How to Do Marketing Reporting

Updated January 12, 2023

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Filling In Your Report Card

Marketing, like any job, is a results-based business. If you’re a marketer, you often have a fairly good idea how your digital marketing campaigns are going. From the work you’re putting in and the results you see, you probably know if you’re on track or not. However, that may not always the case to the rest of your team. According to an Adobe survey 76% of marketers believe the industry has transformed more in the past two years than in the previous fifty. Let’s see if our marketing reporting has kept pace.

So, how do you go about doing marketing reporting?

Set Goals – First thing’s first, if you’re going to report on something you need to have goals. If you’re reporting to your CEO you both need to understand your specific marketing goals and how you can achieve them. Deciding to get 2,000 likes on your Facebook page is great, but what work will that entail? And what will the ultimate business goal? How many people will it take, etc.?  Once you have a plan, it is easier to contextualize your results.

Make Sure You’re Measuring the Right Things – It’s easy to drown in statistics and marketing metrics these days. The important thing is to find out which ones matter to you and your business. As mentioned above, maybe Facebook likes is useful for your business. For many of our clients, they don’t necessarily see a strong correlation between Facebook likes/engagement into sales. Perhaps you want to use Facebook as a customer service interface and therefore raising awareness — either through organic postings or FB ads — is important an important measure. Going back to the goal-setting point, you need to work out what metrics you need to measure. It’s different from business to business and can vary by channel to channel

Know Your Audience – The key with marketing reporting is to tailor your data points. Let’s use Facebook likes as an example; this could be a useful metric for you to judge progress. However, your CEO is more interested in how many website referrals are generated from Facebook. And the VP of Customer Service is probably more interested in how many customer queries were resolved (and comparing those stats month to month). Knowing who you’re speaking to will help you fine-tune your reporting to focus things they really care about.

Include an Overview – Often detailed reports are important in understanding how a campaign is going. You can’t always see ROI instantly from looking at a table with CTR data in it. Especially if you’re reporting up to the C-Suite, management may not have the time, or inclination, to sift through detailed reporting. By providing an executive summary or overview, you can highlight important pieces of data or trends. Plus, it shows you’re focused on the bigger picture and not stuck in the weeds.

Learn to Predict the Future – Once you’ve set up your marketing reporting system, run it over a couple of quarters. You’ll start to see trends and will get more comfortable with anticipating stats. Predicting future performance is often like predicting the weather; eventually, you’ll  notice trends or patterns.

Do you struggle with marketing reporting? Do you think the huge amount of data available to marketers is helping or making things more complicated?

Photo credit – Top: Mark Jensen
Photo credit – Bottom: amboo who?