As a marketer, you make important decisions on behalf of your company every day. You use your best judgment when it comes to making these decisions, and you weave in data and metrics when possible. You’re most likely tracking marketing metrics like traffic, leads, and customers. However, that isn’t enough to inform broader marketing decisions. This is where marketing reports come into play. Below, we will go over tips for building a marketing report.
Marketing Reports
Marketing reporting is the process of gathering and analyzing marketing metrics to inform future marketing decisions, strategies and performance. They uncover meaningful data that can help you draw important conclusions and help you meet goals.
They can vary depending on what data you’re reviewing, as well as the purpose of each report. They can assess where your traffic and leads are coming from, what content they interacted with, if/when they converted, and how long it took them to become a customer.
How to Create a Marketing Report
There are plenty of different marketing reports you can run. However, most of them will contain a few of the same elements.
- Title: What is your marketing report analyzing? Whether the report is on a campaign performance, blog performance, or monthly leads, be sure the title of the report shows the intent.
- Reporting period: Your report should reflect a certain time period. This can be a few days, months, or even years. Analyzing your data within a period of time allows you to compare performance to past periods.
- Summary: Your report summary should reflect the key points of your report. This includes wins, losses, and goals for the next reporting period.
You should determine the goal of your marketing report before pulling any data. Once you make this decision, list all of the data that may be relevant. From there, you will have a much better idea of what reports to run and how to use the data.
Marketing Reporting Best Practices
Schedule your marketing reports
Whether you create a recurring reminder on your calendar or set your reports to automatically run, you need to schedule your reports ahead of time. This will help take the guesswork out of when to run your reports and when to send them.
Collect feedback from your audience
When you send out your marketing reports, ask for feedback from your audience. Make sure to try and use open-ended questions so you’re able to get useful feedback. This feedback can help you improve your reports for the future.
Put your most valuable data first
There is nothing wrong with long marketing reports. However, make sure that you place the most impactful data first. No one wants to read an entire report to only utilize the final page.
Visualize your data as much as possible
When possible, include visual data in your marketing reports. It helps your report pack a greater punch, while trimming down the time and effort needed to digest the data. To do this, you can include charts from Excel or screenshots from your reporting tools.