As we have covered many times before – not all reports will be the same, and in many cases, they shouldn’t be. No matter the client, you want to be sure you are addressing your audience and providing the information they seek to make an informed decision. It’s their money at the end of the day – you’re promising to allocate it strategically for them.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when preparing your reports
Use Reporting to Both Enhance Your Value and Accountability
At the end of the day, reports help your clients improve their business and that’s what we all want. But, it also enhances your credibility and value as a firm. With so many metrics in the world of digital, it often becomes a conversation of what you don’t measure, versus what you do measure. The more time you put into it, the more it will show, and the greater your client retention is going to be. Not to mention, these reports hold your firm accountable, too. If you’re slacking, now you know you’re slacking and where to make improvements.
Don’t Just File the Reports Away; Use Them
Your clients aren’t the only ones that need these numbers and analytics. You need them, too, in all of your marketing campaigns and advertising campaigns. You can use the numbers that you organize and report to help you make changes to content, demographics, posting times, etc. Especially if you are checking certain analytics every single day, you are going to integrate that finding into your marketing, which will make your firm more effective.
Keep It Organized with Dashboards or a Program
You don’t have to do all of this by hand either. There are plenty of programs, support tools, and dashboards that make it easy for your teams to understand what they should or should not be reporting, and how they should be reporting it. Using a dashboard makes teams accountable to the certain metrics they need to be supplying daily, weekly, or monthly.
Forecasting Potential
Every business wants to be able to look into the future and make financial predictions and changes. With analytics reporting, you will have a better idea of how a company is doing with a certain ad spend, which will give you more confidence to ask for more money from the client. Using these numbers, your team will be able to forecast results based on spend. That’s why you should always be identifying the goals a client has and working to ensure they are reflected in the agreement. Making this kind of commitment to the client will show them that you care.
Encourage Your Clients to Stick with Metric Goals
By including a goals section in your digital reports, you can hold both yourself and your client accountable to achieving these goals. This can give you leverage if they are questioning how much they are paying or if they don’t want to work with you anymore. Encourage them to stick with their marketing goals even if they start to get fatigued at some point. Back up your encouragement with your forecasting and goal planning.
Reporting is a mutually beneficial arrangement for both the marketer and any business. It’s a benchmark that keeps everyone accountable, knowledgeable, and motivated. There are no justifiable arguments for why digital marketing reporting should be ignored.
With these best practices, you’re now ready to get out there and report as a marketing guru. At the end of the day, digital marketing reporting is the very blood that flows through the veins of a marketing body. It paints a pretty good picture from how well posts and ads are doing, to what is being spent and lost. These reports show brands what else they can do to resonate with their audiences, or perhaps if their predetermined audience wasn’t correct in the first place.
To exist without this kind of reporting is a disservice to you and your client. That’s why it’s time to embrace reporting with open arms. To learn more about digital marketing reporting, check out our ebook: Digital Marketing Reporting Explained.
