Digital Marketing Reporting
Digital marketing has grown to be a complex activity. Aside from creating strategies and tactics that will drive viable results based on specific business goals, marketers must also report their accomplishments and progress to their clients or supervisors on a regular basis.
Monitoring a marketing campaign is vital these days, mainly because the market itself has a tendency to change and shift overnight. If you don’t keep a close eye on these changes, your marketing efforts may be in vain.
That’s why reporting is vital in the digital marketing world. Should a new trend emerge or should consumer behavior and purchasing decisions change even a bit, you must modify your marketing strategies so that you don’t waste both time and resources on marketing that doesn’t work.
That said, marketing reporting isn’t easy. You must carefully craft your report and include every bit of information that will interest your clients or your boss, for that matter. With that in mind, here are a few simple habits that will improve your marketing reporting.
Create a Reporting Strategy
As mentioned before, every marketing strategy is based on specific business goals. These goals can include more website traffic, more conversions, increased social media engagement, an increase in qualified leads and so on.
Determining what to report can be a challenging task, mainly because CEOs and clients want to see results, and they often want numbers. So how do you portray these results to them so that they can understand the progress you’ve made? Simply put, make it a habit to use as many relevant metrics as you can.
Metrics can show results based on previous and current findings, and they can go into great detail if necessary. The more metrics you use, the more understandable your reports will be.
By using metrics regularly, you’ll create a habit of using them in your reports, and you’ll do it all the time. This will help you ensure that your CEO and your client are satisfied and not breathing down your neck all the time.
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Do it frequently
Frequent reporting should be a habit for every marketer. This habit makes you accountable, and it helps you avoid any inconveniences or misunderstandings. So how often should you create reports? That depends on how needy your clients or bosses are.
However, if you want to make sure you’re doing everything the right way, you should consider creating marketing reports on a weekly or at least monthly basis. If you’re wondering that weekly reports are a bit too frequent, they’re not.
The main reason is that you want to avoid any potential mistakes. For example, imagine running a social media or a PPC campaign only to realize that you’ve targeted the wrong audience with your location tags and all the leads that are coming in are the wrong leads, indeed. It’s better to get wind of this mistake after a week than after a month, wouldn’t you say?
Pick the best tool
Creating digital marketing reports manually would be a monumental undertaking for any marketer. It would simply take too much time and effort to create such reports. Fortunately, technology is here to help marketers out in these endeavors. Making the right reporting tools part of your existing tool arsenal should become a habit if you want to improve your reporting.
There are numerous tools available to you that will help you create reports, which is why you must choose the best tool for digital marketing reporting that will suit your every need. So what to look for in such a tool? Simply put, you want your tool to make reporting as seamless as possible.
For example, you should look for a tool that provides a dashboard that will allow you to pull insights and analytics from various metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you’re tracking. This will allow you to generate reports easily in the format of your choosing, which you can later present to your clients or supervisors on a regular basis.
Improve your efforts
Marketing reporting should be considered a continuous improvement activity. Each report you create should give you valuable insight into areas that can or should be improved. However, you have to make improvements a habit first.
The same goes for your marketing strategies. If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it but you can, however, try to expand it. Reporting itself seems like a mandatory task when it comes to digital marketing but the reality is that marketers often neglect this process altogether, or they don’t do it as often as they should.
Even if you don’t have to report to anyone, consider making a habit of reporting to yourself. This will help you become more productive, in general. Marketing strategies can last a long time and you won’t be able to keep up with everything if you don’t have reports as references to your progress.
Improving your digital marketing reporting isn’t always as easy as you may think. It’s just another task in the sea of tasks that demand your attention. However, understanding the importance of reporting is the cornerstone of not just improving your reporting but also for making reporting a habit, to begin with.
Author’s Bio: Jolene Rutherford is a marketing specialist – turned blogger, currently writing for technivorz.com. Interested in digital marketing and new technology trends. Love sharing content that can help and mean to people.
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