How can you effectively report on the past, present, and future of your marketing performance?

Here's a SMART goal for an e-commerce business: Specific: Increase online sales for our e-commerce store. Measurable: Achieve a 20% increase in monthly online sales revenue. Achievable: By optimizing our website for conversions, running targeted ad campaigns, and improving product listings. Relevant: This goal aligns with our business objective to grow our e-commerce revenue and expand our online presence. Time-bound: Achieve this 20% increase in monthly online sales revenue within the next three months. This SMART goal provides clear direction, measurable progress, attainable targets, relevance to the business, and a specific timeframe for achievement. It guides the e-commerce team's efforts toward driving real, quantifiable results.

Before we set KPIs it's important to set goals. The goals will decide which KPIs will measure it's success and I would like to categories them into funnel approach:- Awareness KPIs Interest KPIs Desire KPIs Action KPIs Challenge with SMARTs or any other framework it doesn't express the marketing impact nor it is initiative for marketing professionals to further action.

Some examples of SMART marketing objectives and KPIs: Objective: Increase brand awareness KPI: Website traffic Target: Increase website traffic by 10% in the next quarter Objective: Generate more leads KPI: Cost per lead (CPL) Target: Reduce CPL by 15% in the next six months Objective: Increase sales KPI: Conversion rate Target: Increase conversion rate from website visitors to customers by 2% in the next year Objective: Build customer loyalty KPI: Net promoter score (NPS) Target: Increase NPS from 60 to 70 in the next two years

The frequency of your marketing reports will depend on your audience/purpose. For ex: you may want to send daily or weekly reports to your internal team, but only send monthly or quarterly reports to executives or stakeholders. Some tips for determining the frequency of your marketing reports: Consider your audience's needs. How often do they need to see marketing data? Consider the purpose of the report. Is it to track daily performance, provide monthly summaries, or present quarterly results? Consider the amount of data you have. If you have a lot of data, you may need to send more frequent reports to avoid overwhelming your audience. Consider your resources. How much time can you dedicate to creating/distributing marketing reports?

It is not just right format, frequency but also 'Engagement" with the reports which will amplify the impact. They will be dashboards and reports which you could schedule but one should also set-up alerts too as it would remind on unusual behaviors or actions that are taking place on your digital assets or campaigns, so that numbers speak to you.

No matter the format that you choose, it's important to provide your audience the ability to drill in to see the details. I think of a pyramid as an analogy - at the very top you have the results of the analysis: for example a slide deck with the main take-aways. But your audience might want to take a look at the metrics underlying the results - so linking back to the dashboard or your analysis is important. At the bottom of the pyramid is data - and ideally the audience can drill down all the way to the source material. Organizing your analytics results with all of the source data will increase the trust of the results, and will make it more likely that your audience will listen to your recommendations.

Leveraging past marketing data is essential for improving future performance. It offers insights into successful strategies, audience behavior, content optimization, timing, and budget allocation. By analyzing historical data, businesses can refine targeting, conduct effective A/B tests, and gain a competitive edge. Additionally, it informs customer journey mapping, aids in risk mitigation, and supports long-term strategy development. In essence, past data empowers data-driven decisions, enhancing marketing effectiveness and ROI.

Looking at the past to inform or even just to benchmark against the future is a good idea. But be careful not to over use this tactic. There are many business situations where the past is not a good predictor of the future. For example, the data from the past could be incomplete, dirty, or otherwise unusable. There are also situations like new products or new business context that may not be easy to relate to historical data. Talk to your audience to make sure that past performance is relevant in the analysis.

Here's a list of tools for creating live reports for marketing data: 1. Google Looker Studio 2. Tableau 3. Microsoft Power BI 4. Looker 5. Klipfolio 6. Domo 7. QlikView/Qlik Sense 8. Adobe Analytics 9. Cyfe 10. Zoho Analytics 11. HubSpot Reporting 12. Mixpanel 13. Kibana (ELK Stack) 14. Metabase (Open-source) 15. TapClicks These tools offer various capabilities for real-time data visualization and reporting, catering to different marketing analytics needs and preferences.

We once had a program that could only be measured by hashtags. No one loves impressions as a measure but they were literally the only option. At the time, Facebook didn't have hashtag data. We presented the floor of performance (eg the worst "provable" case) and then gave scenarios where Facebook was factored in at 2, 5, and 10x, so the client could decide where they thought performance was realistic. Even at 2x the impressions, the program was ROI positive, so the choice to continue was simple.

If you want to create compelling data stories using your analysis this the area to focus on. The data stories will naturally come from the tension between expectations (forecast, goals, scenarios) vs actuals (historicals). That's where all the drama of your stories lives - and that's what your stakeholders care most about: - how are we tracking against our plans? - are we at risk of missing our goals?