information from your CRM has proven to be time-consuming and difficult, giving marketers less and less faith in their ability to generate valuable reports.
Let’s say you want to know how a particular asset is performing. Salesforce should be able to help you with that—and it can—but in its out-of-the-box form, it requires a lot of manual effort to pull out meaningful reports. The campaign structure’s fatal flaw is that it pushes a parent-child hierarchy with default field values and definitions that are often different from the Marketing Automation Platform you may be using.
Think of it like a basket filled with fruit. In that context, it’s clear that you have a lot of fruit, but you won’t be able to tell how many apples you have compared to oranges. For example, let’s say you’re asked to generate a report on your recent white paper campaign that was run through paid channels. Are you able to easily distill how your Google Ads did versus your LinkedIn Ads? What if the lead came in from LinkedIn Platform Form versus a Resource Center form on your website? Typically, the campaign would have a ‘Type’ equal to Paid Advertisement or White Paper. With that information, it’s not easy to tell how or where the campaign responses came from (e.g., LinkedIn, Google, etc.) Out of the box, it’s tricky to be able to easily disseminate this data in meaningful ways.
Through our learnings, we’ve taken that platform and restructured it in a simplified yet powerful way enabling accurate on-demand reporting. This structure helps marketers answer these questions:
Using out-of-the-box functionality within Salesforce, Convertiv created a structure that utilizes efficient naming conventions to allow for easier searchability and less ‘decoding’ of abbreviations. Field structure and values enable multi-dimensional, on-demand report generation within the platform without the need for a strict hierarchy or custom objects. This allows you to produce tailored Salesforce Campaign reports that are as broad or as specific as the business calls for.
The introduction of this tailored structure eliminates the need for data manipulation and review across several spreadsheets that need to be cross-referenced. And it allows marketing operations to make confident and informed data-driven decisions on overall performance, regional success, and the effectiveness of marketing your channels to provide insight on where to invest your next marketing dollar.