In a nutshell: Marketing reports present the necessary information to make informed business decisions. A well-defined marketing report includes only relevant KPIs, addresses your target reader’s needs, and incorporates engaging visuals. Whether you create a weekly or a monthly marketing report, it should answer every question and tell them what’s next. Keep it simple, and straightforward, and show them the bigger picture.
“Can you remove that table and explain the data with a line graph?”
“I need this XYZ client’s Q2 marketing report by 2 pm.”
“I don’t see a connection between these metrics. Can we modify and rewrite this section of the report?”
As a marketer, such questions can make even the most seasoned professional break out in a cold sweat, especially when juggling multiple client reports under tight deadlines. We all have been there.
Getting started on a marketing report is just the beginning. To make it truly actionable, you need to experiment with different formats, decide which metrics matter the most, and present them in a way that tells a compelling story.
You might wonder: How do I kickstart this process? Is there a better way to accomplish this?
No worries. In this article, we’ll explore the best practices for creating marketing reports that communicate your insights and next steps. You’ll discover what works best, how to present the necessary information and make informed choices that help you and your clients move forward with confidence.
Let’s get started.
What is a marketing report?
A marketing report lets you collect, analyze, visualize, and share data with your marketing team, senior executives, and clients to support and enhance data-driven decisions.
Snapshot from a marketing report
For agencies, a marketing report is more than just a document—it’s a powerful tool that demonstrates your value to clients by showcasing the ROI of your efforts and the performance of their campaigns. By presenting clear, data-backed evidence, you build trust with your clients, showing them exactly how their marketing investments are paying off. Whether you’re justifying a strategic shift or highlighting a successful campaign, these reports are crucial in maintaining and strengthening client relationships.
A well-crafted marketing report demonstrates the rationale behind a particular marketing plan through data analysis. Instead of relying on your intuition, you can determine whether to laser-focus on a specific channel or end an underperforming campaign based on solid proof.
For marketing agencies managing multiple clients, a good marketing report can be a game-changer in the following ways:
1. As a compass guiding you in your marketing initiatives
A well-crafted marketing report is a strategic compass that turns data into direction, guiding you through the sea of digital waves. Ideally, for agencies, this means confidently steering your clients toward success by answering the most crucial question, “What should be done next?”
2. Your go-to playbook for hunting the treasure trove
If marketing is your thrilling treasure hunt journey, your data reports are the best clues you can rely on to cross every single hurdle. These reports act as actionable playbooks for your agency, offering valuable insights into viable opportunities that drive effective marketing outcomes for each client.
3. Be a go-getting marketer
With insights from marketing reports, agencies can position themselves as proactive partners. You’ll be able to prospect opportunities at a macro level, anticipate trends, optimize existing campaigns, understand customer needs, and develop precisely targeted plans, all while showcasing your agency’s expertise and foresight.
4. Your creative canvas to test different experiments
A marketing report enables you to rethink and refine your marketing goals. Visualize it as your creative canvas. For agencies, this means experimenting with new strategies, iterating on what’s working, and presenting innovative ideas that keep clients engaged and excited about the possibilities ahead.
5. The practical blueprint you could ever have
The best marketing reports give you a step-by-step plan to scale your marketing strategies. As an agency, this enables you to be both proactive and reactive, adapting to the ever-evolving competitive landscape and ensuring your clients are always ahead of the curve.
In short, marketing reporting is an invaluable process if used correctly. It’s the key to uncovering meaningful data, accelerating data-driven decision-making, and proving your worth to your clients.
Now that you’ve got an idea of marketing reporting, in the next section, we’ll explore key takeaways to understand what goes into a great marketing report.
What does a great marketing report look like?
Key takeaway 1: Include only those KPIs that make absolute sense. Always less is more.
Your marketing report should be easy to process and deliver clarity without overwhelming your client with excessive data. When you include only the necessary metrics tied to your client’s business outcomes, you create a narrative that directly addresses their goals.
For instance, you are asked to track your client’s website performance. There are so many metrics involved. But to offer a holistic view precisely, you must figure out only the essential KPIs that make absolute sense. The 2024 State of Hubspot’s Marketing Report says it all.
For agencies, this not only showcases your strategic alignment but also reinforces your value, making it easier to retain clients and even upsell additional services based on their evolving needs.
Key Takeaway 2: Brainstorm and collect requirements from your clients on what insights need to be presented in the marketing report.
Imagine that your client requests a campaign performance report due tomorrow morning. You might assume that delivering a comprehensive report might quickly impress them. However, failing to understand their specific needs can lead to missed expectations, and your efforts may fall flat.
Clear communication and alignment with client expectations are critical. By tailoring reports to what truly matters to your client, you enhance satisfaction, build trust, and increase the likelihood of long-term retention and potential upselling.
Key Takeaway 3: Create a repeatable process. Use specific marketing report templates for the type of service you provide.
As an agency marketer, juggling multiple marketing reports across SEO, PPC, social media, email, or more can be daunting. Imagine you’ve just wrapped a report, only to have your client request additional details. Suddenly, you’re burning your daylight, scrambling to meet their needs. We’ve all been there.
