It’s amazing what a difference a word can make.
In the marketing world, words such as ‘campaign’ and ‘journey’ can have a multitude of meanings depending on who you are talking to and what type of marketing you are talking about.
This becomes all the more confusing when you are talking about technical ‘features’ within marketing software that have the same names.
Identity crisis
Salesforce and it’s B2B Marketing companion Pardot have suffered from this confusing term syndrome around the word ‘campaign’ since Pardot was acquired by the cloud software behemoth nearly five years ago.
In Salesforce, the ‘campaign’ feature has a very specific meaning and has since the inception of the powerful CRM tool. According to Salesforce, a campaign helps you “Manage outbound marketing campaigns with direct mail programs, seminars, print ads, email, and other kinds of marketing collateral. You can organize campaigns into hierarchies for easy analysis to see what works best for increasing your company’s sales.”
Great! That makes sense…but, marketers who are using Pardot also have a feature called “Campaigns.”
Same thing, right?
Nope. In Pardot, campaigns are thematic touchpoints (similar to “source” in other systems). Pardot campaigns are used to track a prospect’s first touch. A prospect’s Pardot campaign is set when a prospect first hits a Pardot tracked link or Pardot tracking code.
Too much confusion
Two features serving similar – but different – functions in software that hooks together? Every single Pardot client I’ve had over the years has struggled with how to differentiate and use these two features (with the same name) separately.
As a consultant, I dreaded this conversation every … single … time.
Enter the Spring ‘18 release of Salesforce
Salesforce now has a feature in beta that will allow these two worlds to come together and you’ll soon be able to hook your Pardot campaigns into each other to be used as one function.
This will greatly simplify administration of campaigns in the tools and make my conversations about what a campaign actually is much simpler.
Now, Salesforce, let’s talk about that word ‘journey.’