While using Connected Campaigns in Pardot will be essential to your future success, you will need to put in some legwork with your team before enabling this feature.
Special Note: If your Pardot account was provisioned after February 2019, you won’t need the following steps and can start right away building campaigns in Salesforce.
For everyone who has an account older than February 2019, it’s time to do the tactical work to cross the Connected Campaigns finish line. On your mark, get set, go!
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1. Agree on a start date with your team and write it down
2. Get the Right Salesforce Access:
You will need:
Marketing User on your Salesforce profile checked true
Read, write, edit, delete access on all campaigns
Access to the leads and contacts you’re marketing to
Access to create reports and dashboards
Access to any record types that you need
3. Create Campaign Record Types
Campaign record types are a way to segment your campaigns in Salesforce, like for different business units or teams. Chat with your team and decide if you need to create campaign record types and what they should be.
When you enable Connected Campaigns, it will take all campaigns associated with that record type and bring them into Pardot on a list. If you don’t want every single campaign coming over to Pardot, you’ll want campaign record types to help you tell Salesforce what should stay and what should go.
4. Build Out Your Campaign Hierarchy in Salesforce
In Salesforce, reference your master template to help you build your campaigns with the proper child and grandchild campaigns using your naming convention and appropriate nesting. Make sure that any campaigns you currently have in Pardot that you want to continue to use or need to report on are in Salesforce. When you enable Connected Campaigns, you’ll always need a 1-1 relationship with Salesforce and Pardot campaigns.
TIP: Let’s say you were using a stand alone campaign in Salesforce and now want to add a parent campaign to it. The data you currently have on that campaign will not automatically roll up to that parent you just created. Moving forward, any new data for that campaign will roll up to the parent, but it’s not retroactive to the time when it was an orphan campaign.
5. Reorganize Your Pardot Assets Into the Proper Folders
Now go back into Pardot. Be sure you build out your folder structure in Pardot to mimic your campaign hierarchy. It also is helpful to add in some admin folders to organize master lists, automation rules and templates as well as a media library folder for icons, logos, etc. These folders won’t be part of your campaign hierarchy, but will allow your team to easily find assets they’ll use often when working on projects.
6. Update Your Pardot Assets
Now it’s time to go back to the start date you chose with your team and update all assets in Pardot so they are in the proper folder, assigned to the corresponding campaign and are updated with the correct naming convention. Be sure to include lists, dynamic content, custom redirects, and anything else in Pardot that you are using for a campaign/project.
TIP: Create a legacy folder to put any Pardot items that didn’t make your cut-off date. This is especially helpful if you don’t currently have the time to organize and delete old files and assets. In doing this, when navigating to Pardot Folders, you have a home screen that’s clean and simple with a list of your Parent Campaigns and Admin folders.
Enabling Connected Campaigns
1. In your Pardot account, navigate to Settings by hovering over the grey cog.
2. Click Edit, then scroll down until you see Connect Campaigns and click the plus sign.
3. Now you’ll see a bunch of checkboxes. Here’s what to do with them:
Enable Connected Campaigns and Engagement History - You earned it, click this!
Enable Campaign Member Sync - Click this, it’s for mapping.
Checking this off will bring the campaign members from a Pardot Campaign you choose to a Salesforce Campaign. So if you have, for example, 100 prospects in a Pardot campaign and you’re mapping it to a Salesforce campaign with 25 of those prospects, when you make the connection those remaining 75 prospects will get brought over to Salesforce with a status connected.
Important note: In order for a Pardot campaign member to be revealed in Salesforce, it must be assigned to a user and that person must be a user in both Pardot and Salesforce.
Use Salesforce to manage all campaigns - Don’t click this yet! First you will want to map everything, we’ll come back to this later.
Show unconnected campaigns in Pardot Campaigns tab
If you have Pardot Lightning enabled, you might see this one. Inside of Pardot Lightning you’ll have some extra tabs that show campaigns that you didn’t map. My suggestion is click this one, it often becomes useful, and at the very least doesn’t hurt.
Campaign record types enabled for connection
All of your campaign record types will be listed here and I talked about this earlier in the post. Click on all the record types you want to come into Pardot. Do not check the ones that you don’t want in Pardot.
4. Next, stay in Pardot and navigate to Marketing > Campaigns. You’ll be given 3 options:
1) Connect campaigns with excel
2) Bulk connect Pardot Campaigns to new Salesforce Campaigns
3) Connect individually
I suggest choosing the first option as it’s the easiest way to do the mapping. If you’re curious to try Connected Campaigns with one campaign to see how it all works as a test, you can choose number 3, and then go back to number 1 later when you’re ready to map all your campaigns.
Follow the instructions and you’ll map your campaigns together, which will now be easy for you since you’ve already done the heavy lifting of organizing Pardot and your Salesforce campaigns and using naming conventions that line up.
Once your mapping is complete, go back to Settings, click edit and scroll down to Connect Campaigns to open up that list of checkboxes. Now you can check that final checkbox “Use Salesforce to manage all campaigns.”
5. Congratulations, you’ve done it!
Now, put it to good use!
You’re now officially on your way to maximizing your technology, streamlining your processes and making forward progress within marketing and sales.
You are now only creating campaigns inside of Salesforce and they will magically appear for you in Pardot. Be sure you set your Salesforce campaign to “active” in order for it to show up in Pardot.
Also use the date fields to choose start and end dates for each campaign. This allows you to filter by date in your reporting.
Once you create a campaign in Salesforce, go into Pardot and navigate to Marketing>Campaigns. Toggle to Connected Campaigns in the drop down menu to find your newly created campaign and use the cog to edit and add it to the proper folder in Pardot. You can then start adding assets for your project to that folder, which will all be tied to the same campaign.