In this article, we will dive deeper into how you can use Connected Campaigns to your advantage when working with Salesforce and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (previously known as Pardot and from now on mentioned as MCAE). 

There are MC Account Engagement Campaigns and there are Salesforce Campaigns. These used to be two separate things, until Connected Campaigns came along, enabling you to connect the two and get more insight into the customer journey and the ROI of your marketing campaigns. 

What are Connected Campaigns? 

You can look at Connected Campaigns in two ways, depending on your MC Account Engagement history: 

• If you have been using MC Account Engagement for a long time and have created both MC Account Engagement and Salesforce Campaigns in the past, Connected Campaigns is a way for you to connect Pardot Campaigns with Salesforce Campaigns so you can use the same campaigns on both platforms. 
• If you are new to MC Account Engagement, it’s easier to ignore the terms MC Account Engagement Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns and just focus on Connected Campaigns. When setting up the Salesforce Connector in MC Account Engagement , simply enable Connected Campaigns and the campaigns you create in Salesforce will be available to use in MC Account Engagement as well. 

How to use Connected Campaigns?

Connected Campaigns can be linked to Prospects (MC Account Engagement), Leads, Contacts, Accounts (optional), and Opportunities. On the Prospect, Lead, Contact, and Account records, you can see these campaigns as touchpoints in the customer journey. By making sure campaigns are linked to contacts whenever they interact with your brand, you will get more insight into campaign performance. 

Additionally, linking Opportunities to campaigns enables you to calculate ROI. Adding the campaign that influenced a Closed Won the most, will give you insight into how much revenue that campaign created. By default, Salesforce attributes 100% of an Opportunity’s revenue to the campaign you added, but Customizable Campaign Influence enables you to use multi-touch attribution. 

The importance of campaign structure (+ HAVIK tip) 

You have complete control over how you set up Connected Campaigns and the structure in which you do so. Depending on how your business operates and what you want to get out of your campaigns (think about reporting), you can define a structure of parent and child campaigns. It’s important to consider this before getting started with campaigns. Because, once you start using them, it’s quite a hassle to change the structure – you will have to reassign your Prospects, Leads, Contacts and Opportunities to the right campaigns. 

Based on our experience with customers, we defined four types of campaigns (note that these are not actual Campaign record types, but just a way to structure campaigns): 

• Source campaigns: channel campaigns to track where a Prospect came from (for example: Google-Organic, LinkedIn-Advertising, etc.). 
• Touchpoint campaigns: to track conversions. For example: adding a campaign Whitepaper-Download when a Prospect downloads a whitepaper. 
• Always-on campaigns: for tracking campaigns that run all year (for example: Google Ads campaigns, onboarding and nurturing campaigns, etc.). 
• One-off campaigns: campaigns that only run for a limited amount of time, for which you want to track the results (for example: Spring-Sale-2023). 

Most of our customers use at least two of these campaign types and have set up their campaign structure around them, creating campaigns for each source, touchpoint, always-on campaign and/or one-off campaign. 

What are the benefits of Connected Campaigns? 

It’s easy to see the benefits of using campaigns that connect data from your marketing automation tool with CRM data: 

• Campaign engagement: you will be able to track how contacts engage with your marketing assets and sales efforts. 
• Campaign influence: you will get more insight into how campaigns influence revenue. 
• Reporting: you will be able to calculate a campaign’s ROI. 

Eager to get started with Connected Campaigns? Our MC Account Engagement experts can help you out. Feel free to contact us! 

P.S.: For the curious among us there will be a part 2!