ROI is an important metric all digital marketers should understand. It allows you to see the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and helps you better refine your strategy. In our previous blog that you can read here, we gave an overview of what ROI is and why it’s important, plus some handy tools you can use to collect the right information.
However, just calculating ROI is not enough. You also need to know how to present the information to your team members who all want to know different metrics or have a different level of understanding when it comes to marketing. Below we discuss the three most common types of reports a marketer needs to deliver.
Marketing Report
A marketing report is a high-level report with detailed information on all your campaigns and on all aspects of marketing. It should have all the important data a marketer needs to know so you can identify which campaigns worked and which didn’t. With a good marketing report, you can get insights into your audience’s preferences and behaviours, make better decisions regarding your budget and address any weakness in your strategy.
Before creating a marketing report, you should know what information you need, which depends on the types of campaigns you have running, the goals of your campaigns and the platforms you use. Here are some useful information to include in your marketing report:
- Goals such as monthly revenue, website traffic, number of leads and the conversion rate from new lead to customer.
- Website analytics such as traffic, number of unique visitors, source of traffic, visit duration and bounce rate.
- Ad campaign data such as number of leads or conversions, cost per result, conversion rate, number of clicks, etc.
- Work done that includes new campaign launch, new email campaigns, new website content, and so on.
Sales Report
It’s common to have some friction between the sales and marketing team, and often, it’s caused by miscommunication of leads. Sales teams often say that they’re not getting any leads, while marketing teams think that sales aren’t following up on the provided leads they have handed them. That’s why when preparing a report for your sales team, it’s important to highlight information that is relevant to them - often, they don’t care about page view or sources of traffic, they just want leads!
Your sales report should detail the number of leads generated, what leads have been sent to the sales team, who the leads sit with and if they have acted on the leads. To further help you and your team understand your ROI, you can include data such as average purchase value, revenue and profit, and the conversion rate from lead to customer.
CEO Report
The CEO report is usually the shortest of the three reports and contains results-related metrics that drive business outcomes. When creating a CEO report, you should think about your marketing efforts in business terms and include relevant information.
At the end of the day, a CEO wants to know how your marketing efforts have influenced a change in sales or revenue; ie. the ROI. It’s also worth noting the lifecycle of a customer and the lifetime customer value. Leave out all the website traffic data and focus on dollar value, and how your marketing efforts have played a part in achieving business goals.
You can also provide an analysis of your data and provide recommendations that your CEO can consider such as the ideal budget to make an impact in revenue or the ideal cost per acquisition you can work towards.
Not sure where to begin with writing these reports, or don't have the data you need to produce meanngful reports? Complete our digital maturity index to see how you're performing in the digital landscape.