So how do you address this major challenge?
Implementing a repeatable reporting process with customizable templates allows you to streamline your workflow, focus on high-value data, and deliver consistent insights that clients appreciate.
Look for the best self-service analytics and marketing reporting tool like Two Minute Reports, that does the heavy lifting. With real-time insights via interactive dashboards, pre-built templates for each report type, and the ability to extract and refine data, you can quickly adjust reports on the fly. This saves time and ensures your reports consistently deliver the value your clients expect, helping you build trust and retain clients.
How to write a marketing report?
Understanding the fundamentals of great marketing reports is crucial but the real challenge lies in putting them into action. Let’s understand four simple steps on how to create a marketing report.
1. Begin with a clear vision
A marketing report without a clear purpose is like setting sail without a map.
You’ll drift aimlessly, never knowing where to start or how to reach your destination. To avoid falling into this trap ask yourself: What key insights or story am I trying to convey?
Once you have a defined purpose, half the battle is won. Your marketing report should be intent-driven, concise, and focused. Avoid jamming your client’s report with unnecessary data. Just keep it simple, relevant, and purposeful.
2. Know your target audience
Every report has a different audience, from internal stakeholders to clients with distinct needs. For instance, your marketing lead might be focused on campaign ROI while your client cares about the leads generated.
Understanding these needs is vital. Tailor your reports to reflect what matters most to each audience.
The more aligned your marketing report is with its goals, the more value you provide and the stronger your client relationships will become. It should ideally tell them how it impacts their overall bottom line in an easy-to-understandable format.
3. Gather only necessary data
As a marketing agency, you will be dealing with multiple clients and data streams. While it’s tempting to include every detail, a 50-page marketing report full of irrelevant data is a quick way to lose your target reader’s interest and focus.
Instead, pay attention to key metrics that add value to your client. This not only streamlines the marketing reporting process but helps you deliver actionable insights that drive results. Using automation tools and marketing reporting templates can further reduce time spent on manual tasks, enabling you to concentrate on analysis and strategy.
4. Make your report visually appealing
A well-designed marketing report does more than just present data—it tells a story. But if your visuals are just a collection of bar charts and pie charts, they won’t have much impact.
To make your marketing reports visually compelling, you must first get clarity in your report design. Here’s how you can:
- Ensure your visuals are clear and align with your narrative.
- Think about the reporting context.
- Choose visuals that highlight the key data points.
- Use consistent design language that resonates with your brand.
Remember, a visually compelling marketing report can transform complex data into a powerful tool for strategic decision-making and client retention.
Five essential marketing report examples with templates
Now that you’ve got a 4-step framework for writing compelling marketing reports, it's time to understand how to incorporate these insights practically. In this section, we’ll explore the five most crucial marketing report examples and templates that help you visualize data in a centralized dashboard.
1. PPC Marketing Report
PPC campaigns let you advertise your brand in front of the right audience. You need to streamline campaign reporting and track relevant ad metrics. No matter which platform you run your paid campaigns on, you can customize them using Two Minute Reports’ PPC templates to monitor and optimize campaigns on the go.
With TMR’s PPC marketing report templates, you can gather and analyze key ad metrics from platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Bing Ads, Pinterest Ads, and even Apple Search Ads.
The best part is that you can compare the cross-channel campaign performance and garner significant insights on which ad platform drives the most conversions.
Through these actionable PPC reporting templates tailored for different ad platforms and use cases, you can measure the correct data and send meaningful campaign reports to your clients within minutes.
2. SEO Marketing Report
Investing in organic marketing is a long game. You must keep tracking your website traffic, visitor engagement, keyword rankings, etc., to better understand user engagement and website performance in Google.
Though numerous SEO tools can do this, they need comprehensive reporting features. You don’t just need an automated PDF filled with numbers, right? As a marketer, you must create actionable SEO marketing dashboards to constantly check and monitor critical insights.
Fortunately, you don’t have to build from scratch. You can use Two Minute Reports’ SEO marketing report templates to visualize and explore vital SEO metrics.
The above Google Search Console template is designed primarily for page and query analysis. It will help you fetch crucial metrics like clicks, CTR, position, and impressions as scorecards and timeline charts to get a better understanding.
Remember that the list of SEO metrics doesn’t stop with this. Whether you need to optimize your website speed, improve local page listings, or want to hop onto the latest search trends, we’ve got you covered with a series of SEO marketing report templates to do the heavy lifting.
3. Social Media Marketing Report
A great social media marketing report should give you crystal clear insights about your target audience and how they engage with your content.
Though every social media platform has native analytics, it offers limited customization options. Also, you need to properly organize platform-specific data to make strategic social media enhancements.
To make this easier for you, Two Minute Reports’ Social Media Reporting Templates let you track your client’s social media performance so you can understand how each platform contributes to improving online engagement.
The above Facebook Insights template illustrates the top 15 posts with the highest impressions. Likewise, you can visualize and analyze core social media KPIs for different social platforms under one marketing dashboard. Understand your channel performance and allocate the right content resources to optimize engagement.
