Whitepaper: 5 marketing reporting best practices

Most marketing teams report on ‘easy’ metrics such as monthly lead gen or website traffic, but generally do not demonstrate how their efforts are contributing to growth for the business.

This is a major missed opportunity, because internal reporting is perhaps the marketing team’s most powerful tool for engaging stakeholders around their work, defending their budget, claiming successes, and securing investment for new initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to unite marketers and business leaders around the reporting best-practices which are genuinely valuable to a growing business. These insights are based on the collective experience of Navigate B2B and Artios, the data-driven SEO agency, of delivering marketing-led growth for startups, SMEs and enterprises in many industries.

We hope you find these insights useful, and we’d be glad to offer further advice regarding the reporting setup in your own commercial team.

Download via this form, or scroll down for a preview of what’s inside.

Key advice in our marketing reporting whitepaper

A business’s optimal reporting setup is subjective, so we’re not going to tell you which metrics to use, or which software to use for reporting. But certain approaches are much more likely to produce useful insights, as opposed just attractive graphs.

Follow these 5 best-practices for genuinely productive marketing reporting:

1. Focus on long-term growth over short-term campaign results

Whereas most marketers report on on monthly metrics, business growth is measured in months or years. Also, short-term metrics can be highly misleading. Focus on long-term results to counteract the effect of anomalies, and align your reporting with the businesses’ growth horizions.

2. Demonstrate YoY change, and consider the effect of seasonality on metrics

Audience behavour fluctuates seasonally. To demonstrate true growth, focus on year-on-year trends as a more useful measure of change.

3. Prove cause and effect between marketing activity and reporting data

Don’t rely on automated reporting dashboards. Pull all your raw data into a separate environment for proper analysis and exercise your curiosity to prove cause and effect.

4. Include qualitative analysis in your marketing reporting to optimise your advertising

Creative media is a major factor in the success of marketing initiatives, but the success factors themselves may not be obvious in your metrics. Combine qualitative analysis with metrical analysis to produce useful insights and optimize your creativity.

5. Tie your findings back to growth, by identifying other metrics impacted by marketing

Look beyond improvements in individual channels. Identify metrics which may be impacted by marketing but which may not reside in any one marketing tool or platform (i.e., brand visibility), and show the wider value of marketing for the business.

About the authors

Paul Tomlinson is the founder of Navigate B2B, a content agency specialising in niche value propositions and high-quality thought leadership. We build long-term patnerships with commercial leaders and company founders to support sales cycles and with inbound and outbound campaigning. Find out more at NavigateB2B.com.

Andreas Voniatis is the founder of Artios, provider of SEO services to startups, SMEs and enterprise. Artios uses technology to model large-scale changes to clients’ site content, guaranteeing 200% growth based on improved search traffic. Andreas is also the author of Data-Driven SEO. To found out more, visit Artios.io.