Campaign is probably the most widely used generic term in marketing that can mean literally almost anything. So it’s not surprising that the term campaign is so damn confusing. In this article I dive into the differences into how campaigns work between Marketo and Hubspot. It's fairly in depth and is targeted to an admin or marketing operations professional.
Campaign is probably the most widely used generic term in marketing that can mean literally almost anything.
So it’s not surprising that the term campaign is so damn confusing.
This is probably the biggest difference between Marketo and Hubspot and deserve to be reviewed especially if you are choosing what platform to go with. If you are coming from Marketo then the way Hubspot does campaigns will be confusing AF.
In this article I dive into the differences into how campaigns work between Marketo and Hubspot. It's fairly in depth and is targeted to an admin or marketing operations professional.
Campaigns in Hubspot contain a bunch of marketing assets like, emails, landing pages, forms, and lists that are all a part of the same marketing initiative.
Hubspot campaigns have some built in tools to show you how effective the campaign is right in the campaign without going to an external report. You’ll see new contacts, influenced contacts and revenue attribution all within the campaign.
You can see influenced contacts. Which mean contacts that have engaged with your assets, like viewed an email, or viewed a landing page or submitted a form that are associated to the campaign.
You can see Revenue influence by the campaign which will be counted by any contact that was engaged by an asset in the campaign and ends up being associated to a closed won deal.
Hubspot campaigns are not Salesforce Campaigns.
Hubspot themselves even state that Hubspot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns are not the same. They do not align or correspond to one another. So if you use Salesforce and if you are going to use Campaigns in Reporting, I would probably just skip using Hubspot campaigns altogether. Because essentially you will have maintenance in both systems. Which I’d argue you will probably be able to get what you need just from Salesforce.
Campaigns in Hubspot really are built to work well within Hubspot if you are using Hubspot Sales Hub and Marketing Hub. It skips things like statuses all together. Statuses in Marketo are a key building block to showing influence. It has attribution tools baked into the campaign function that allow you to see campaign influence right there on the campaign.
Hubspot campaigns make sense if you are an all Hubspot shop and you want to have campaigns track campaigns that have multiple pieces a part of it.
I’d say one of the key benifits of Hubspot Campaigns is that it gives you better visibility into how the assets in your campaign influence your revenue.
To make things even more confusing, Campaigns are actually called Programs in Marketo. Programs are individual marketing initiatives like webinars, events, email sends, free trials, assets demo download forms etc… There are different program types with different features to help you keep track of your different marketing initiatives.
They sync to Campaigns in Salesforce. Marketo Programs were built to sync exactly with Salesforce Campaigns. You can choose to have these campaigns sync 1 to 1 or you can limit the sync to only be people that reached a success status for example. Pros and cons to each approach there. But we won’t dive into that here.
In Marketo Campaigns show influence by having a contact be a program member with a success status, like “filled out form” or “visited our booth”. That contact then needs to be associated to an Opportunity in Salesforce. If that opportunity has an amount value then Marketo will show that program as having influenced revenue if it becomes a closed won opportunity. You can see these influence reports in the Performance Insights reports in Marketo.
Statuses are key building blocks to programs in Marketo. They help you keep track of how people engaged with your marketing program/campaign. A member will only have 1 status and it will show the furthest status they made it to. Statuses are helpful tool to know how people are engaging with your marketing activity. It’s one of the key things that is missing from Hubspot and it’s really missing with offline events. Marketo shines being able to clearly show you who has registered, visited your booth, booked a demo right within your program. This is perhaps the biggest difference between Marketo and Hubspot Campaigns.
Both are actually pretty powerful. They both have the goal of being able to track your marketing initiatives and show how they are having an impact on new contacts created and on revenue won.
Marketo shines bright in that the programs are more flexible in allowing you to make them do what you want them to. They have statuses that are keys to measuring what is successful.
With Hubspot you can’t change what logic counts as an influence. It’s based on Hubspot logic. Which isn’t necessarily flawed. But you don’t have control over statuses. Which if you are using Hubspot and Salesforce that is going to be a point of conflict if you are using Salesforce campaigns. That’s why I would be very clear about your campaign tracking strategy.
Marketo helps you keep track of events better. The event tracking module in Hubspot is really limited.
Programs in Marketo are more flexible. These programs have statuses that help you keep track of the success of that individual tactic that you are running.
What you need to decide is what requirements for tracking campaigns you have and then that will help you choose which system will work better for you.
P.S. If you run live events, Hubspot is notorious for sucking at tracking live events the way most marketing teams want to or are used to.
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