The Best Marketers Can’t Succeed Without the Right Reports

Marketing doesn’t happen without context. We need to understand what we are trying to accomplish.  It also doesn’t happen without measurable goals. We don’t know where we are going or if we have even gotten there without goals. It is the reporting against those measurable goals that shows marketers whether they are delivering more effective campaigns and increasing customer engagement.

This may sound like a simple and obvious marketing task, but having access to the right reporting tools and developing the right tools is key to making this happen. Consider what more effective campaigns means. Defining this with metrics is the first step to determining if the campaigns are more effective. The same is true with increasing customer engagement. What are the measures that show that increase and what kind of report is needed for everyone on a marketing team to understand the results?

Demonstrate marketing success

In some way or another marketing must influence sales. The degree to which that is needed is what marketing success looks like. The amount of revenue that is directly attributable to marketing is often the missing piece in marketing reporting. All marketers want to take credit for sales, and the best way to do that is to develop a reporting framework that showcases the marketing team’s efforts. Consider getting sign-off on these reports with those responsible for sales before the reports are developed and shared. The marketing team can take credit and properly celebrate when goals are met.

Refine your strategies

Digital marketing is not a one time effort, but an ongoing approach to connecting and engaging with customers and to increase company revenue. This means that marketers are always on the lookout for data-driven ways to improve their results. The right reports help marketers analyze customer activity and spot behavioral patterns to understand what works. This way they can do more of that. Reporting can also identify what tactics and activities are not working so they can be retired. No one wants to spend time on campaigns with limited results.

Identify successful emails

When marketers focus specifically on emails, it is the reporting that lets them continue to finely craft them for success. Open rates, click rates, and transaction rate all add up to showcase top-performing emails. There is a difference between a list of numbers in a spreadsheet and a thoughtfully designed report that clearly shows actionable insights. Marketers like these kind of reports because they are more easily interpreted by everyone in the marketing team.

See the entire story

Browsing the web has become a series of tab-hopping. Marketing reporting sometimes feels like that. Every system generates its own reports and marketers have to connect them by building a slide deck, or even worse presenting the results in a spreadsheet. Consider how much easier life would be if all metrics from any system could be collected and displayed in a single reporting interface. When that happens marketers can head out to lunch early because their tools are doing the heavy lifting and they can focus on the strategy and insight.

Marketing reports that show the right data in easy to understand formats keep teams aligned on the same goals. This creates both more successful teams and more efficient teams. And those are the things that keep the boss happy.

This post originally appeared on the Cheetah Digital blog.