What exactly are insights in marketing reports? Well to answer that I might say that filling your reports with KPIs, graphs and other data visualizations is not everything. More often than not you’ll have to explain this data to your clients in order for them to understand the work that you have done over the previous reporting period, and how these efforts are performing compared to expectations.
With this in mind, including effective insights in your digital marketing reports to complement the data visualizations and metrics is a must for any digital marketing agency.
Let’s take a look at how you can include insights in your own reports:
Types Of Insights
Goals
Taken from the client onboarding meeting, this will often be placed at the beginning of the report to remind the viewer of what was initially agreed upon and what goals are being used to mark performance against.
An example of this would be to obtain 1000 new qualified leads within 3 months by making use of PPC marketing efforts. This would form an introduction for your report and would remain unchanged as long as the initial agreement between your agency and the client remains unchanged.
Summary
This forms part of the introduction of the report and will generally be included alongside the Goals section. What the Summary section adds to the introduction of the report, is a short, to-the-point overview of the performance over the current reporting period.
The Summary can often be paired with marketing KPI’s in the form of scorecard widgets, as this allows you to set the scene for the viewer before you dive into depth in a more in-depth pass.
What this may look like in reality is something along the lines of: Obtained 400 qualified leads for the month of February with the aid of PPC marketing efforts on the Facebook Ads and Google Ads, of which $1000 has been spent so far.
Explanations
Explanations in the form of text can be placed in any area of your report. Where they are most effective is when text is placed right next to, or below widgets that you feel need an explanation in order to aid viewer understanding.
Explanations could be used to explain why a certain metric has performed poorly, what has changed in digital marketing efforts over the previous period to explain the changes in a metric, and what can be expected for future previous periods. Some digital marketers even use this form of insight to highlight the goals these metrics are being marked against, so that it is clear how certain metrics are performing against expectations.
Conclusion
The conclusion will form the last page of your report and serves as an opportunity to once again summarize performance over the reporting period, provide clarity of the efforts that are planned for the next reporting period, and give recommendations and insights to your client on what can be done to improve the results of your digital marketing efforts.
These recommendations may be along the lines of increasing spend, making use of new digital marketing platforms to more easily reach the communicated goals, or even adjusting certain campaigns that are not performing as expected.
It is important to remember that digital marketing is not an exact science and often certain tinkering and testing is needed in order to find a winning recipe for success. That is why this section is so important for delivering quality insights to your client that shape how the relationship between your agency and your client’s brand will continue, and how your digital marketing efforts will be performed.
Email Copy
While using the copy in the email containing your report is not necessarily the most popular form of highlighting insights to your client, it is still a good opportunity for you to highlight a few key points before your client even lays their eyes on the report.
One way that this could be used effectively, is by adding a few bullet points in the text before the link to your report so that your clients, especially those you feel are too busy to read your report properly, can still get an idea of how your efforts have performed against targets and what your recommendations are.
What this could look like is as follows:
Extra Tips
One of the biggest misconceptions for including insights in your digital marketing reports is that all insights need to be in the form of text. Something that is becoming increasingly popular, especially since many agencies are no longer meeting with their clients in person to explain their monthly reports in person, is the use of video insights in reports.
Including a video in a shared report not only allows you to give insights on certain sections of the report to your client in a way that they may better understand, but it also allows you to reinforce the personal side of your business by putting a face to your insights which can go a long way into reminding the client that they are dealing with a person who is giving insights into their specific situation, and not an agency where a client is just a number. While this factor may seem insignificant, it can have a big effect on how your client receives and reacts to the information.
Complimenting this, insights can also take the form of images added to your report, if used correctly! Images are a great way to display visual data next to the actual performance of a metric in the event that it is not possible to display it via a widget in your report. An example of where this would be useful is displaying comparison data for a competitor, such as for post likes, or maybe even highlight the desired goal for a metric in order to better gauge current performance. P.S. On Oviond you can also use our custom scorecard widget to highlight custom KPI values!
Feeling Insightful Yet?
Oviond has a range of features that make adding insights to your reports both easy and aesthetically complimentary! With the use of our text boxes, media uploader, and personalized email automations, Oviond has you fully covered in terms of your client communications and insights.
But that’s not all that we have to offer, we also have a blog bursting at the seams with valuable agency tips and digital marketing tips that will be useful to any agency. Take a look here.
