The Perfect Marketing Report: 5 Things to Include

With hundreds of metrics and KPIs, it could be overwhelming to decide what to include in an ideal marketing report so that it provides marketing leaders and the management with the info that matters to them. There are many things that need to be added to create a perfect marketing report. Let’s deep-dive into all of them. But first,

What is a Marketing Report?

The perfect marketing report provides a cross-section of your marketing efforts and a snapshot of your business. With statistics and feedback analysis, it helps you answer tough questions and check whether your marketing effort is going according to plan.

What Does it Tell?

A marketing report is a marketer’s friend that reminds them of their purpose when they’re lost and helps them justify their marketing expenses. In reiterating the aim and providing a justification, it serves as a compass and barometer of marketing success.

5 Things to Include in Your Marketing Report

1. Goals

Different people measure success differently. Your marketing report must begin with the goals you intend to reach, whether in terms of number of clicks, conversions, or whatever else you use as a metric for the success of your plan. For anyone reading your report, a recap of your marketing goals will provide an introduction to what you set out to do and set the expectation for what the rest of the report has in store. The goals also serve as a point of reference for how far you’ve come.

2. Holistic Marketing Dashboard

A good marketing report must include a holistic marketing dashboard that shows high-level information about different metrics and KPIs. It is immensely useful for giving not only an at-a-glance picture of the state of your marketing but also enables viewers to drill-down to specifics. Charts and graphs around deals won and closures, marketing influence on revenue etc. can add immense value.

3. Website Analytics

While a marketing dashboard provides a macro view of your marketing activities, it must also go into each segment and break it down. Websites are the platform closest to your product and the shortest path between a product and a consumer, much like the narrow road that leads into the driveway of a restaurant. It is essential to keep a close tab on this path and make sure it is unobstructed, well lit, attractive, well-labeled, and free of potholes and anything that will make for a bumpy ride.

One portion of the report should be dedicated to website analytics which contribute significantly to outreach, lead generation, and sales. The report should be able to account for these as well as variables like website traffic, click rate, bounce rate, average time spent on a page etc.

4. Channel Performance

A marketing report must dedicate a section to each marketing channel like paid, email, organic, social etc. The aim here is to not only measure the general performance of each channel vis-a-vis the spend, but also to deep-dive and understand the cost and the ROI associated with each channel. This will show which channels are working well and which ones aren’t. In separating the golden-egged geese from the money pit, you’ll be able to use the report to make important marketing trade offs.

5. The ‘Whys’

The most important part of a marketing report is the ‘whys’. It is imperative that you include an explanation of the numbers, KPIs, anomalies etc. instead of letting things hang. This is where the report starts to make sense and the insights become truly comprehensive. This portion explains what dashboards and charts say, and justifies the marketing decisions made therein. If something is not adding up in the numbers alone, this is the portion where it can be explained with the help of other associated variables.

Summing Up

The perfect marketing report is a matter of precision, brevity, and detail, containing insights from a sea of data compacted into smart data visualization and providing a holistic picture of all the efforts being made towards marketing. The report recapitulates marketing goals, justifies marketing decisions, and helps trace the path for the future of the plan.

Building this perfect report manually can be a task to reckon with, and it is much easier when you have the right tools to facilitate the collection, organization, and visualization of data across all your marketing channels and platforms. While manually, the report could be the result of weeks of toil, the right tool could practically make the report for you in a few minutes in just a few clicks.