More than Numbers and Charts
One way a good marketing analyst can add value to their organization is to provide stellar reporting back to management. Reporting is so important to telling the story of a marketing campaign. If done correctly, marketing usually gets more dollars and credibility to continue on their quest of awesomeness. If done poorly, the opposite happens, and marketing efforts are scaled back or leaders may ultimately be replaced.
Don’t let reporting be the weakest link in your marketing organization. Help it be the strongest by understanding there is more to good marketing reporting than numbers and charts. Numbers and charts, while informative and necessary, can be interpreted in a variety of ways and may be sending mixed messages to leadership. Ensure the right message is conveyed by producing marketing stories that detail the success and/or key learnings from every marketing campaign in a manner to provide reflection and strategic planning opportunities.
Where you’ve been
Begin your report by sharing a little history about the marketing campaign. Why did your team believe this to be a great idea? Why was it needed? What was the hypothesis, and more importantly, what was the goal? To share this part of the story, you can use a few charts, but stick mainly to the relevant bullet points. You don’t need to write a chapter book. Keep your bullets succinctly worded and easily scanned.
What happened
This is the part when you detail the campaign. Be sure to include all relevant information, such as timing, audience, channel, creative used, segmentation, etc. Include any additional demographic break-downs that your group may have been focused on. Detail the results. You can choose to detail these any way you want, however, be sure that any chart you include:
relates to your goals/objectives;
can be explained – don’t show anomalies in the data without explanation; and
has context – include benchmarks or relevant historical comparisons
Key learnings
Marketing campaigns would/should not be allowed to continue without an understanding of what was learned. Even if the marketing campaign was unsuccessful, there should still be some type of lessons learned. Did you learn a certain demographic should no longer be considered your target market? Did you learn that September is not a good month for sales? Did you learn that prospects prefer phone calls to emails or blue to green? What did you learn?
Probably equally important, is to understand what your go-forward plan is. How will you build on your success, or how will you learn from your mistakes? Be sure to outline what the plan is for next time.
Reporting is such an important step in the success of a marketing campaign; don’t squander your chance to show off your team’s skills with an underperforming report. If you don’t have in-house talent available to synthesize reporting for you, B2E would be happy to help out! We love to create visual stories to help you gain approval for your next campaign. We promise, it won’t just be numbers and charts.
