How to Create a Campaign in Salesforce

I work in a mid-size organization that uses Salesforce CRM. Recently, we launched a new software product aimed at small businesses.

To successfully introduce this product to the market, we need to arrange a campaign that will generate leads and educate potential customers.

Here, I will explain the campaign object in Salesforce and then show you how to create a campaign in Salesforce. Additionally, I will give an overview of the objects related to the campaign object in Salesforce and how to add leads and contacts to the campaign.

Table of Contents

Campaign in Salesforce

Salesforce campaign is a feature that allows us to manage, measure, and analyze advertising initiatives. It provides a platform for organizing multiple marketing initiatives, tracking their success, and understanding their impact on sales.

Creating campaigns in Salesforce is essential for arranging and controlling all marketing operations in a single platform. It allows us to track leads, calculate ROI, and segment audiences for targeted conversations.

Salesforce campaigns can improve collaboration between marketing and sales teams by providing specific information about lead engagement, automating follow-ups, and providing accurate data.

This streamlined strategy ensures that your marketing operations become more efficient, data-driven, and scalable as your organization grows.

Create a Campaign in Salesforce

We will see how to create a campaign in Salesforce using the following steps.

1. To create the campaign, we need to navigate to the campaign object. To do that, go to the application where the campaign object is present, or you can search for it directly on the App Launcher.

2. Then click the New button to create the campaign.

3. Now, we need to fill in the information in the campaign fields. In the following table, I have explained the details of the fields:

Field Name	Description
Campaign Name	Provide a name for the campaign.
Active	If you checked the checkbox, that means it’s an active campaign.
Type	Select what type of campaign you will conduct, like a webinar, conference, or trade show.
Status	It means your campaign’s current status, such as planned, in progress, or aborted.
Start Date	Campaign start date.
End Date	Campaign end date.
Expected Revenue in Campaign	How much revenue are you expecting from this campaign? Enter that amount.
Budgeted Cost in Campaign	Total budget set for this campaign.
Actual Cost in Campaign	The actual amount spent on the campaign
Expected Response (%)	Enter the number of responses you are expecting from this campaign.
Num Sent in Campaign	How many have you invited for this campaign?
Parent Campaign	If this campaign is part of other campaigns, mention the name of that parent campaign. It is a lookup field with a self-relationship.

After filling in the information, click the Save button.

4. As you click the details of the created campaign record, you will see some extra fields with zero values. These are rollup summary fields of the campaign object, which display the values of related objects.

In the following table, I explained the information about these rollup summary fields:

Field Name	Description
Leads in Campaign	It shows how many leads you invited for this campaign.
Converted Leads	It shows how many leads get closed-converted to accounts or contacts.
Contacts in Campaign	It shows how many contacts you invited for this campaign.
Responses in Campaign	How many contacts responded to you from this campaign?
Opportunities in Campaign	How many opportunities/deals did you get from this campaign?
Won Opportunities	Opportunities you sell a product, i.e., closed-won opportunities.
Value Opportunities in Campaign	The expected amount you will get from opportunities.
Value Won Opportunities	The actual amount you got from closed-won opportunities.

5. Then, as you click the Related tab of the created campaign, you will see the information related to this campaign.

In the following list, I provide information about related objects.

Campaign Hierarchy: Multiple campaigns can be under a single campaign. When you create a new campaign and select the New Software Launched campaign as the parent campaign, the campaign hierarchy displays 1. Like this, the child campaigns you generate from this parent campaign, the more you will see the number in the campaign hierarchy-related list.
Attachments: You can upload images or documents related to this campaign.
Opportunities: Here, you will see the related opportunities of this campaign. The more opportunities you add, the more that number will reflect on the opportunities in the campaign field on the detail page.

6. Campaign Members: Campaign members are the leads and contacts in Salesforce. We can invite leads and contacts for the campaign by clicking the Add Leads and Add Contacts buttons.

As you add more leads and contacts, the number will be reflected in the campaign’s leads and contacts fields, respectively, on the campaign record’s detail page.

I added three leads and two contacts here, so the campaign member list will show 5. We can import leads and contacts in the campaign member in Salesforce.

Add Leads and Contacts to a Campaign in Salesforce

7. Click the Add Leads button from the campaign member-related object to add leads to the campaign. Then, you will see the Add Leads to Campaign UI. Select the leads you want to invite for this campaign and then click the Next button to proceed.

8. You will see the number of selected leads. Then, you need to choose which Campaign you are inviting these leads to so that the number of leads you invited will display in the leads field on the detail page of the selected campaign record.

9. Then, we need to select Member Status, which has two options: Sent and Responded. When inviting leads, we need to select the “sent” option, and then update the status to “Responded” upon their response.

Then select the Overwrite member status option to update the existing member status and click the Submit button.

Similarly, add contacts to the campaign, follow the same steps by clicking on the Add Contacts button.

Change Status as Responded

10. When a campaign member responds, and you want to change the status, go to the campaign member, select the contact or lead who responded, click the Update Status button, select Responded in Member Status, and click the Save button.

Convert Leads in Salesforce Campaign

11. When a lead is interested in becoming a customer, you need to convert it to a closed-converted lead. The converted leads are saved as account, contact, and opportunity object records.

12. Now, you can see that all rollup summary fields in the campaign record have values. In the following list, I explained how we got value in these fields:

We invited three leads from the Add Leads (campaign members).
Then, we converted one lead into a customer.
Then, we added three contacts.
We got one response from a campaign member.
Then, we created three opportunities.
We sell products to one opportunity, which means we have one closed-won opportunity.
When we created three opportunities, we entered the expected amount, which is the sum of the three amounts we got here.
The opportunity we got as closed-won for that sum is reflected here.

This is how the campaign object works in Salesforce.

This way, we can create a campaign in Salesforce by adding opportunities, leads, and contacts to the campaign object.

Conclusion

I hope you have an idea about the campaign object in Salesforce. I explained how to create a campaign in Salesforce and gave an overview of the related objects, as well as how to add leads and contacts to it.

Then, I explained how we could convert leads to display the converted leads, won opportunities, and the amount we get from won opportunities, which we could compare with the expected revenue and actual cost spent in the campaign.