All marketing actions must be measurable. When your management asks you for results, you can do what most people do: prepare a long, huge Excel spreadsheet across five different sheets… long and boring. Today, we’d like to introduce you to the ultimate document: simple and effective, the marketing report (ps: you’re going to enjoy reporting)
In this article, we give you our tips for creating a flawless report—your management will love it!
A marketing report allows you to track your performance. This document gives you an overview of all the relevant data for your marketing strategies. This resource should be intended for your management, but also for yourself. You will know where to focus your future efforts. For your management, you will be able to justify your marketing actions by clearly and measurably showing their impact (just to make sure everything is running smoothly?).
The steps to create a marketing report
The ideal frequency for producing marketing reports
Some bonus tips for setting up an effective marketing report
The steps to create a marketing report
All reports are different, but here are 5 necessary steps to create a complete report. ✅
Adapt your reports
Whether it is to measure the return on investment for your management or to analyze the performance of your actions, it is necessary to customize your document. Your management will probably be interested in the financial impact, while you will pay more attention to the technical impact. In both cases, your report will be beneficial for your decision-making.
Identify your KPIs
By defining your objective, you can identify the performance indicators you will need for your report. As you know, there are thousands of KPIs. Let’s focus on the KPIs that are useful for your marketing reports.
Which KPIs should you choose for your marketing reports
Social media performance
? Engagement rate
? Number of new followers
? Organic and paid posts
? Return on investment of paid campaigns
Website performance
? Website traffic
? SEO / SEA
? Traffic sources to the website (SEA campaigns, Social Ads, social media)
Marketing campaign performance
This may include the use of special offers
? Newsletter
? SMS
? MQLs, or marketing qualified leads, allow you to assess whether your marketing strategy has enabled you to generate interest.
?Return on investment of the software used
All these KPIs are only suggestions; it’s up to you to choose which ones are the most relevant for your marketing reports.
Collect and organize your data
Collect the data necessary for your report from your various tools.
? For your website, use suitable analytics tools to track performance, especially for SEA.
? For your social media, use tools to analyze organic posts or those run as Social Ads.
? For your marketing campaigns, get the necessary information through your marketing software. This makes it possible to analyze your newsletters, SMS campaigns, etc.
Then centralize all this data in your reporting tool or in a file, such as a presentation, for example. Organize it and present it in the form of charts for clear and effective visualization.
Present and analyze the results of your marketing actions
This is the most crucial part of your marketing report: interpreting and presenting the results you obtained from the data collected. Start by structuring your presentation by highlighting the information that is most relevant to the objective of your report.
Our tip: create a single template and duplicate it according to the number of sections you need to cover.
Given the diversity of marketing actions, each team uses specific indicators. Community managers evaluate the performance of their social media posts (impression and engagement rates). People responsible for email campaigns measure the effectiveness of their actions (open and click rates). As for the team that manages the website, they analyze website traffic (sources, number of sessions) to optimize SEO.
As you will have understood, if the objective of your report is to analyze the performance of your email campaigns, it would not be relevant to include an analysis of your social media. (It’s up to you to adapt your reports according to your analysis topic).
⚠️ It will sometimes be interesting, or even obvious, to include analyses that concern other departments (other than marketing), such as information on the performance of the sales department. This will allow you to see how the leads generated by your marketing actions were handled by the sales teams and to understand their results.
- Number of MQLs
- Number of SQLs
- How many additional customers?
Thanks to this analysis, you will be able to refine your conversion funnel and improve the synergy between marketing and sales.
Then compare the results obtained with the objectives you had set for yourself:
- What % ROI was achieved?
- What actions were taken?
- What are the future actions?
? If you have reached or even exceeded your objectives, highlight what worked well.
? If the results are below expectations, identify the possible reasons, such as a lack of budget or a strategy that was not sufficiently developed.
By interpreting your results, you will be better able to understand which marketing actions contributed the most to achieving your objectives. I also recommend adding suggestions for your future reports, in order to continuously improve your performance.
Create an executive summary
To present your results, I recommend setting up an executive summary. Hmm? ? What does that really mean? This resource is a summary of all the important information and data present in the marketing report.
It’s ideal for your colleagues who don’t have the time to read your report in detail. ? This way, you provide them with the most relevant information in a simplified format.
The ideal frequency for producing marketing reports
You can create reports at different frequencies :
?Weekly: useful for individual assignments
?Monthly : ideal for analyses presented to the whole team
?Quarterly : perfect for analyzing the initial results of marketing campaigns
?Annual : ideal for analyzing the actions you implemented throughout the year and for defining the objectives for the year ahead.
Some bonus tips for setting up an effective marketing report
Include an action plan
By integrating an action plan into your marketing report, you ensure that the recommendations do not remain unimplemented. This plan, which details the steps to follow and the indicators to monitor, makes it possible to turn your analyses into concrete actions and measure their effectiveness over time.
Continuously improve your reports
A marketing report is not fixed. It must evolve according to your new objectives, the tools, or the data collected. I therefore advise you to continually improve your reports. This allows you to always have an up-to-date view of your marketing performance. I also suggest modifying your reports once a year, or with each new objective. You can also adjust them when making financial investments, for example in new tools, in order to measure their effectiveness.
Webmecanik Automation for your marketing reports
Using Webmecanik Automation allows you to analyze in detail all the results of your campaigns implemented via the software. The reports are directly integrated into the platform. This gives you a complete and centralized solution for managing and optimizing your marketing campaigns. ?