4. Ecommerce Marketing Report
When managing an online store, there’s so much to keep tabs on. From order history, inventory management, and customer behavior to sales, including support interactions via live chat software, you must track every key metric to maximize revenue.
Whether you manage your online store on Shopify, Amazon, or WooCommerce, use Two Minute Reports’ eCommerce marketing report templates to gauge your online store’s effectiveness.
The best part is you don’t have to manually pull data from GA4 to track your online store data. Using channel-specific ecommerce templates, you can holistically monitor key product and sales KPIs and devise decisions to boost profits.
5. Email Marketing Report
You just can’t hit the send button and wait for subscribers to flow in. You need an email marketing report to get powerful insights into how your email campaigns impact your client’s bottom line.
You’ll have to track open rate, click rates, bounce rate, and other email metrics to analyze your email campaign effectiveness. Using Klaviyo email marketing templates, you can get full-fledged insights into how your email campaigns reflect your client goals.
To begin with, you can view scorecards of major email KPIs, time-series charts, and tabular charts with heatmap rankings, campaign performance table, subscriber demographics insights and many more. You don’t have to manually track; instead, you can visualize the funnel stages and email campaign progress under one roof.
Best practices for building insightful marketing reports
You’ve come this far–well done! Now it's time to get into action.
In this section, we’ll cover the 5 best practices for crafting actionable marketing reports to WOW your clients.
1. Highlight your marketing strategy
As a marketer, you pour your creativity into developing strategies that boost your client’s online presence. But does it matter if your clients don’t understand the reasoning behind your campaigns?
To bridge this gap, discuss the following with your client and include key insights in your marketing report:
- What is the current scope of the project?
- Which demographics does the target audience ideally reflect?
- What are the prime marketing channels driving profits?
- What are the future growth areas likely to be focused on?
- How are the trends performing compared to the previous report?
By addressing these questions, you provide clients with a comprehensive understanding of how your efforts align with their goals–showcasing your strategic value.
2. Have a defined marketing reporting structure
One of the pivotal points of building useful marketing reports lies in how you properly structure them. Your audience should easily grasp the insights you present on each page of your marketing report.
Here’s a simple 6-step breakdown for structuring your report:
Step 1: Introduction - A cover page summarizing the report: client name, type of report, date range, and channels covered.
Step 2: Outline of previous action items - Recap of major highlights and actions taken.
Step 3: Goals - Mention realistic benchmarks for evaluating success.
Step 4: Current KPI performance - Analyze relevant metrics from selected marketing channels to derive marketing outcomes.
Step 5: Trends and distribution - Illustrate growth and your client’s competitive standing.
Step 6: Practical recommendations - Offer actionable suggestions to enhance your client’s marketing strategy.
A clear structure allows clients to quickly locate the information that matters most to them, even at a glance. That’s how an ideal reporting structure is meant to be.
3. Forget “cut-copy-paste”
Downloading CSV files, converting them into Excel sheets, and spending countless hours on formatting – sounds familiar? This traditional approach can be incredibly time-consuming and tedious.
Rather than manually copying and pasting data, consider leveraging marketing reporting tools that streamline the entire reporting process. By integrating a reporting add-on (like Two Minute Reports) directly within platforms like Google Sheets, you can quickly access updated data, automate repetitive tasks, and generate insightful marketing reports in a few clicks.
This approach saves time and ensures your reports are always accurate and up-to-date, allowing you to focus on optimizing your client’s strategy.
4. Report consistently to your clients
Regular communication is key, but finding the right reporting frequency can be challenging, especially with clients who have varying expectations. Here’s how to balance it:
- Weekly marketing reports track short-term activities, such as social media engagement or web traffic. Ideal for teams to monitor progress closely.
- Monthly marketing reports provide a broader overview, perfect for longer campaigns that need ongoing optimization.
- Quarterly marketing reports are comprehensive, reflecting overall performance against set goals and guiding long-term planning.
Choose a reporting frequency that aligns with your client’s business objectives, ensuring they receive updates that matter to them without feeling overwhelmed. It fosters accountability and develops a sense of trust & collaboration.
5. Refrain from building data silos
Agencies often face the challenge of fragmented data across departments. Siloed data can lead to inefficiencies and poor decision-making, limiting your growth spectrum. To prevent this, establish a unified data repository that integrates information from all relevant teams.
This approach ensures that everyone has access to consistent and accurate data, leading to better collaboration and more informed decisions.
Conclusion
Are you winning or losing your marketing game?
The answer is in your marketing reports. After all, what gets measured gets improved.
From numbers to narrative, your reports should spotlight the key metrics that truly impact your client’s goals. By focusing on the data that drives results, you can not only track performance but also highlight the value your agency brings to the table.
For agencies looking to enhance their client reporting process, consider exploring marketing reporting tools like Two Minute Reports which offer pre-built templates and automation features. This can streamline your workflow, allowing you to deliver meaningful reports that resonate with clients, without adding extra workload. Experience all the features with our free trial for 14 days and start generating reports in no time.
