As a marketer, you have the responsibility of creating your marketing reports every month. You have to fetch data on each platform, copy-paste those numbers into an excel spreadsheet, and create reports for either your clients or your boss. It is time-intensive, tiring, and tedious, but has to be done.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to automate your marketing reports:
Step 1: Start the preparation
The following should be in place before you start your reporting process in any capacity. Begin with deciding on what KPIs and metrics you need to include in the report. You can determine this by asking each client relevant questions regarding their business. The second most important thing is deciding the reporting frequency you will be using. A lot of agencies prefer monthly reporting. However, you can also go with daily or weekly reports with automated marketing reports. Assigning roles is a great way to decide who will provide the insights to each client, when, and how.
Step 2: Create a campaign
Creating a campaign for your client is crucial once you have decided on the metrics, KPIs, the reporting frequency, and who specifically will be responsible for reporting.
Step 3: Connect the data sources
Connecting all the relevant data sources to your campaign is the next step. This will help get clean and useful data that would be useful for the relevant campaign and clients’ needs.
Step 4: Create a dashboard and send reports
It is best to decide whether you will send periodic reports to your clients or give them 24/7 access to a dashboard. You can use dashboards and report templates to get your reporting operational and accessible as quickly as possible.
Step 5: Customize dashboards or reports
Customizing the dashboards can make campaign reporting more effective for your clients. They can work more efficiently and gain an edge over their competitors.
Step 6: Provide Client Access to schedule automated reports or dashboard
You can either schedule automated reports daily, weekly, or monthly or provide client access to your dashboard.
Summary
Automated marketing reporting is a vital part of running an agency and providing value to your clients. However, manually creating each report every month is not necessarily a high-value task. Instead of manually tracking data, collecting various tools, and automating marketing reporting, you should focus on the campaigns themselves.
Automated reporting software should already have a place in all the marketing data connections that you will need. You just have to connect your account to begin automating your reporting. Automated marketing reports abundantly provide time and cost benefits for marketers and their clients. They demonstrate the true value of your services while offering scalability and high-quality consistency of your reports.
The primary advantage of marketing automation reports is that it saves time. It gives more room for in-depth analytics and strategic planning and reduces the amount of manual work. Automation is necessary for future business growth. You will fall behind your competitors if you do not use it effectively. Automated reporting is a quick win to help up your marketing game.