Marketing reporting: how to do it?

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What is a marketing report?
Marketing reporting is the activity that consists of evaluating and measuring the actions carried out by the marketing department manager and his team through the use of different KPIs or performance indicators.

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Even the most successful marketers face a challenge: they need to make sure their marketing team is taken seriously within their company.

For this, it is essential to publish a complete, thoughtful and quantitative monthly report on the impact of their missions.

Marketers have always struggled to demonstrate the impact of their actions. Nevertheless, it is now very easy to collect the necessary data and rely on the right reports to show how marketing investments are generating revenue for the company.

How to make a good marketing report?

Meeting a dual objective

The first issue directly concerns the marketing manager and his teams. Indeed, measuring the performance of the actions carried out makes it possible to determine the improvements to be put in place to increase the impact during the next campaigns.

The second objective is to report to Management on the return on investment of the actions implemented. Reporting helps to make strategic and financial decisions in the short and medium term.

Highlight successes

Marketing reporting should always begin by highlighting the highlights of the period under analysis. We must not forget that the main objective is to convince of the relevance of the marketing actions undertaken. For this, it is better to start the presentation with positive elements.

Choose the right KPIs

Obviously, the choice of performance indicators is a key step in the construction of marketing reporting. It is imperative to choose relevant KPIs for the company at the risk of providing an inappropriate report, not reflecting the quality of the actions carried out. Some questions can be useful to determine these KPIs:

• What are the objectives of today's and tomorrow's marketing strategy?
• What could justify the success of the actions undertaken?
• What types of data would measure this success?
• What would be the consequences of using this or that indicator?

Be clear and concise

A good marketing report should not span dozens of slides, but focus on the essentials. The ideal is to present an action by slide, divided into 3 parts: its objective, its results (KPIs) and the recommendations for the next campaign.

Which indicators to use in marketing reporting?

The choice of performance indicators is the basis of marketing reporting. Without them, it is impossible to define the level of achievement of the objectives. The most relevant KPIs for your marketing strategy are:

1. Visits by source : This is your top-of-funnel metric. It shows, month by month, how many people come to your site and how they get there.
2. Leads by source : This is the measure of your activity in the middle of the funnel. This report shows how many leads you generate and on which channels.
3. Overview of the funnel : This is an overview of your marketing funnel that shows the 5 most important metrics: visits, leads and customers over time, as well as conversion rates from visitors to leads and leads into customers over time.
4. Paid campaigns and manually generated leads : This report shows how many leads come from paid campaigns and how many come from organic search. If you're looking to create a true inbound engine and minimize your spend, this report will allow you to track your progress.
5. Top blog posts by number of page views : This report allows you to track the content that interests your audience. You can thus refine your blog posts to generate even more traffic, and your marketing strategy as a whole, in order to better reach your target personas.
6. The best landing pages by number of leads : This report shows which offers and landing pages are generating the most leads. It is important to know this data and always test new offers and landing pages in order to create new engines that will generate even more leads.
7. The speed of lead conversion : This report is used to assess the quality of the leads you send to your sales team. If your leads are converting quickly, that means your marketing team is performing well. On the other hand, if the conversion is slow, it is imperative that you adjust your strategy to better bring them to maturity.

What tools to do marketing reporting?

HubSpot is an inbound marketing platform with different software suites, including a powerful marketing reporting tool. The ultra-complete and easy-to-use solution offers more than 90 predefined essential reports such as: transaction forecasts, funnels or sales performance. Plus, with HubSpot's fully customizable sales reports and sales analytics, marketing teams can track their performance in real time.

Pentaho is an open source business intelligence software, with multiple features and totally adapted to small and medium-sized businesses. It makes it possible to carry out classic reports via a global platform for monitoring the main KPIs. Dashboards are customizable and the tool offers the ability to perform multidimensional analyses.

EMAsphere is a decision-making tool dedicated more specifically to the monitoring of financial KPIs. It connects to accounting software, Excel, HR or CRM tools to produce preconfigured and easily customizable dashboards. Reports can be shared smoothly and securely with different members of the company. In addition, the solution makes it possible to make reliable forecasts, thus facilitating decision-making.

MyReport is a complete business intelligence solution adapted to SMEs. The tool, installed locally on a computer or on the company network, relies on its ease of use and user autonomy. MyReport allows in particular to:

Create dashboards directly from Excel Cross-reference data from multiple sources, model them and present them.Automate many basic tasks.

Power BI is a Microsoft-owned, scalable platform that balances data mining with decision-making capability. Each user can access a personalized view of the most relevant indicators and has the possibility of designing and sharing dynamic tables in complete safety. In addition, it has other features ideal for working in corporate mode, via chat, meetings and calendar sharing.

Bime Analytics is the reporting solution par excellence for beginners who do not have specific computer knowledge, in particular thanks to its very ergonomic interface. Accessible in Server mode or in SaaS mode, the tool can be used by any type of business. It is able to simplify the collection, combination and analysis of data from different sources (social networks, CRM, Google Analytics and others).

Monday.com is a complete and powerful reporting tool offering the possibility of producing basic reports, but also more elaborate reports in the form of tables, graphs or diagrams. The application allows you to create personalized dashboards shared between all members of the marketing team. In addition, it is possible to follow the budget and the planning of the tasks in real time.

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