Reporting isn’t hard. Making people read reports is hard.
This is an article I wrote about the worst job I ever had. Reporting on data and whether people liked it or not to a man whose job qualifications was that he emerged roughly twenty years earlier from the vagina of the person who was married to the owner.
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Internet marketing can be as fun or as ridiculously goddamn boring as the content you’re making, the products you’re selling or the people you’re pushing both content and product towards. A big part of doing this for clients is that they expect reports as a part of the overall package that they recieve for trusting you to know what any normal person wouldn’t: How to sell crap to people who don’t need it.
You do your job, and it either works or it doesn’t. Like everything else in the universe, things work on a cycle. Some are measurable, and some are so big that you don’t even realize they’re on a cycle, but they inevitably are. Usually.
This is where you prove your worth — The Report. This can be as nuanced and minutae filled or dead simple as you want them to be. Some people want the shortest route between A and B. Some want to know every unsavory detail about how you got there, what the alternate routes were, and why you got there how you did, when you did, and for what reasons.
So, having been rather successful in working in this world, despite my venomous dislike for it, I’m going to share some tips for those of you who actually want a career in marketing and with that, the ability to explain to the dummies who pay you what you did and why.
First, think of classifications. Dumb little animals. Rats, Lizards, Snakes, etc. They live on a fight or flight reflex. This is fine. It serves them. It’s also the reaction of most people in positions of leadership. They look at your stuff and immediately have a response “I DON’T LIKE IT” within five seconds of you handing a pile of stuff on their desk. This is the Visceral response. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just stupid. It’s the mythologized “gut feeling” and it serves people at times and at others lets them miss the big elephants in the room that they should be paying attention to, data-wise.
Primates, specifically Apes. They’re definitely not stupid little reactionary critters, but they’re not quite on the nuanced level of humans. They can witness behaviors, mimic them, learn by seeing and doing. This is the gap between pests and humans (arguable, sure.) — you can teach someone to know that something is important. The key is knowing how.
Humans. This is what one could call the reflective species. They can take something, look at it, know it’s important and then, hopefully, read between the lines and put things together. See the how and why and when and what and make it click in their heads.
The key to making people pay attention is to pay lip service to all three of these responses. Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective responses are alllll going to happen when you go “Hey, here’s the report you asked for.”
What are people looking for, then? Great question, nobody!
They’re looking for data. More specifically, they’re looking for a fucking story.
What is the data telling you. Why did it happen. What should we do next?
WHAT.
WHY.
NEXT.
Establish context so that they’re just not seeing random bullshit and believing you.
Don’t make them read. Cut out as much as you can. Show them the data and cut out redundant sources of the same data. If they don’t get it the first time, they’re not going to get it the fifth time, either. If the ink on your page, or the pixels on your power-point aren’t data related: LOSE THEM. Revise and edit the shit out of your report until it is air-tight. Use small multiples that are easy to understand. Don’t use crazy neon bullshit colors that make me want to stab my eyes out. Go natural. If you look out the window and don’t see it growing from the ground, flying in the sky or on a human being, don’t bother. That being said, use enough contrast so people can know what is what. The important thing here is to show the differences between the things you’re showing to them. Make it easy. Keep it simple. Get to the point.
Say no to pie charts. I don’t give a fuck if you’re making a pie chart that is a chart of pie that you have eaten and pie you have not eaten, don’t use a fucking pie chart to show the data off. Graphs are so much better for so many reasons. The biggest being that you can see the difference between 3% and 6% so much better on a graph than you can on a pie chart that it’s not even arguable. That should be the closer on that topic, right there.
If you’re showing a lot of things, show them consistently. Act like you’ve been here before and don’t point out things as being more important than other things. They’re all important. That’s why they’re in your stupid little report, otherwise you wouldn’t be following the “edit out redundant stuff” part of my little tutorial here.
Last of all, show trends. All the data in the world can float right over someone’s head and they won’t see if it’s going up or down. Spell it out for them.
This is not a hard profession. Tedious? Yes. Boring? Mostly. After a while you can look at pretty much anything and have a good feeling about whether it is going to hit or not. But, I’m not going to be the guy who says you can know, because if you could, then people wouldn’t hire marketing consultants, because all the marketing consultants would actually be out there making retarded ass amounts of money instead of helping dummies who can’t read reports.
I would make a graph of how many people made it to the end of this but I barely made it to the end and I wrote it. Save the graphs for someone who pays for it.