Itâs time to create your year-end marketing report. We revel in this time of year because we think itâs fun to look back on data and make a plan for improvement in the new year. But we love crunching the numbers and showcasing our work!
If youâre a little nervous about creating your year-end marketing report for board members or shareholders, we have some tips for you.
Click Here to Jump to Our Marketing Report Template!
Tips on Creating Your Report
1 – Include the Good and the Bad
Donât just share the good stuff – especially if it isnât the full picture. The point of a marketing report is to know what a business is doing well and what could be better. Plus – you can use the âwhat could be betterâ information to create goals – which is the most important part (more on that later).
2 – Dive Deeper into the Bad
In fact – when you do share bad news, take the time to dive into WHY. There is always something to learn from a downward trend. And remember, a downward trend may not necessarily be âbad.â
For example, we saw the average email open rate go down for a client from 60% to 45% throughout a year. While that seems like a negative, it isnât. They had earned a lot of email subscribers, so rather than having a small number of very engaged subscribers, they gained a lot of above-average subscribers. A brand doesnât need extremely active email subscribers, they need their email marketing to operate as a successful retention strategy. Those new subscribers spent more than their long term active subscribers and their email stats are still well above average for their industry.
3 – Keep Your Marketing Report Easy to Digest
Board members donât care about the 15 pages of wordy reporting you have. That information is for you. They want to know what worked, what didnât, and what youâre going to do about it. Boil your long report down to the most important and actionable data you have. Make it quickly digestible and offer bites of quotable information.
4 – Be Specific in Your Language
When youâre setting KPIs and sharing data, itâs vital that you use the same terminology throughout the report. It is easy to confuse things like reach and engagement or users and sessions. Donât get creative with your KPI language.
What to Include in a Marketing Report for Your Board Members
1 – Traffic Statistics
One of the most important things to include in your yearly marketing report is your website traffic. How has it changed over the past year? Did you notice trends in the traffic? If you have been tracking traffic regularly for the past year, you’ll have a simpler time identifying trends.
For marketing, itâs important to know where your audience came from so that you can identify the best places to put your energy/budget. We do that by reporting on how people get to the site. Is direct traffic the highest? Organic? What is happening with social media traffic?
Something that looks really cool for a board member, and feels a little extra is sharing the actual search queries people search to get to the website organically. It builds in a little pocket of excitement for them – and it gives you a moment to breathe during your presentation while they read and discuss (and often laugh at) the searches.
2 – Sales
You gotta talk numbers. Even if youâre not in the âsalesâ department. IF you have access to sales metrics, use it.
Specifically, use it to show how your efforts in marketing have helped improve sales overall, and point out potential pitfalls and opportunities for growth. Being able to understand how your marketing is tied with your sales often helps to convince board members that marketing is an asset to your business.
Share things like:
- Comparison data for total sales compared to the year before
- Top products/services throughout the year
- Any change in conversion rate trends. (Note: if youâre presenting this, explain how/why you think the conversion rate changed)
3 – External Marketing
If you are on social media and you have an email marketing program, include them. Is your email marketing strategy working to drive people back to the website? Are they purchasing from emails? Like the search queries, add a section where you share the top and bottom email subject lines – this is a fun exercise to look at together!
Is your social media growing? Board members love to see growth in followers – but remind them that this can also be a vanity metric. Show when youâre seeing an increase in engagement or traffic from social media. Consider creating a section or a page that shares a few of your top posts. Add photos and make it pretty. Itâs nice for your board members to reconnect with the beauty that youâre sharing on social media.
4 – Goals
This is the most crucial piece of information on your whole doc. Board members love to have information, but what they really want to know is: what are you going to do about it?
Of course you want to continue doing the stuff that youâre doing well – but remember when I told you to share the âbadâ stuff too? This is where that really comes in handy. Sharing downward trends and losses throughout your report sets you up for creating goals around what you can improve on! It gives you the upper hand because in this set up, you come prepared with growth solutions, not just facts.
Get Our Marketing Report Template
Need a little more help putting together your year-end marketing report? Take our template! Itâs built in Canva so you can make yourself a copy and update it with your own images and data. This is the template we use for our clients year over year because it offers enough space to include graphs and information, but it doesnât allow us to get too wordy.
