What reports should your marketing department be producing?
There are thousands of articles available online about the building and implementation of your marketing strategy. But what do you do after you have implemented the strategy? How do you analyze and present the performance of your marketing strategy?
There are multiple options in which you can keep a record of the performance, analysis and details of your marketing strategies and initiatives. The most common and efficient is making a report. A report is equal parts comprehensive and concise. These reports are more generally used to understand and present any step taken in a business setting. This blog is focused on understanding the needs of making a marketing report and determining what types of marketing reports to focus on.
There are multiple types of reports that can be made to present and record all the different types of marketing practices and steps involved in developing a marketing strategy. Here are a few of the reports that you as a marketer should mostly focus on: General marketing report, Search Engine marketing report, Digital advertising report, Email marketing report, Content marketing report, Campaign reports and Ecommerce reports.
General Marketing Report
General Marketing Report is an overall picture of all the marketing activities under the umbrella of the marketing department in your company. This report presents all the activities combined together and a short outlook on each. The aim of this report is to identify successful or inefficient marketing strategies and justify the investment in terms of returns. ROI (Return on Investment) is one of the most important metrics in a business. The investment that a company puts in marketing should be justified and profitable. This report does exactly that and gives a brief overview of every marketing activity.
Search Engine Marketing report
Search Engine Marketing report deals with all metrics related to the search engines, like the rank of your website, pay per click and factors relevant to them. This report presents a detailed description of all the efforts that had been taken in terms of paid or unpaid advertisements and Search Engine Optimization. It traces a footprint of the businesses’ website on the online space and how the online marketing strategies that are concerned with search engines performed, both organically and paid. The pay per click advertisements also include heavy investments from the company, so it is important to analyze its performance and ROI results.
Digital Advertising reports
Digital Advertising reports deals with a wider spectrum of marketing efforts that are undertaken. The report puts data analytics metrics from these advertisements into one place. If your business puts a substantial chunk of investment in digital advertising for example, display ads in popular websites or shopping portals, it is necessary that your marketing departments make this report in regular intervals. This report would help you prove the usefulness of these efforts and justify the investment from the company. It would provide a break down on each and every advertisement that has been put up by the company, helping marketers understand which advertisements are receiving the most attention and generating profits.
Email Marketing reports
Email Marketing reports deal with a very specific part of a company’s marketing portfolio. Email marketing has become very important for every business in this time. Every company invests at least a percent of their total marketing budget and time in email marketing. These campaigns help businesses follow up with their customers and even attract new ones. The report for email marketing includes metrics like open rate, close rate, reply rate, visits from the button in the email, etc. These performances are then evaluated and a decision is made to keep working with the existing email marketing campaign or formulate a new one.
Content marketing report
Content marketing has been a relatively newer concept in marketing analysis, but it certainly is a very important one. The difference that a good content marketing campaign can make is indispensable. A content marketing report deals with all channels of content marketing that the business does. For example, videos, photos, blogs, etc. This report is a comprehensive discussion of the metrics that determine the company’s performance in their content marketing initiatives. These metrics include, engagement, insights like the demography of followers and growth in followers, etc. These factors majorly impact brand awareness and thus, sales of the business. So, a content marketing report provides good recommendations and analysis for the marketing department.
Every marketing campaign is run keeping in mind its specific set of goals, targeted audience and timeline. It is impossible for one report to summarize every campaign in it. Hence, the marketing department should produce single reports for each campaign in a detailed and focused manner. This report includes key performance indicators like ROI, impressions, engagement rate, etc. Which makes it easier for those who are reviewing the performance for this campaign.
Each business that provides any product or service requires an online presence. This online presence complements consumer convenience. Almost every commercial website has some sort of description or purchase option online. Hence it becomes crucial to keep in track the Ecommerce performance from time to time. The Ecommerce report is a detailed and quantified version of the ecommerce activities the business does. The report includes important metrics like, sales revenue, CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), ROI, etc. These metrics are considered to measure the overall sales performance of the company, making it a very important report to generate.
These reports are a good way of presenting the performance of any business. But it takes a deep understanding and knowledge when trying to interpret it. To align the marketing initiatives with business goals and understand relevant changes that should be implemented are some of the challenges. So, making these reports from time to time would stimulate business growth and also increase the marketing team’s and businesses’ ability to connect factors together into a meaningful picture of marketing strategies.
Author – Ishita Jain
