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How To Write The Best Marketing Report As An Entrepreneur

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| Updated:
November 2, 2022
Marketing Report
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In school, you’re issued a report card/sheet which tracks your performance in school. Similar to this is the marketing report which tracks the marketing activities of a business.

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What Is A Marketing Report

A marketing report is an overview of up-to-date data that gathers and analyzes marketing metrics, which informs future marketing decisions, strategies, and performance. Apparently, a marketing report is a snapshot of your business, because they help you uncover meaningful, actionable data that will help you make informed business decisions.  

In a nutshell, a marketing report helps you in answering these tough questions:

  • How did the previous campaign work?
  • Do I need to approve more budget for certain projects?
  • Are we actually closing deals and getting more customers?
  • If campaigns are falling flat, why? What do we need to do to fix them?

See Also: B2B digital marketing strategies for business to market their products and services.

Writing A Marketing Report

Simply, the marketing report gives you the opportunity to rethink your strategy and make new business moves. In this article, you will learn what to include in your marketing report.

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1.) Summary Of The Marketing Report

The first page should include a project overview, highlighting the most important metrics in a clear and concise manner. It should give you an idea about the position of your marketing for that month, quarter, or year.

First and foremost, marketing needs to increase your bottom line, so, that’s where the marketing report will start. Also, it’s important that you include a short summary of three successes your team achieved over the past month, quarter or year, depending on the segment you’re working on.

The summary should include:

  1. Successful and completed projects.
  2. Problems your team have been able to solve.
  3. The KPI result in a snapshot based on different campaigns. 

More so, anything that’s worthwhile can go into this space.

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2.) Goals And Benchmarks 

Nothing keeps you or your organization on check as much as a goal does. Your organization and even the department responsible for the growth of revenue have to be goal-driven. After the summary or review of the last month/quarter/year, you have to begin with a reminder of what you’re working towards.

Your marketing report is going to be phenomenal if the marketing department channel their energy towards achieving the goal of your organization. This will be like a benchmark for their performance, as there would be something to compare the results with.

Have a culture of comparing your progress to your end goal, to monitor your actual progress. From your monthly or annual revenue to your website analytics, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), leads, sales, etc.  

Next, let’s take a look at your sales and revenue. These are the numbers that count as a marketer.

3.) Sales And Revenue

As an entrepreneur, the numbers that count the most are your sales and revenue. The first line on any income statement or profit and loss statement deals with this aspect. The exact wording may vary, but you can either call it “gross revenue,” “gross sales,” or “total sales.” This figure is the amount of money a business brought in during the period covered by the marketing report.

The total revenue figure is important because a business must bring in money to turn a profit. If a company has less revenue, all else being equal, it’s going to make less money. For start-ups that are yet to turn in profit, revenue can sometimes serve as a gauge of potential profitability in the future.

See Also:100 Profitable business ideas to start now for aspiring entrepreneurs and investors.

4.) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) And Website Analytics

Website analytics and SEO data will give you the room to ask questions about your digital marketing strategy. The beautiful thing is that these numbers are not based on assumptions or on estimates. They are real and actual figures that give your marketing report the depth it needs.

More so, this aspect of your marketing report outlines your website performance and what you need to review or change totally. You have insights into data ranging from, how many people visited your website to what they did when they visited your website. 

Every business and industry have their peculiarities, so yours might not involve any search engine marketing (SEM). More so, you necessarily might not be big on online advertising, so there might be little or nothing to track on your paid ads and also your blog. One thing is certain you should do though, have an online presence and analyze your data with respect to your online actions.

The following are the website analytics you should pay attention to:

  1. Your website traffic numbers – they tell you how many people are coming in contact with your business. Total site traffic numbers help visualize the size of your reach. The total traffic number gives you a frame of reference for your business’s position online and even offline as well because human beings are the ones driving those numbers.

The traffic can be broken down into different types:

  1. Unique visitors – the number of people coming to your site, not total visits
  2. Paid vs. organic traffic – how many people are you driving to your site through ads, and how many are coming there naturally? If you’re paying for ads, how has the return on investment (ROI) been?
  3. Blog traffic – If you have a blog, how many people are reading it? How many are subscribing?

Also you have to monitor these: 

  • Trends – What are the numbers like compared to last week? Last month?
  • Areas that are performing well and areas that aren’t
    • Which pages are attracting the most visitors?
    • Where are visitors consistently landing?
    • Where should you double down for continued success?
    • What needs to change to improve underperforming pages?

Other SEO data-points you might add to your marketing report are:

  1. Average visit duration – how long are people spending on your site? Several factors go into this metric:
    • How engaging is your website?
    • Does it take long to load pages?
    • How well does your site match the intent of each visitor?
  2. Pay-per-click (PPC) – if you’re running ads, how much are you spending per engagement? This metric is a way of measuring the efficiency of your advertising.
  3. Page rankings – where does your business appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you rank, the more visible your website is and the more traffic you can expect from organic search.

See Also: Retail business ideas to start now with low investment for aspiring entrepreneurs and investors.

5.) Email Marketing Data

As an entrepreneur, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are mentioning email marketing data as one of the things you will include in your marketing report. Obviously, you have clients and customers on your email newsletter. You have to track the data of clients who subscribe and actively engage with your email.

You’ll be walking on eggshell if you don’t monitor how your email outreach is going and the type of message resonating with your subscribers. This information on your marketing report gives you an idea of the product and services that your customers find more appealing. 

Necessary email marketing data to add to your marketing report:

  1. Emails sent
    • How many emails did you send out to your subscribers or contacts?
  2. Email delivery
    • The percentage of emails delivered into your contacts’ inboxes
  3. Email open rate
    • The percentage of sent emails that your contacts opened
  4. Bounce rate 
    • The percentage of undelivered emails due to temporary (soft email bounces) or permanent (hard email bounces) issues
  5. Click-through-rate (CTR)
    • The percentage of sent emails that your contacts clicked
  6. New subscribers
    • The number of contacts you added to your email lists
  7. Unsubscribes
    • The number of contacts that unsubscribed from your email list

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6.) Leads And Customers

All of the activities will be dead on arrival if you don’t pay attention to your leads and customers. This is what turns all the inputs to revenue and profits. How do the metrics in your marketing report become leads and customers?

There are some key components to look at when analyzing your leads and customers;

  1. Number of new customers
  2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
    • The Naira amount needed to add a customer
  3. Cost Per Action (CPA)
    • Naira spent divided by customer actions (download gated content, form submission, sign up for a trial, etc.)
  4. Attribution
    • Which sources are the leads coming from?
    • Where are the quality leads coming from?
    • Which channel brings in the most customers?
  5. Number of new marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
  6. Engaged contacts that are more likely to become customers than other contacts
  7. Number of new sales qualified leads (SQLs)
    • Contacts that show high levels of engagement and are ready to make a purchase

Clearly, this aspect of your marketing report has a lot to do with your goal as an entrepreneur, hence shouldn’t be taken with levity.

There is no ”one cap fits all” approach when writing your marketing report. What we listed are the things that you should include in your marketing report, but you have to understand that it may vary depending on your industry, niche, and company size.

Have you ever written a marketing report? What was your experience? Please share it with us in the comments. Also, please share this content with your audience if you found it useful. 

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One Response

  1. Knowing how to write optimized marketing reports is essential for entrepreneurs as it helps them to grow their own business.

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Frank Fagbo

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