4 Simple Habits To Improve Your Marketing Reporting (& Results)

As every good marketer knows, setting measurable goals is key to tracking how successful your marketing efforts will be. You may look back at the end of the quarter, month, or even week, but do you know how you’ve reached them?

In modern marketing, you need to be able to give your numbers context; spot trends and correlations.

You know you got to 15,000 visitors a month, but which campaign was the driving force behind this?

Consistent marketing reporting on each and every campaign and tactic will open your eyes to what’s actually helping you reach your goals and what you need to iterate on.

While this sounds easy, it’s not common.

Be honest, when was the last time you looked at all of the campaigns you’ve launched? Do you know how many qualified leads your Twitter posts are pulling or how well your blogs from the past month are performing?

Unfortunately, with limited time and amazing new ideas you’re excited to start, we often forget to go back and analyze our past marketing efforts, but it needs to be a priority.

Comprehensive, regular reporting allows you to stay agile, optimize your marketing efforts, and better achieve your goals because you know what works and what you need to re-evaluate. 

To get you started here are a few tips and tools we use to keep our reporting on track: 

1. Define it in Your Strategies

Saying you’ll remember to do your marketing reporting is one thing, having it documented along with a defined process is another. 

No matter what, every strategy should have a line item stating how you will report on a campaign’s effectiveness, and how it helped you reach your goals. 

With each strategy, plan out exactly what you’ll need to monitor to determine if the campaign was successful.

For example, if your goal is to increase qualified leads, then your strategy needs to include going through the leads that came in and evaluating or scoring them.

At IMPACT we generally track traffic, marketing-qualified leads, sales qualified leads, customers, and conversion rate. Then on a client to client basis, we’ll track even more metrics that make sense for their business or goals. Whether it be blog post views or opportunities in the funnel we’ll make sure we lay that out in our strategies.

We also create an easy to follow scorecard for each client that lays out all of the metrics and compares them to the previous months as well as the year before. This allows for a full overview of what we’re doing and how it’s working each and every month.

By making sure reporting is actionably built into your process, you’ll have no excuse not to do it. It’ll be one of the last things you need to check off to complete the campaign. Without a full report, the task shouldn’t be marked complete. 

2. Make it Part of Your Weekly Tasks

Now that it’s a part of your strategies, make sure you stay on top of it. Adding reporting to your weekly tasks holds you accountable.

Checking weekly may seem like a lot, but it’s only checking in on them. You should save your full analysis for once the campaign is over.

Within our pod, we make we always keep an eye on the marketing dashboard. We’ll reach out via our pod slack channel or discuss it during our stand-ups as to where things stand and if we have any accounts we need to be concerned about.

Checking these important analytics every week helps you know if there’s something that needs to be changed right away, rather than catching it at the end of the month. 

For example, say you’re running a Facebook ad and you realize all of the leads coming in so far are the total wrong audience you can take pause the ad, so you’re no longer wasting money, and go back to determine where you went wrong with your audience or location set-up.

By keeping such a good pulse on everything you’re able to act fast and continue to work towards your goal each and every week.

3. Use the Right Tools

To make this task seem a little less daunting, there’s a ton of tools you can take advantage of. Utilizing different tools will help you see even more analytics and keep them organized and easily viewable.

The first step is determining what tools are best suited for your needs:

• Are you adding a lead magnet section to your homepage? See how many people are clicking on it by adding Hotjar to your site. With this user tracking software, you’re able to record how visitors are interacting with your site as well as add polls to certain pages to see what visitors want from the page or if they feel something is missing.
• Want to know how many marketing qualified leads were created during the quarter? If you’re a HubSpot user, use the HubSpot Reporting Add-on. You can also use it to create a ton of other custom reports to give you whatever information you’re looking for. I recommend making a wishlist of everything you’d like to track and then reaching out to HubSpot to see how you would set this up with your dashboard.
• Want to know if a landing page with testimonials works better than one without? A/B test it with tools like HubSpot, Optimizely, or Visual Website Optimizer (VWO).
• Need overall reporting analytics? Databox can give you full insight into more specific campaigns including analytics from channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter rather than just your CRM. Another cool thing about Databox is that you’re able to view your analytics across any device type and can even set-up notifications via Slack.

While this is only a few of the reporting tools you can use to help they’re definitely a good place to start. Explore a couple options then figure out what works best for the results you’re trying to achieve.

4. Build Your Next Strategy Based on These Results

Insights from your marketing reporting should be the main driving point in your next strategy ideas.

If something is working then expand on it, make it reach even more people, or continue to test it. 

If you notice something not working then either make changes to try again or move onto a new idea. Either way, you’ll be able to build even stronger more accurate strategies that will help you reach or even exceed your goals. 

Key Takeaway

Reporting may seem like an obvious thing that you should be doing, but in actuality, most aren’t doing it as often and as well as they should.

It will be a lot of upfront work to get started, but in the long run, it’s 100% worth the time and effort. You’ll be expanding your reporting and making your strategies better than they’ve ever been! 

Use these tips and tools to help you get started and then let us know how it’s helped you perfect your reporting.