How to Create and Analyse a Marketing Report?

As a marketer, you make important decisions every day for the company you work for. Naturally, you use common sense when making these decisions, gathering data and digging into the statistics.

You probably already track various marketing statistics such as traffic, leads and/or customers. All important parts of your funnel and flywheel, but this data alone is not enough to make broader marketing decisions that affect the entire company.

That is where marketing reporting comes in. We would like to tell you which data and statistics you can use in your report to help you analyse data properly and make well considered decisions.

In this blog, we will cover the following points:

• What is a marketing report?
• How do you create a marketing report?
• Tips for creating marketing reports
• Marketing report examples

What is a marketing report?

The definition of a marketing report can be described as follows: a marketing report is the process of collecting and analysing marketing statistics to make the right decisions for future marketing decisions, strategies and performance. Marketing reports reveal meaningful, actionable data that help you draw important conclusions and achieve business objectives.

Marketing reports vary enormously depending on the data you review and the purpose of each report. The report helps you assess where your traffic and leads come from, which content they interacted with, whether and when they converted, and how long it took before they became a customer.

You do not create a marketing report to review data performance or check an ongoing goal, for that you look within your marketing dashboard.

Putting together a marketing report purely to view data is comparable to scheduling a meeting to review a project. Who wants to attend a 30 minute meeting when the content could just as easily have been shared by email? Nobody is waiting for that.

Reports should instead help you make a decision or reach an important conclusion. This is comparable to how a meeting should help your team make progress on a project.

In short, marketing reports are highly valuable provided you use them the right way. In the next section, we will look deeper into creating a marketing report.

How do you create a marketing report?

Many different types of marketing reports are possible. We will give you some examples so you get an idea of what is involved. For this reason, we will not focus on which specific data you should include in your marketing report, as this depends on the type of report.

When you build a marketing dashboard, the process will differ slightly from creating a marketing report. This section is about building a marketing report so you can make data driven decisions that are valuable for your team, CEO and/or customers.

Most marketing reports contain some of the same elements:

Title: What are you analysing with your marketing report? It is important to give your report a clear title so it is immediately obvious what the purpose is. If you share a report on your campaign results, blog performance or leads, the recipient will immediately understand what you have analysed.

Reporting period: Your marketing report should represent a specific period. This period can be several days, months or even years. By analysing your data within a specific period, you can easily compare performance with other equivalent periods.

Summary: For every marketing report, you add a summary in which you summarise the key points of your report. Here you outline the positive points, negative points and goals of the report. This is particularly useful if you have put together a huge report that is really too long to read in full. Also known as the ‘too long; didn’t read’ of your report.

Let us move on to the report specifications. Valuable, insightful marketing reports recognise two different components, namely: the purpose and the target audience.

What is the purpose of your marketing report?

A marketing report should help you make a decision. Choosing the content of your marketing report (that is, the data you analyse) is straightforward. However, the real challenge lies in how you handle the data and use it to make a decision or draw a conclusion.

There are two common reasons why it is difficult to make a decision or draw a conclusion.

• Marketing reports are often run purely to review data, which is a waste of time.
• The various data can be used to draw multiple conclusions or make multiple decisions, so you need to know exactly how you are going to use the data before you collect it.

So you need to have the purpose of your marketing report clear beforehand, before you start collecting data. Once you have the purpose in mind, you list the data that may be relevant. From this starting point, you have a much better idea of which reports to run and how to use this data for your final report.

Who is the target audience of your marketing report?

Marketing reports are highly valuable because they provide insights for making various decisions. Decisions that are made by a wide variety of people in your organisation. Whether you deliver a marketing report to your team leader, department manager or CEO, the report should be tailored to whoever reads and uses it.

A few ways to do this effectively:

• Ask what they need. If you know what decisions they need to make, you also know what data you need to collect and analyse. It also prevents you from delivering a report that is of no use to them.
• Speak the language of the target audience. Within marketing, a lot of abbreviations or jargon are used. Your team members may understand what you mean, but that will not be immediately clear to leadership. So keep in mind who you are writing the report for.
• Do not mix target audiences. It is best to deliver a marketing report for one specific target audience. So do not deliver a report to both your marketing staff and your CEO. This allows you to focus on the data and analyses that are most interesting and relevant to them.
  
