Effective data analytics can provide the means to drive your business forward. Whether you’re a company doing your marketing in-house, or you’re an agency doing the job on behalf of someone else, your marketing efforts need to be always in line with your - or your client’s - business objectives.
Make sure you’re clear on the marketing goals you’re chasing, and the strategies that will lead to their achievement. Ensure that you manage expectations accordingly, and always keep your company or client in the loop.
As strange as it may sound, taking care of day-to-day marketing activities and running campaigns is only half of a job well done. The other half is marketing reporting. Really, a performance report with all the relevant marketing data in it is a must. Without one, your company or client would not know where they stand in terms of their marketing spend, return-on-investment (ROI), and the overall success of their strategy.
After all, what is marketing data if it’s not transformed into insights that businesses can act on?
Integrated marketing analytics is the way forward
Clearly, keeping track of your marketing performance, and reporting it quickly - ideally in near-real time - to your client or management, is a crucial, yet often very complex task.
The more data sources you have, the more complicated it gets. Collecting, putting together and analyzing all relevant data can be tiring, not to mention time-consuming. And if that weren’t enough, quite often by the time you’ve sent your findings to the client, they’re already outdated.
So to avoid that, you need to be able to share your data quickly, in its entirety, and in an easy-to-understand way. An integrated marketing analytics tool can help you do just that.
It all starts with data automation
The process of data being automatically pulled and processed into your system as soon as it’s generated. Automation is not only a time-saver, but it allows you to always have the latest data at your fingertips. What’s more, having such a tool to clean and normalize your data is your assurance to have data that is unified, stripped of its multiple formats, and in high-quality, ready for your analysis.
Gone are the days when you had to log everything into a spreadsheet. With the growing amounts of data out there, doing so manually is no longer feasible. Also, an automated process is bound to save you unintentional errors - because let’s face it, we’re all human and we all make them.
After all, interpreting your data and making sense of it for your company or client is what your job description is all about. Spend less time on data wrangling, and more time on deriving insights and making smart business decisions.
The tools that make your marketing job easier
A data analytics tool can certainly make your work as a marketer a lot more efficient. It won’t just help you minimize the number of repetitive tasks you perform every day (bet copy-pasting is no one’s hobby), but it will also collect and store everything around your marketing efforts in one place.
So what are some of those tools, we hear you asking?
Google’s Data Studio or our own marketing analytics platform, for example, help you gain easy access to your data sources, transform your data, and build visual reports for your management or client. Share them in real time, too? No problem. Microsoft’s Power BI and Tableau are also there to turn data collection and transformation into a more seamless process. While those tools are super powerful, they can become a complex matter if you are trying to get all those funny granular details that your boss is asking you for. So, to become better at reporting your campaign activities, you need to become a better analyst - that helps you becoming a great data-driven marketing leader in your company.
After all, marketers should be focused on strategizing and driving business decisions. Without an integrated analytics tool to help them with the piles of marketing data, doing that will the last step of a very long process. I think we all can agree on the fact that reporting should be highly automated to save you, your colleagues and your clients valuable time.
A few things to remember
So, to conclude:
- Make sure to have your data automatically integrated so you don’t have to manually download those fancy reports from Facebook or another other campaign manager.
- A single source of truth for your campaign and marketing data reduce the chances of human errors occurring, while providing everyone with access to those numbers.
- Using such tools increases your efficiency even further because of the simple fact that your data is always up-to-date. Thank you, real-time updates!
- Once your reporting is set up, you can share those insights easily - again, you want to avoid manual work as much as possible, because everybody makes mistakes. We are living in a beautiful world, full of big and small errors.
And let’s not forget the ease with which it all happens: With only a few clicks on your part, you can have a compelling and good-looking set of marketing insights within seconds. For you, for your partners, and for all the other stakeholders relevant to your business.
What tools do you use for your marketing reports? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
