Client reporting is essential to building and improving your client-agency relationships. It’s the most effective way to let your clients know about the work you’re putting in and how that work is paying off. As a marketer, the work you do is results driven and client reporting is your way to show these results to your clients.
Creating client reports enables you to be transparent about what’s working and not working for your client’s campaign. Regular and consistent reporting establishes accountability and allows you to manage your client’s expectations.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are the bread and butter of measuring the success of your clients’ campaigns. They’re the objectives they’ll measure their progress against. By using KPIs they’re able to get a clear picture of how effectively their campaigns are working.
Importantly, the goals and marketing objectives should align with the overall goals of the business your client is running. 95% of leading marketers agree that “to truly matter, marketing analytics KPIs must be tied to broader business goals.”
Conversion rate, customer acquisition numbers and cost, sales growth, and social shares are all examples of KPIs you should be considering when putting together your client reports.
Metrics
Closely connected to KPIs, metrics are trackable pieces of data that help your clients see how well a campaign is performing. In simple terms, metrics are the results of your campaign. It’s important that the metrics you use are tied in with the KPIs for the campaign or else they won’t make a lot of sense!
89% of top marketers use strategic metrics, like gross revenue, market share, or customer lifetime value (CLV) to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. By including metrics in your client reports, it allows you to see the bigger picture enabling you and your client to think more strategically.
Return on investment (ROI)
Your clients are going to want to know how their investment in working with you is benefiting them. Including ROI in your client reports gives you the opportunity to show how your clients investments can result in big wins, growth, and potentially any savings that can be made.
Marketing departments that calculate, measure, and report on ROI are 1.6 times more likely to be awarded the budgets they want and need. If you’re including ROI on your client reports, your clients will be more open to working with you if you need them to invest more money in a certain element of your campaign.
Where there’s room for improvement
Every campaign will have elements that perform better than others. By being open about when your efforts didn’t quite work out as well as you’d hoped, you can provide context to the client. This gives you the opportunity to work on finding solutions and prevent the same mistakes from happening again. It’s important to include this information in your client’s reports.
Any client worth their salt will understand that there has to be some trial and error when engaging in a marketing campaign. By being open and transparent, you’ll gain respect, trust, and loyalty.
Summary of events
Sometimes it can be a case of out of sight, out of mind. You meet with your client monthly and in between times they don’t think much about what you’ve been doing for them. That’s why it’s important you include a summary of events in your client reports. That way, the client can see exactly how much hard work and graft you’re putting into making their marketing campaigns a success.
Are you spending too much time on client reporting?
There’s no denying that client reporting is one of the most important tasks a marketer can undertake. But, are you spending too much time on reporting and not enough time on getting the work done to make sure your campaigns are running smoothly?
Marketers that use Coact to create their client reports say they save 75% less time on reporting than before. That’s a lot of time! Talk to us today to discuss your reporting goals and how Coact can help you achieve them.