  
  

Tips for creating marketing reports

• Plan your marketing reports
• Gather feedback from your target audiences
• Create marketing report templates
• Put your most valuable data first
• Visualise your data as much as possible

Marketing reports can take up a lot of your time, or even waste it, if you do not approach them well. We have five tips for you to work smarter when it comes to marketing reports.

1. Plan your marketing reports  

Make sure you schedule your marketing reports properly for yourself. This can be done simply with a recurring reminder in your calendar, or you may have the option to set your reports to run automatically. This prevents you from forgetting to send reports to the relevant target audiences waiting for this information. Automatically sending reports is possible with, among other tools, HubSpot Marketing Hub, so you can automatically send daily, weekly or monthly reports to the inbox of the recipient.

2. Gather feedback from your target audiences

Ask your target audience for feedback once you have sent the marketing reports. In this case, it does not matter whether you ask an open question or use a Google form to fill in if needed. All the feedback you receive can be put to good use to improve your reports.

3. Create marketing report templates

If you send marketing reports with the same design every time, it is wise to create a template. This saves you time and energy on the repetitive formatting work for each report. It also provides a predictable report design, which is useful for the target audience of your reports.

Want a head start? We have a free marketing report template ready for you, which you can download here .

4. Put your most valuable data first

Long marketing reports are fine, as long as all the data you include is valuable and useful. It is wise to present the most impactful data first within your report, so your target audience can stop reading as soon as they have made a decision. After all, nobody wants to read an entire report just to use the last page.

5. Visualise your data as much as possible

Did you know that people process visual data 60,000 times faster than written data? Presenting your data through charts or diagrams is also more credible, according to a study.

So try to add data within your reports and present it in a visual way. This not only makes a bigger impression on your colleagues, managers or leadership, but it also reduces the time and effort needed to process this data. Think, for example, of charts from Excel, screenshots of reporting tools (such as HubSpot) or possibly heatmaps of your website.

Marketing report examples

There are hundreds of reports you can run to demonstrate your marketing efforts. You may not know where to start right now, or you may be looking for basic reports to get familiar with the data you have been tracking.

That is why we have listed five different examples of marketing reports for you to use to get started. These examples are based on the use of HubSpot Marketing Hub. Of course, it is not necessary to work with this software. There are naturally also ways to get the right data through Excel charts and pivot tables. However, using HubSpot Marketing Hub does make creating  HubSpot reports quite a bit easier.

1. Multi-touch revenue

As a marketer, you are largely responsible for the growth of the company. Of course, it is important to be able to demonstrate the impact of your efforts and link this to revenue. If you cannot demonstrate this, you will always be undervalued and given too few resources.

With multi-touch revenue attribution, you link your revenue to every marketing interaction, from the first interaction on the website to the last email sent. This way, marketers get the credit they deserve, and marketing managers can make smarter investments based on what it delivers rather than simple statistics. This attribution model also helps you stay more aligned with your sales team.

Within HubSpot, this is simple to set up. HubSpot’s attribution tool is aimed at ‘people’ rather than ‘data scientists’. It automatically links every customer interaction to revenue. To do this, navigate to your dashboard and click add report. Here you can select the attribution report. You can then choose from a number of pre-made ‘best practice’ templates, or you have the option to create a custom report yourself.

To analyse this revenue report, you need to find out what is working. Look at the revenue results of different channels and see where you had the most success. Then use this information to decide which marketing resources you want to invest in going forward. If you notice that your Facebook campaigns brought in the most, it logically makes sense to invest more in this channel.

You should run this report monthly to gain insight into the broader impact of your marketing resources. Of course, revenue is important, but it is also wise to look into other statistics to get a more complete picture.

2. Channel specific traffic

Knowing where your traffic comes from can help you with the strategic decisions you make. If you see good results from a particular source, you may want to invest more in it.

