Understand Campaigns

Whether you’ve just started marketing with HubSpot or you’ve been using Hubspot for some time, the campaigns tool can help you organize and keep track of your efforts in one place.

The term campaigns may be used with or in reference to other tools outside of HubSpot. Learn more about the differences between HubSpot campaigns and other campaigns. 

What is a campaign? 

In HubSpot, a campaign is an organized, strategic effort to promote a specific goal. The HubSpot Campaigns tool helps you create, manage, and report on a single marketing campaign using multiple assets in one place. For example, you can create a campaign to use social posts and ad campaigns to raise awareness of a new product or an event. 

After setting up your campaign, you can track the performance of these assets collectively or individually in the campaigns tool.

What are campaign assets?

Campaign assets refer to the added content used as part of the organized strategy to market a campaign. Review the full list of assets that can be added to a campaign in HubSpot.

In HubSpot's Campaigns tool, you can organize and tag assets like blog posts, social posts, and more. These assets should all correspond to the campaign and work toward achieving the campaign goal. For example, you can have a series of marketing emails and social posts directed to the same landing page to encourage visitors to sign up for a webinar. 

Strategizing your campaign

Before setting up your campaign, it is recommended to plan your overall campaign goals and how you want to measure the success of your campaign. Use specific and measurable metrics to keep track of your goal attainment. Learn more about campaign metrics.

Some common goals and result pairings include: 

Campaign Templates

If you want to use HubSpot for marketing but don’t know where to start, or what kind of content you want to add to your campaign, you can use one of HubSpot’s campaign templates.

HubSpot currently provides 12 templates to achieve your campaign goals:

• Abandoned cart: target customers that have abandoned their shopping carts and encourage them to complete their purchase with automated emails and ad campaigns. 
• Email drip campaigns: nurture relationships with your customers through automated emails.
• In-person event promotion: attract attendees to your in-person event, such as a conference or trade show through various marketing efforts, such as automated emails, social posts, and ad campaigns. 
• Internal newsletter: inform your team and stakeholders through internal newsletters via automated emails promoting blog posts. 
• Lead generation: attract visitors and generate qualified leads across multiple channels such as emails, ad campaigns, and social posts.
• Loyalty program: encourage customers to sign up for a loyalty program and nurture the relationship between your brand and customers. This campaign uses landing pages, emails, CTAs, social posts, and ad campaigns. 
• Nurture: build customer relationships, increase engagement, and guide prospects toward conversion using emails, ad campaigns, and social posts. 
• Onboarding & welcome: onboard new customers and welcome them to your brand with personalized messages through emails and dedicated website pages.
• Online event promotion: attract attendees by promoting your online event, such as a webinar (through event integrations).
• Product launch: introduce your new products or services using landing pages, emails, CTAs, social posts, and ad campaigns. 
• Product sales: generate sales, increase revenue, and promote your products or services using landing pages, emails, CTAs, social posts, and ad campaigns. 
• Re-engagement: connect and nurture cold leads to encourage renewed engagement and interaction using automated emails and social posts. 

Campaign tasks 

Stay organized and keep track of your campaign. If you have a team, keep track of the progress of your team members. You can also use the Tasks tab in the campaigns tool to keep track of what you need to do. Here are some examples:

• If you’re using a campaign template, a number of tasks will have been created for you. Use the tasks view to check off each task, whether it’s creating a blog post or a new landing page. 
• If you’re managing a team, you can create and assign tasks from the task view. You can also keep track of the progress of the different tasks to keep agile, prevent duplicate work, and optimize your team. 

Campaign calendar 

Within the campaigns tool, you can review each week, month, or day of your campaign. After creating your campaign, it is recommended using the marketing calendar to ensure that you have content consistently published.

During certain months like December, the campaign calendar is especially useful to run events such as an advent calendar giveaway.

In addition to keeping track of you and your team's work, you can use the marketing calendar to share information on the campaign's execution with other stakeholders. 

Additional information

If you're using the campaigns tool for the first time:

• Use templates to get started on your first campaign. If you’re not sure which to use, it is recommended to start with the Lead generation template.
• Use the marketing calendar to ensure that you’re posting content on a regular schedule.

If you want to speed up your campaign management processes: 

• Use the tasks views to keep track of the progress of work across different teams. 
• Use the calendar to take note of key holidays to plan your campaigns. 
• Create your own campaign templates for you and other members of your team to use. 
• Customize the campaigns form for the more important campaign properties. 

Using the campaigns tool 

Here are some essential guides to getting started with campaigns:

• Creating your campaign 
• Associating assets with a campaign
• Track the performance of your campaigns
• Campaign metrics