An innovative approach to marketing reporting is essential for businesses to make the best data-driven decisions. It’s no longer enough to simply collect and analyze data; marketers must be able to effectively communicate their findings to key stakeholders in efficient formats that make the analysis more productive.
By using the right technologies and techniques, organizations can streamline their most important marketing metrics to focus on what’s truly important, automate reports to save time and increase efficiency, create custom dashboards for real-time insights, use data visualization to bring findings to life, and use storytelling techniques to create a compelling narrative around key business data.
To that end, here are five ways to boost your marketing reporting and take it to the next level:
1) Real-time insights
Arguably more than any other business area, marketing needs to make decisions on the go. In that sense, reports with real-time data can turn into a huge competitive advantage. Having real-time insights at their fingertips enables the marketing team to spot any performance issues within campaigns and optimize them before the entire budget for the campaign is spent. This will not only make the marketing department way more efficient but will save money by avoiding seeing the negative results of a campaign when it is too late to fix it.
2) Marketing dashboards
Traditionally, businesses use tools like Excel or PowerPoint to generate their reports. While there is nothing wrong with these tools, their static nature makes them less efficient when it comes to the agile decision-making environment of the marketing department. In that sense, a marketing dashboard is a way better option. These analytical tools provide a centralized view of a business’s most important marketing KPIs in a visually appealing way. Plus, dashboards are interactive, meaning all charts can be filtered to answer any questions that might arise in the data. If you want to see these tools in action check out these 17 marketing reports examples using dashboards.
3) Report automation
As we already mentioned, the marketing department needs to move fast. With so many strategies and promotions to develop, dedicating countless hours to report generation becomes a tedious task. For that reason, relying on report automation is key. It will not only give the team access to real-time insights without the effort of generating a report, but it will also save them countless hours of manual work that can be dedicated to other tasks. Plus, by eliminating manual work you also significantly reduce the risk of human error in report generation.
4) Multiple data sources
It might seem like an obvious point but many businesses still fail in their marketing reporting efforts because they don’t use enough data sources or the correct ones. Your marketing efforts will likely be directly tight to general company goals. For that reason, integrating KPIs from other departments such as finances and sales, and comparing them with your marketing KPIs can provide a 360-view that will lead you to make smarter strategies.
5) Brand-focused design
Rather you are presenting to your manager or a client, branding your reports is another way in which you can boost the reporting process. Using the colors, logo, font, and other branding elements of the business or client is a great practice that will make reports more engaging. When visuals look familiar, audiences tend to be more open to receiving new information, therefore, your analysis process can go a lot smoother.
As you’ve learned from these 5 tips, innovation is key to excelling with your marketing reporting efforts. If you implement a couple of these innovative best practices, you will skyrocket your marketing analytics process.
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