With trade show season fast approaching, marketers should be well underway for planning their event campaigns. Now feels like the perfect time to raise the question: How do you track ROI on events?
Why does ROI (return on investment) matter? Events and trade shows are a significant spend, and as a marketer, you need to justify this investment. Looking forward, proving ROI is your secret weapon to bumping up next year’s budget.
To be able to say, ‘we made £X amount of profit from event Y’ can be difficult, particularly in B2B with its long sales cycles. However, with best-of-breed tools such as Salesforce and Pardot at our disposal, we can come to these bold conclusions with confidence.
This post will talk about how to begin answering these questions. I will run through some quick tips for prepping your Salesforce and Pardot accounts to accurately and effortlessly track ROI from events and tradeshows.
Matching Marketing Effort with Revenue
As I’m sure you know, won and potential sales revenue are tracked as opportunities in Salesforce. But how do you attribute marketing activity to these opportunities?
This is what Salesforce Campaigns were built for. This feature has got even better now that Salesforce campaigns and Pardot campaigns can be aligned, so you shouldn’t delay starting to use Salesforce campaigns!
Building Your Campaign Hierarchy
Give Campaigns a solid structure for Reporting
How you set up Salesforce campaigns is up to you, but one thing you should definitely make use of are campaign hierarchies. These allow you to structure your campaign records into a hierarchy, and drill down into different aspects of a campaign. By doing this, you can report on each item individually (down to a specific ad or email send!), or roll up to the parent campaign at the top. You can have up to five levels in a Salesforce campaign hierarchy, and how granular you get depends on what sense it makes for your marketing – some organisations may be happy just to know that an opportunity was tied to an event, and some may want to know which email send drove the most revenue. Here is an example of what that could look like:
Important note: Pardot will only attribution campaign influence if the prospect is a Contact Role on the opportunity. See: ‘A Marketer’s Guide to Salesforce Campaign Influence’ for more on Contact Roles and other campaign features.
To explain briefly, if a CEO of a target account not a Contact Role on your opportunity, any engagement with her will not be attributed to closing the deal – meaning that despite meeting with her F2F at Dreamforce (an even you put lots of marketing budget towards) would not get any credit. Make sure this functionality is being used correctly!
Matching Event Leads with Campaigns
Leads are a Salesforce standard object, which are stored in Pardot as ‘Prospects’ (from now on I will refer to Prospects, as Prospects hit Pardot first before becoming Leads). There are many ways you can collect Prospects from events, but how do you ensure they’re being tracked correctly across both Pardot and Salesforce?
For the following scenarios, I’m going to assume you’ve set up campaign alignment with Salesforce. If you haven’t, don’t worry – you can still connect up Salesforce campaigns by using an automation rule to ‘Add to Salesforce Campaign’ based on a Pardot list that you want to push to the Salesforce Campaign. It just means an extra step to remember. The old-style, one-association-only Pardot campaigns will not suffice for ROI tracking: you’ll need to be able to associate prospects with multiple campaigns.
| Source | …how to add to campaign. |
| Scanner | Import list, set campaign for new prospects, use table action to add to campaign for existing prospects |
| Form on e.g. an iPad on your booth | Completion action on form: ‘Add to campaign’ |
| Specific landing pages, e.g. using QR codes | Ensure the landing page is associated to the correct Pardot campaign, and/or include a completion action of ‘add to campaign’ |
| Promo codes | Using promo codes (in custom fields) for online orders, use an automation rule to select those with the relevant value and add them to the correct campaign. |
| Manually add | If your sales reps are manually adding Leads in Salesforce, make sure that they are also being added as campaign members to the correct campaign. |
| Engage with you from pre-event email or online marketing | Completion action on email click, custom redirect, or form/landing page to add to campaign. |
| Engage with you from post-event email or online marketing | Completion action on email click, custom redirect, or form/landing page to add to campaign. |
Summary – a Quick Checklist
- Create campaigns (in Salesforce and Pardot) for each source you want to attribute revenue to
- Use completion actions and other Pardot functionality to automatically associate prospects to these campaigns
- Make sure your sales teams are adding Contact Roles to opportunities
- Identify what your goals and KPIs are for events, and build reports around these
And viola! You’ve proved ROI, and may even have earned extra budget for next year! ☺