Increase Efficiency (and Save Time) with 6 Insightful Marketing Reports
After hours of strategizing and perfecting your marketing campaign, there’s only one thing left to do; sit back and work on the next one, right? No, this is something we see every single year and it leads to millions of wasted dollars. If you aren’t keeping an eye on your marketing efforts, you could end up with six different failing strategies.
1. Why EVERYBODY Should Track Marketing Campaigns
By following specific KPIs and metrics, we get an insight into why campaigns were successful, or why they failed. Seeing success is wonderful, but we need to learn why a campaign did well if we’re ever to emulate it in a future campaign. On the other hand, we need to see the exact reasons why a campaign didn’t work. If we don’t learn these lessons, it’s easy to continue making the same mistakes.
Along the way, performance reporting also allows us to pick up things that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. For example, the difference between poor traffic and poor conversion. It isn’t enough to know that sales haven’t increased, we need to know why.
- Scenario #1 — In the first case, website traffic data is telling you that traffic is down. If people don’t visit your website, the flow stops abruptly, and you don’t even get the chance of converting visitors into customers.
- Scenario #2 — On the other hand, thousands and thousands of people are visiting your website on a weekly basis. Yet, this is not reflected in sales and subscribers. In this case, looking at the bounce rate may tell you that the average stay for a visitor is 11 seconds. Now, you’ve identified the problem and can look into why people are leaving so quickly.
By tracking marketing campaigns, we learn from both success and failure in order to increase the effectiveness of all future campaigns.
2. KPIs vs Metrics
When in this area, you’re likely to see both of these terms mentioned, but are they the same? No, there are actually key differences.
- KPIs — Short for Key Performance Indicators, examples include conversion rate and lead-to-customer ratio. Essentially, the idea is to assess whether your campaigns are progressing towards set objectives. For the most part, they cover three areas: sales, conversions, and leads.
- Metrics — With metrics, it’s possible to dig deeper into why a campaign is doing well or why it’s failing. Therefore, we’re more interested in the time spent on each page, bounce rates, and the number of pages visited by the average visitor.
3. Do’s and Don’ts of Tracking
Before we move into our six insightful marketing reports, we first want to provide some do’s and don’ts on how to track your digital marketing campaigns.
DO: Take Advantage of Proper Tools — Before anything else, get your website and social media platforms set up for tracking with tools like Facebook Pixels and Google Analytics. After placing a code or tag on your website, everything is tracked, and you’ll receive an overview of traffic and various other metrics.
DON’T: Ignore the Signs — Taking the first step to tracking is brilliant, but you can’t then ignore discrepancies and issues when they arise. Even when problems seem small, they can quickly escalate into long-term trends so deal with it immediately.
DO: Be Honest — If a campaign isn’t performing as you’d like, honesty is ALWAYS the best policy. When devising a performance report, use accurate figures and start working towards a solution. Whether dealing with a boss or a client, it’s better to admit to problems and get in control of the situation than let it snowball.
DON’T: Get Lost in Numbers — After first opening Google Analytics and seeing all the different data points, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and then lose hours assessing campaigns from dozens of angles. Instead, try to take a step back and remember your goals and the big picture at all times.
DO: Remember Offline Marketing — Sometimes, there can be increases in traffic without any changes or improvements to online strategies. In these circumstances, remember that there’s a world away from the internet too. Could it be an outside influence?
DON’T: Waste the Opportunity — With lots of different data points, don’t waste this opportunity by lumping together several metrics in order to improve the perceived success somewhat. Be specific and only combine metrics and data points when it adds to the report.
4. Six Insightful Marketing Reports
When starting with marketing tracking, it’s difficult to know where to begin to compile performance reports. We have six examples below -
Channel-Specific Traffic
Familiar to those on HubSpot, this is a performance report based around channel trends. Where are visitors originating? By understanding the source of your website traffic, you can move forward in one of three directions;
- Invest more money into the performing platform to continue pulling these visitors in
- Invest more money into the other channels to try and bring them onto a par with the performing channel
- Invest money into both
On platforms like HubSpot, it takes seconds to view the sources graph. However, not many people are aware that this is customizable. You can pull data from the whole database, from a particular demographic, or whatever else you need.
New Contacts (Persona)
As marketers, we all understand the importance of creating a buying persona. As well as understanding our audience, we need to know how many people with the same persona are being added to our database. Sticking with HubSpot as an example, we recommend plotting all contacts by creation date. From here, you can break it down by persona.
Even if you look at this once a month, it helps with resource allocation as the different areas of the business grow.
Revenue Reporting
How successful are your marketing investments across different channels? With this knowledge, you know where to focus future investment. On your chosen software, pull the revenue data for your contacts and see which channels are performing and which channels aren’t. However, don’t solely rely on revenue reporting because poorly-performing channels may still contribute. Sometimes, it’s a combination of channels that lead to sales while only the first point of contact gets credit.
Leads by Offer
As well as what channels perform, we also need to know what content draws people inwards. Especially for those heavy on inbound marketing, you might notice that webinars are much more effective (both money and time) than whitepapers. Elsewhere, product reviews might generate more interest than industry news.
The more you understand about your content, the more you can shape all future content creation to what the consumer needs and wants.
Blog Leads Report
Not only does a good blog generate more traffic, but it also brings in leads. Therefore, an overview of your blog’s performance will never be a bad thing. How well is content performing? How do people find our blog? Where should we spend our time in the future? After learning which channels bring the most attention to the blog, you have the same three options as earlier — invest more in performing channels, invest more in failing channels, or concentrate on both.
Contacts (Lifecycle Stage)
The final performance report we recommend reviewing is how each contact appears by the lifecycle stage. While some businesses will need to concentrate on bringing more leads into the company, others will find that closing all current leads is more important. As you assess the leads you generate by each lifecycle stage, you’ll learn which stage of the funnel needs the most attention.
5. Perfect Monthly Performance Reporting — Automation
When producing a monthly report of trends, channel performance, or any other area, we believe there are a handful of key features
- A summary page
- Details on the existing marketing strategy
- Conversion metrics
- Traffic metrics
- Overview of SEO
- Leads generated by the blog
- PPC campaigns
- Overview of social media performance
- Goals for the next period
- Ideas and strategies for the coming weeks
- Projections
Fortunately, there are now wonderful tools online ready to help with our marketing reports. These days, technological innovations in machine learning mean that we can gather insights and make sense of the sheer amount of data presented to us. Rather than wasting hours, why not work with these automated solutions?
Even for those on a budget, they’re affordable enough to make the small investment worthwhile. The tools take care of the data, and you and your team can focus on more important matters. Why not improve efficiency today with this small step before the competition?
Bonus! Marketing Tools:
2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights
