Properly communicating the importance of a digital marketing strategy is vital in securing new clients and defending decisions about implementation.
Without well-written and effectively designed marketing reports, CEOs and stakeholders may find it difficult to understand the impact of your work. Even the most promising results are meaningless if they aren’t presented concisely and convincingly.
No matter how successful your digital marketing analytics say your campaign was, you’ll need an elegant and engaging marketing report to get your point across.
An effective marketing report has concise objectives and three important components.
Concise Objectives of Marketing Reports
Successful digital marketing is powered by evidence and solid figures. Thanks to data-driven marketing, businesses can make sound decisions regarding their marketing campaigns guided by carefully gathered information.
Data-driven marketing reports need to meet three precise objectives to be effective.
- Track the customer’s journey. Precisely identifying which stage of the customer’s journey your stakeholder’s ideal client is in provides valuable context for your marketing campaign. Without accurate answers to this goal, you could be aiming your efforts at the wrong clientele and waste your efforts.
- Analyze marketing’s Return on Investment. Establishing which strategies are worth your time and resources help refocus your efforts on those that are more successful. Alternatively, you can investigate why particular tactics aren’t returning their investment.
- Align with the Sales Team. Communicating information clearly is the overall goal of a marketing report. By painting a clear picture for the sales team, your report helps bring your departments on the same page. Using your report as a guide, marketing and sales could improve the way they’re implementing a digital marketing campaign.
An excellent marketing report can meet all three objectives. It cannot accomplish these, however, if your report is hard to comprehend.
Components of a Concise Marketing Report
You should be able to render your marketing report to three parts, each with a distinct function. By dividing it into these three components, your stakeholders will be able to understand the report during your presentation.
- This part presents a graphical overview of your report’s most important parts. It should convey the gist of each part at a glance and can be easily read at a moment’s notice. The dashboard often incorporates visual representations, like infographics.
- This is the lengthiest part of the report and provides context and in-depth explanations of results and information the dashboard glossed over. Use concise language with each entry and make them as easy to read as possible.
- This portion acts as an index, containing all data you’ve gathered for your reports, such as the results of analytics software and any surveys. These are the proof to your report’s claims and hypothesis which you’ll use to support changes in strategy and similar decisions.
So what marketing report should you present to C-suites and stakeholders?
If you’re looking at a monthly review progress, you may need to do a performance report to show results. This could be a program channel performance, which shows executives the number of targets you’ve made per channel, the costs, the percentage of targets turning into opportunities, and how long it takes to convert them.
At some point, you’ll also need to present a deep dive into your marketing programs to show your pipeline-to-investment ratio. This tells your bosses what worked and what didn’t.
An effective marketing report is one of the best tools a company can use to improve its profitability. And like every effective tool, putting it together requires skill and dedication. Using this information, you can create a marketing report that speaks for itself.
Metric-Driven Marketing
Connected Culture excels at using collated data to structure effective digital marketing campaigns for our clients.
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