A monthly marketing report is essential to the success of any business, and it shouldn’t be difficult to create every month.
This is your chance to brag about your work, as well as explain any problems you may have dealt with in the past couple of weeks and brainstorm solutions. You can use these reports as a reference to see how your marketing strategy is succeeding (or failing) from month to month.
In addition, a marketing report is a great way to show stakeholders what you’ve been up to, how your marketing has improved, and how you see your marketing strategy progressing in the future. In other words, you want to make sure it’s detailed and professional. Below are 10 areas that should be included in every thorough monthly marketing report with screenshots from Agency Analytics Demo Account:
A Summary/ Highlights Page
This should be the first page of your report and it should contain the most important highlights of the information presented in the rest of the report. It should be concise, easy to read, and contain only facts, and your audience should be able to use it to get a general understanding of where you stand that month in terms of marketing. Everything that comes after this section should just be more detailed information for the areas you’ve discussed on the summary page.
You can also use this section to speak to people who may not be completely familiar with marketing strategies and vocabulary, so try to keep the text accessible and the jargon to a minimum whenever possible.
Information about Your Target Market and Audience
While you are (hopefully) well versed in your niche market and target audience, some of your stakeholders may not be.
Clients also generally appreciate marketing and SEO reports. That’s why it’s a good idea to include a section in the marketing report that addresses the type of market and audience you’re targeting with your product.
Discuss the demographics and give background information, and then elaborate on any strategies you’re using to specifically reach this audience. If there have been any changes to your market or audience in the past month, you can address those here as well. You could also consider adding information about your competition if you find it relevant.
Current Marketing Strategies
This is one of the most important sections of the report and should differ from the section on top campaigns.
In this part, you’ll address all the marketing strategies you’re currently applying as well as their level of success. While you can probably skip the graphs and charts and include them in the metrics section instead, it’s still a good idea to include statistics to back up your information.
For example, if you’ve focused a lot this month on email marketing, explain why and then show some numbers to support your information. You can always elaborate further (and you should) in the metrics section. Other strategies may include webinars, an increase in long-form blog content/ebooks/whitepapers, a video campaign, an event you held or conventions you went to, etc.
Monthly Metrics
This should be the meat of your report and include plenty of charts, graphs, and statistics showing the numbers that back up your goals and progress. If you have the Agency Analytics app, run reports for metrics such as:
- Leads by source (offline sources, social media, referrals, paid search, email marketing, etc.)
- Paid vs. organic leads
- Pageviews that are broken out by page (this is also a great place to include bounce rate)
- Marketing reach (broken down by channel)
- Top landing pages and the source of the traffic to each landing page
You may want to create a separate SEO report because of how many components go into SEO analysis, or you can choose to include them here. Either way, it’s always a good idea to compare metrics from month to month so you can see where you excel and in which areas you need to improve. Agency Analytics once again is a great resource to use if you struggle to compile accessible reports for your essential metrics.
They have exceptional SEO ranking report software that can be an asset for any marketer. Below is an example of the “Site Audit” function that will give you most of this information in one place:
Top Campaigns
Not all marketing campaigns are successful, so when you have something that is a knockout, you definitely want to brag about them in your monthly report. Analyze your past campaigns to figure out which ones have driven the most customer growth in terms of leads and conversions. If you have multiple successful campaigns in a month, divide them up and spend time discussing the details of each. You can look at data such as profit growth, new customer acquisition, and lead generation.
Blog Leads
A company’s blog is one of their most important marketing strategies, and so it deserved a section all its own in the monthly marketing report. Blogs generate both traffic and leads, so you should be documenting this data each month to make sure your blog continues to perform optimally. Consider looking at how people are locating the content published on your blog and then analyzing which channels are most successful and which need improvement.
This should help you optimize your content strategy as well—are people sticking on the “how-to” articles, or do they prefer your infographics? You can find this information by viewing the pages readers typically visit and read and looking for your blog post metrics.
Traffic from Specific Channels and Devices
It’s imperative that you understand where your web traffic is coming from so that you don’t waste time or money developing unsuccessful channels. Are most of your web visitors coming from email marketing leads, paid searches, referrals, etc.?
Once you know which channels are the most lucrative and which aren’t, you can choose to either devote more resources to the most successful channels or work on improving the weaker ones.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Apple iPhone is very much ahead as a channel for this particular company. This could help the company understand that they need to prioritize iPhone optimization and start testing SMS marketing as a tool.
Current Offers
Whether you have a lot of offers going on during any specific month or just a few, you’ll want to include information about them here. What kind of rewards program are you running? Are you offering any special discounts or coupons, and to whom?
Are you rewarding customers for referrals or email signups? It’s good to document these things each month so that you can see any trends over time. You should also make note of how successful each specific offer is so you know whether it’s worth introducing again in the future.
Goals and Ideas for Future Campaigns
Setting goals and then striving to achieve them is what will keep your brand growing, so you definitely want to include a section for goals in your plan each month. You can revisit the goals from month to month to see how you’re progressing, and your sales and SEO teams will appreciate being kept in the loop in this area as well. It’s always a good idea to highlight any future plans you have for marketing campaigns.
This is a good way to involve other stakeholders and give them a chance to ask questions and follow your progress if they choose.
Financial Projections
This section will never be 100% accurate but should include all the information present in your marketing plan. You’ll want to discuss any future promotional expenses you anticipate spending, as well as their expected return on investment.
This area should address the goals you listed in the previous section but go one step further by including the projected costs of meeting those objectives.
If you’re still struggling to create a monthly marketing report, consider consulting Agency Analytics for help with all your report needs, including white label SEO reports and SEO audit reports.
Originally from the public sector, in 2022 I founded Clockwork Copy to bring a breath of fresh air to the content writing industry. We pride ourselves on being a firm that practices consistency, professionalism, and honesty, with the eventual (lofty) goal of being one of the best in the world.