How to Curate the Best, Most Efficient Marketing Report
You probably already know that businesses spend quite a hefty amount on marketing.
After all, it either makes or breaks the business. Hence, as a business owner, you need to overview your marketing ideas, curating them effectively to draft a solid marketing plan that will help you change prospect clients into long-term customers.
A marketing report, or usually referred to as a marketing plan, is a set of data that is created by a marketer to analyze the overall performance of the business’ marketing campaigns.
The report includes various tactics and research models, all of which help to curate a solid marketing strategy.
To help your business make the most out of your marketing report, we advise you to carefully follow these few steps:
1- Mapping Out Your Marketing Report
Although the most important part of your marketing report should be the content you decide to add to it, it is best to get an outline out of the way before you begin drafting an all-rounded marketing report.
Hence, mapping out your outline should focus on understanding the purpose of the marketing report, what it should highlight, and how it should attract your potential customers.
Start this step by considering why you require market research in the first place. Is it because you wish to plan your marketing campaign? Is it a result of a failing marketing campaign?
Or perhaps you wish to invest heavily in your marketing campaign to improve its plan?
Whatever the reason is, considering in-depth answers to such questions will help you find a clear path to commit to when drafting your report.
2- Deciding The Essential Parameters Of The Report
Your next step should be highlighting what your marketing report needs to address and answer. This is not just limited to what your business decides to offer in terms of product and service portfolio but instead how your business plans to offer those services along with the potential benefits achieved as a result.
Such parameters should include identifying your target market, overviewing your customer profiles, and highlighting the various needs and wants of your potential customers.
Data collected under such constraints can be specific to the age, gender, interests, and relative income of the potential customers and markets you’re trying to target.
When walking a fine line, it is imperative that you include statistical data that gives you solid insight into the current marketing trends of your industry, as well as the forecasted events of your target market.
When you decide to add each and every single metric you have, your data is transformed into a much useful version of it.
TIP: Look into what the market already offers to your potential customers and take your research further from there. This will help you find the grey areas where you can intervene and market your product. Perhaps you will be able to solve a specific problem that your customers face by launching your product/service at the right time, in the right market.
Moreover, don’t forget to include how you wish to reach your intended audience. You need to definitely make sure that your audiences are able to turn into loyal, long-term customers.
All of this can only be done if your marketing report is strong enough to help you curate fine marketing strategies; hence, consider this one of the more important steps of drafting a sound marketing report than the others, as it clearly fulfills the purpose of the report itself.
3- Paying Attention To The Actual Market Research
During the extensive mapping and outlining of your market report, don’t lose sight of what is important: examining and interpreting market research efficiently and in your business’s favor.
You can do this by evaluating how you currently market your product. If you’re using e-marketing techniques, it is best to obtain information regarding how well your marketing campaign has been able to convert bystanders into long-term customers.
Knowing the different techniques, you use, how effective they have been, and where you lack is a great way of stepping up your game against your competitors, especially as it helps you get the upper hand over them.
After all, knowledge is power.
Once you have properly assessed the effectiveness of your marketing, you’re one step closure to curating the best marketing report that your boss has ever laid eyes upon!
Or, for that matter, you have laid your eyes upon if you’re the boss here.
4- Taking A Solution-Oriented Road To Your Product
Your marketing report should include a brief overview of how your product is a solution-oriented approach to your potential and targeted customers and the market’s needs and wants.
Confused? On how to include this in the report, well, think about how exactly your product is going to help the customers? Is it going to be a completely new and innovative product in the market, or is it going to be an improved prototype of what is already being offered in the market?
Clearing such muddles in your marketing report is going to help the marketing team strategize the product accordingly.
When you have provided enough detail to how you’re going to solve your customer’s problem with your product, you need to figure out ways to highlight your competitive advantage along with all the features of your product that set it apart from your competitor’s.
Don’t worry! It is not as difficult as it sounds.
Just examine your competitors’ products carefully against yours and review what you do better. The goal here is to identify the advantage and make your marketing campaign focused on it.
5- Don’t Overdo; Keep It Simple
If you’re going to go into the complexities, the chances are that your fellow stakeholders are going to have a hard time understanding what you’re really trying to get to with your marketing report; hence, we advise you to keep it simple.
Summarize your findings from the market research for the marketing report all in one place so that you don’t end up confusing yourself just as much as others!
Trust us; this happens a lot more than we wish for it to, especially when marketers lose focus on what they truly wish to achieve from their marketing report.
6- Drafting A Concrete Marketing Report
Here it is, the step you have definitely been waiting for! You’re now ready to finally start drafting a concrete and effective marketing report.
