As a business leader, keeping the entire company on task is no mean feat.
In order to keep things running smoothly without finding yourself with more tasks to manage than hours in a week, it’s vital to ensure that your teams are providing you with key updates that reflect the state of their team’s work.
A question that many leaders are left with, though, is: what does that look like for marketing?
After all, marketing isn’t like finance or sales, where the reports will look about the same each time across businesses; marketing contains a bit more nuance, with different teams employing different strategies, platforms and goals.
In fact, it’s common for marketing reports to get very granular on things like specific social posts, individual emails and campaign check-ins, and while these are helpful, they’re not necessarily what a business owner has the time to be overseeing. At times, leaders will be met with figures as particular as social impressions per week and follower growth; and while those numbers may feel good to see, at the end of the day, vanity metrics such as these are useless to the overall growth of the company if they’re not tied to fundamental goals of the business.
In reality, check-ins should be offering a higher-level view of progress against actual objectives, with ideas of how to tweak plans going forward to ensure that the business continues to grow.
As a business owner and Chief Marketing Officer with over a decade of experience in marketing, here are three reports that I always ask for and provide… and that I think offer the biggest bang for your buck.
Revenue & Pipeline Report
The first report that your marketing team should be able to show you each month is a pipeline report. This will be a labour of love between your marketing and sales team – a process that, if your marketing and sales team are optimally collaborating, will be simple.
This report should offer a look at:
- Marketing-sourced pipeline
- Marketing-influenced pipeline
- Number of qualified leads or opportunities
- Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
- Opportunity-to-client conversion rate
- Average deal value
- Sales cycle length
- Lead source and attribution
- Pipeline by sector, service line or target account type
The distinction between marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced leads is especially important when it comes to B2B marketing. After all, a prospect may first hear about your business through a referral, then read three articles, attend a webinar and later speak to sales; a simple ‘lead source’ report often misses this critical nuance.
Lots of businesses neglect to track this, but it is a vital report that shows businesses what’s working in their sales and marketing processes, as well as where their leads are coming from.
Once this is nailed down, your team will be able to continually optimise where they appear and how they close deals, ultimately leading to a higher close rate and more customers coming through your (proverbial) doors.
Marketing Investment & ROI Report
Next up is a spend report.
No matter if your business has a marketing spend of £500 or £500,000, you need to have an idea of where that spend is going.
This report should cover:
- Spend this month
- Spend year to date
- Spend against budget
- Spend by channel or campaign/spend distribution
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Cost per qualified lead (CPQL)
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Return on marketing investment (where measurable)
- Forecasted spend for next period
- Budget reallocation recommendations
It’s worth noting that this report shouldn’t be viewed as a way to continually cut costs – we don’t want to be punishing the marketing team each month, and as we all know, you need to spend money to make money – but instead as a way to ensure that these figures are continually being optimised, and help the leadership team decide whether money is being spent intelligently.
Ultimately, when paired with your pipeline report, your spend report should paint a clear picture of whether your funds are going to the right places and can offer a glimpse of any missed opportunities when it comes to visibility.
Strategic Performance Report
To add some further clarity to how your pipeline and spend are performing, you should be requesting a monthly strategic performance report.
The report should answer:
- Which audiences, sectors or services are gaining traction?
- Which messages are resonating?
- Which campaigns should be scaled, paused or changed?
- What risks or opportunities is marketing seeing in the market?
- What decisions does leadership need to make?
- How was performance against projected goals & figures?
- Do goals need to be adjusted? If so, how will activities be adjusted accordingly?
- And, most importantly, are we making progress against the marketing strategy?
This report should not be a KPI dump with random figures and vanity metrics; it should be an intentional, data-backed set of facts and figures that indicate how things are going, and where strategy can be tweaked.
The report should be able to answer those questions and then some, offering context into how marketing’s current activity fits into the rest of the business.
Seeing the Big Picture
Altogether, these three angles will offer a more comprehensive view of marketing success and activities than just standard marketing metrics reports. While there’s a place for individual social posts, webinar, and blog metrics, by the time reports hit your desk, it should offer a higher-level view of what’s working and what needs adjusting.
Ultimately, it should all come down to how the month’s progress reflects on and informs strategy going forward so that you and your team can rest assured that marketing is doing what needs to be done, at the correct cost, in the right places.
James Le Gallez (main picture) is the Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Edward & James, a qualified marketing consultancy helping professional service providers make confident decisions, execute effectively and grow with intent.
Working across finance, legal and beyond, Edward & James helps professional service businesses get to the strategic heart of their work, whether it be the first week of their company or the thousandth. Get in touch today: [email protected]