On the other hand, you may want to invest specifically in the channels that perform less well in order to improve their performance. Whatever you decide, it will help to know which source the traffic is coming from.

HubSpot users can find this report under Traffic analytics (under Reports and then Analytics tools in your navigation) to split website traffic by source.

Do you want even more insight into your website traffic? It is also possible to dig further into these statistics sorted by geography. This lets you see, for example, which sources generate the most traffic from specific countries.

In any case, it is wise to look at which channels perform well when it comes to website traffic. Depending on the goals you have set, this may mean you look at visitors or focus on conversion rates. In any case, there are several ways to look at your data:

• If you get a lot of traffic from a certain channel, but this channel does not lead to visitors converting, that could mean you need to invest more in other channels, or that you need to further optimise this channel for conversion.
• For example, did you run a campaign that made a certain channel perform well? Was there specific content that caused this? Look at past successes and see how you can reuse them and possibly optimise them further.
• If you have not yet invested in certain channels, it may be a good time to try it out. Think about how you can include multiple channels in the same campaign and align them with each other.

Pulling this report daily may be excessive, since some channels need time to become effective. Pulling this report monthly can have a negative impact, as you cannot adjust flexibly. Therefore, pulling weekly statistics is the best approach here to stay in control of performance.

3. Blog posts based on conversion

Blogs are hugely valuable for a marketer. There is a direct correlation between how often a company blogs and the number of leads and traffic it generates. It is therefore essential that you keep close track of how your blogs perform.

Reporting on leads via your blog is a way to see how many leads you generate daily, weekly or monthly and which channel brought this about. This gives you insight into which channel delivers the best results, allowing you to decide to invest more time in channels that generate the most leads and/or traffic.

When you use HubSpot, creating a report with blog leads is easy to set up. When you select Top blog posts by contact conversion under add report, you get everything visible right away. This shows the blog posts that were most often viewed by contacts just before they filled in a form on your website.

Look at how many leads you generate with your blogs over time. If you see peaks in leads, it is worth looking at whether certain topics are more successful at generating leads than others. The more you can find out what works and what does not, the better you can structure your blogs.

It is wise to review this report monthly, so that during this period you get the chance to write and analyse relevant blog articles.

4. New contacts based on personas

Every marketer benefits from using buyer personas. It is important to track how many new contacts you actually add based on your buyer personas.

This will help you determine how accurate your buyer personas are and how successful your marketing is at reaching the right persona.

Within HubSpot, you can show your contacts in your report based on creation date. This is the date on which you added a new contact to your database. You can then break down your report by persona.

Did you run a marketing campaign around a specific topic? Did you focus on promoting your content through specific channels? What did you do that led to an increase or decrease in persona acquisition? If you dig into this report, you can deploy your resources more effectively to grow different segments of your business.

If you review this report monthly, you get valuable data on how your campaigns generate new contacts per persona. It may also give you an idea of any imbalance in the resources allocated to specific personas.

5. Lifecycle stage funnel

Another way to segment your database is by looking at the lifecycle stage. This gives you an idea of how many leads, customers or prospects you have in your database over a given period.

This data helps you understand whether you need to generate more leads or focus more on closing deals with your current leads. It also provides insight into the quality of your database.

Within HubSpot, you can create a funnel report by clicking ‘add report’ on a dashboard and then selecting the Funnels category. Choose which stages you want to include and select the visualisation to get the report.

This report gives an overview of the progress of your leads throughout the buyer’s journey. Use this report to see which parts of your funnel you need to address for greater efficiency.

If it turns out you are doing well at generating leads but not at converting these leads into MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), take a close look at where you might improve the relationship with this lead. By reviewing your marketing funnel reports monthly, you stay up to date on the efficiency of your marketing process.

Get started!

Marketing reports are an essential part of your marketing efforts and help you keep a finger on the pulse when it comes to the growth of your company. By understanding how efficient and effective your marketing is, you can allocate your time, resources and money better. With the data, you can make better decisions.

Start with these examples of your marketing reports and keep expanding your reporting as you use more data.

Want to know more about how to set up marketing reports? Feel free to schedule an meeting in my calendar.