Here is a checklist to help you keep track of what to add and what not to add in the final report:
- Executive Summary: 1 to 2 pages
- Detailed Report Section: 3 to 4 pages
- Goals and Objectives of Marketing Report.
- SEO Data, Leads, And Potential Customer Data.
- Social Media and E-Marketing Data.
- Surveys with Full Data Statistics and Explanations.
- Trends and Future Inclinations.
- Summary of All Findings: 1 to ½ pages
6.1. Executive Summary
Begin by providing at least one or two-pager executive summary. Your summary should hit all the major points of the detailed report section.
Don’t forget, the majority of your stakeholders are going to read the executive summary and end summary of all findings with much more interest than the rest of the report, so be sure to add all the statistics you can to support your findings here.
6.2. Detailed Report Section
This is where all the magic of the marketing report happens!
From a brief account of what your company does, its extensive product portfolio, work environment, and organizational culture to an in-depth overview of all its past, ongoing, and future marketing activities, this section of the report is supposed to include it all.
Make sure to incorporate the objective of your research in your marketing report; most of the time, it is well-accredited.
Moreover, add incomplete details of SEO data, leads, and potential customer data collected during market research in this section.
Website analytics, especially in this day in age when e-commerce is overpowering the market, can help give you the right foundation towards curating strong marketing strategies.
Similarly, mentioning the social media platform trends and other e-marketing analytics will prove to be beneficial in understanding where your marketing campaign lacks.
Don’t forget, the power of social media is relentless. Hence, working on establishing a strong social media marketing campaign can help your business reach new heights.
Furthermore, your detailed reporting section should give an insight into the different surveys your brand conducted. Such surveys can be those that have been conducted on your business websites, advertisement surveys, and even email marketing campaigns.
Any information from focus groups can prove to be valuable, especially if it helps in giving a clear indication of target customers and market.
6.3. Summary of All Findings
As the title suggests, this should include a summary of all empirical findings of your marketing research. Display your marketing conversion data and figures that represent the quote of potential customers you wish to reach through your report.
You can do this easily by monitoring the site traffic your business encounters on a daily basis, especially if your business model relies heavily on e-commerce. Moreover, you can include statistical data analysis interpretation along with market research data interpretation in the end.
Don’t forget, having a page full of numbers and fancy values does add to the overall value of the report!
7- Giving Full Focus To The Future Trends And Inclinations
Up until now, your marketing report has heavily focused on its past and current marketing techniques and practices. However, this is where you’re going to give full focus to the future trends and inclinations of your target market and its potential customers.
Rather than just analyzing how effective your marketing campaigns were in the past, it is time to focus on adding in changes that will help make them just as effective in the future. After all, the market is never standing still in one place. Instead, it is ever-changing and unpredictable; hence, it demands constant improvements and alterations.
TIP: Consider the fact that your competitors are working through the same processes to ensure that they stay on the top. Unfortunately, it is the stark reality! Hence, it is important for you to find innovative, out-of-the-box techniques that will truly help you get the upper hand.
8- Noting marketing returns on investment
This is one of the things that are often overlooked by many when curating their marketing report. However, what they don’t know is that financing your returns is just as important as investing in them in the first place.
Don’t overspend on marketing and advertisements to the point that your business finds it hard to get by everyday activities. Try to maintain a balance that allows you to increase your revenues through marketing without breaking the bank. Make sure you consider each and every value you’re able to get for spending on your marketing endeavors.
And that’s about it! These are all the steps you need to carefully overview before starting your marketing report. Your final marketing report should be able to answer questions that are simple and complex alike. If your report answers the following questions, it is time to put faith in making it public:
- Does the marketing report reach out to the needs of all customers?
- Can the marketing report publish be a source of achievement for the firm?
- Will this marketing report help reduce the chances of the marketing campaign falling flat?
- Will this marketing report help approve more budget for business marketing activities?
You can come back and refer to this blog as a checklist while you’re still drafting your report so that you don’t miss any of the important things out.
The Key Take Away
Now that you’re through with the essentials of establishing and bringing forth the best, most effective marketing report, be sure to use your marketing report to make efficient changes to your business.
By the end of this report, your customers should be able to view your products differently, with much more value than ever before. If you’re unable to achieve this, you need to evaluate what went wrong during the whole process!
Your marketing report should not just be any other report that you share with your stakeholders; instead, one that helps you transform the course of your organization in its relevant market.
At the end of the day, the marketing report is formulated to help you curate your business’ marketing strategies in a way that they are extremely beneficial to your business in the long run.
