One of the most important aspects of any marketing strategy is creating compelling marketing reports. This isn’t only about providing value to your clients, but also helps you evaluate your own marketing strategy and take an unbiased approach to figuring out where your marketing strategy needs fine-tuning.

In this article, we’re going to give you some helpful tips for putting together marketing reports that should surely impress your clients, as well as help you more effectively plan and strategize based on the data in your reports.

Decide the purpose of your report

The basis of your report should be to help make decisions, so that means figuring out what questions you are actually trying to answer, as far as key business goals goes.

It’s not enough to report data for the sake of presenting numbers and statistics. The purpose of your report should be related to key business goals, so for example, your report should answer questions like “What social media posts are driving the most users to our business?”, or “What is the average click-off rate of users coming in through sponsored Reddit ads?”.

Decide who the report is for

As we said earlier, marketing reports shouldn’t exactly be used for impressing clients and higher-ups. If you’re presenting reports to a client, your goal should be to inform them in a realistic way, to arm them with the information necessary for making key decisions.

If your report is for your marketing team, you may want to focus on presenting the results of various strategies, so that your team can figure out where to invest more or less effort.

A client wouldn’t necessarily care about statistics from individual strategies, they’ll be more concerned with their investment and revenue growth. So essentially, you need to figure out how your report will inform and motivate its intended audience, and the metrics you’ll need to include to that purpose.

You can check here for some examples of great marketing report templates.

Gather the most actionable data possible

There’s an increasingly growing treasure chest of marketing and sales tools available, as well as big data and AI. To create the most compelling reports possible, you need the highest quality available data.

While many marketing and sales tools will provide you with data, it can be a bit of a headache working with data from different platforms, and all the nuances of how they’re formatted. Reports for cross-channel marketing would make anyone nearly insane using these data sets.

You don’t actually need huge datasets, what you need is a consistent target data schema. Your data sets should be reliable, consistent, and as accurate as possible, not to mention relevant for the reports you’re using them in.

What it boils down to is having the best reporting tools at your disposal, which deliver the data you need in a format that is ready for analysis – ideally, you could also be leveraging AI to perform most of the analysis for you, saving a significant amount of time on creating reports.

Conclusion

While we could dig deeper into this subject and provide more nuanced examples, what we’ve given so far just about covers your bases. When creating your next marketing report, just follow the steps of Purpose > Audience > Relevant data > Analysis > Delivery.