As a marketer, you want to be the superhero that comes in and saves the day for your clients. Who wouldn’t? It’s exciting to put a creative strategy in place that impacts businesses and changes lives.

So why does reporting on marketing data often leave both agencies and clients … well, unenthused?

Because traditional reports are tedious, time-consuming, and overly complicated for both agencies and clients alike, and this frequently leaves clients with unanswered questions and diminished confidence in their marketing partner.

We want to change that.

Grow analytics dashboards make it easy for you to clearly communicate the impact of your work to clients so that they can have greater confidence in your expertise, and you can enjoy being the superhero. But the first step to having a great marketing reporting dashboard is knowing which metrics should be on it.

Results-Focused Reporting

One mistake marketers often make when reporting to clients is that they focus on the wrong metrics. That is, they focus on the metrics that matter to marketers instead of the metrics that matter to clients.

Rather than digging into the nitty-gritty of every campaign and every channel, you need to demonstrate the key points that matter most to the client’s bottom line. Start by focusing on the big picture: What major company objective are you impacting? Are you increasing revenue? Are you delivering a good return-on-investment for your client?

This results-focused approach will provide the necessary context that frames how your client approaches the remaining details of your report.

5 Metrics Your Marketing Clients Want to See

Clients typically don’t need (or want) you to dive into every single metric of every single campaign. But you can use high-impact metrics to tell a compelling story of your work, starting with the big picture and then honing in on specific details. Here are five metrics that will help you do just that:

1. Marketing-Originated Customer Revenue
Starting with marketing-originated customer revenue couldn’t be more straightforward. This metric clearly demonstrates how your agency is impacting revenue and driving new business for your client.

Find this number by taking the total revenue from new clients in a period and calculating the percentage of that revenue that came from customers who started as leads generated by your agency.

Tip: We recommend graphing this percentage month-over-month on a dashboard. With a Grow BI dashboard, you’ll also be able to see the monthly rate of growth displayed with the graph for quick insight.

2. Marketing-Sourced Pipeline
After showing your agency’s contribution to new business and revenue, you should calculate the percentage of new leads generated by your agency. This provides your client with a view toward the future, and also provides an opportunity to discuss the hand-off between your agency and their sales team, if your percentage of pipeline is dramatically higher than the percentage of new customers.If your attribution system is sufficiently sophisticated, you should also calculate the marketing-influenced pipeline, which includes all leads that were nurtured or touched by marketing at any point, even if they generated elsewhere.

3. Conversion Rate by Channel
Although traffic and engagement data is useful, it’s often labeled a “vanity metric.” In order give it meaning and value, calculate your conversion rate by channel. This delivers business value for your client and demonstrates that you’re aligned with their company objectives, not just your own.

4. Marketing Cost Per Lead
Your clients also care about costs. An important one that they’ll use to measure your benefit to them is cost per lead, specifically the marketing percentage of cost per lead. To calculate this, divide the marketing cost to them by the total number of leads that came directly through marketing.

You may want to follow this further down the funnel and address marketing percent of customer acquisition cost (CAC), especially if providing higher-quality leads to sales is one of your objectives.

5. Marketing ROI
You want to make your client feel good about the money they’re spending on your services, so showing them a good return on investment is incredibly important when you’re reporting to them. The proper formula for a marketing agency to use is this:

Tip: You can also break down ROI further by campaign or channel to give greater insight into what has been effective. (We highly recommend a stacked bar chart to show progress over time.)

INSPIRE CONFIDENCE

Your clients will feel confident in your abilities if you can show improvement with these five metrics. You should also include any other metrics that are relevant to your client’s specific company goals, and drill down on any campaigns or channels that are particularly important to your marketing strategy. Just don’t forget to tie that data back to your client’s top-line growth.

THE EXTRA MILE

In many ways, while you’re helping clients with marketing, you’re also helping them understand their business and their own customers better. Marketing in 2016 isn’t just about broadcasting a message—it’s about listening, and it’s your job to share that information with your clients. Things like social followers, likes, comments, shares, etc. can provide qualitative insight that will help your clients further develop their products and services.

White Label Dashboards

For marketing agencies that are managing enormous amounts of data for multiple clients, there’s no better way to prove success than to use Grow dashboards. They’re clear and beautiful, ridiculously simple to use, and specifically designed for the non-analyst. The metrics that matter most to your clients will be easy for them to understand and easy for you to explain when you report on them.

Grow’s white label service makes this process seamless for your clients—and they’ll be seriously impressed with your agency. Plus, they get many of the same perks that you’ll enjoy, like constant access to up-to-the-minute data with their dashboard.

It also makes things easier for you. Instead of having to build reports for each client and campaign from scratch, dashboard templates and duplicating features are included with the white label. All you have to do is attach the correct data sources for each client.

Using Client Dashboards to Build YOUR Business

Another benefit of having Grow client dashboards is that they can become a selling point for your own new clients. Because you have clear, stunning representations of your past success, you can show it to other prospects as evidence of how effective your team is. It wasn’t something we set out to do with Grow, but according to our clients, it works.

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