Clients want their marketing agency to demonstrate ROI using marketing reporting that’s straightforward and easy to understand. Agencies are responsible for proving their value to clients on a regular basis, from recognizing what is and isn’t working to using visual data to show why certain marketing campaigns are necessary.
Visualization using analytics, insights, statistics, and hard data will help clients understand what your agency brings to the table. Unfortunately, poor data communication can lead to future challenges. You may put stress on your client relationships and experience higher levels of churn, just to start.
If your clients aren’t seeing the whole picture, they may not fully understand the value of their investment and may wonder where their money is going. Set their minds at ease with the right data that gives the answers they need to see:
- How many leads is your client getting?
- Are these high-quality leads?
- How much revenue has been generated from your campaigns?
- Are you building and increasing the client’s online presence?
- Are you working toward improving your client’s long-term lead generation and sales strategy?
How accurate marketing reporting can demonstrate your agency’s value
Marketing reporting can prove your value, highlight recent successes, and help your client understand areas of their own operations that may need improvement. When creating an agency reporting strategy, keep some crucial questions in mind:
Are you speaking to the CEO, business owner, head of marketing, sales leader, or customer service representatives? Different employees, stakeholders, and departments want to see different data, even if they care about the same general KPIs (key performance indicators).
- **What is your basic narrative? **
What data should be used to demonstrate the performance of individual campaigns? Make sure you can pull data from every necessary source to tell your whole story. This will help align your story with your client’s overall goals and help to justify your marketing strategy.
Pro tip: If you're not tracking incoming phone calls, you're missing out on part of your narrative. With call tracking software you will be able to attribute every phone call your client receives to a specific ad, campaign, or keyword. This attribution reporting will allow you to get the data you need on a data source that is harder to track in order to tell the entire story to your client. You'll be able to show which marketing efforts are bringing in the most phone calls so that your client is spending money on the marketing efforts that count!
- What information are you trying to communicate?
How do the right marketing metrics contribute to improving your client’s goals? Show your clients exactly how metrics will help, and how your agency is making a positive impact.
- **Are you telling the entire story? **
Remember to tell each aspect of the entire story using the right visuals. Marketing agencies must show how their work improves their clients’ overall performance, brings in more revenue, and boosts ROI.
Make sure your reports focus on ROI-boosting information
Essentially, your agency’s marketing reporting should include information that answers specific questions, including:
- What did we want to happen?
- What actually happened, and how did it compare to what we expected?
- What marketing activities contributed to these outcomes?
- What were the external factors that positively or negatively impacted this outcome?
- What successes and failures were experienced? What valuable lessons did we learn?
- What’s the next step?
- What can we do to improve the process?
Streamlining the marketing agency reporting process
While communicating the correct visual data, insights, and metrics is imperative to proving ROI to clients, refining the process can take some time. Understanding the needs and goals of each client, gathering the correct data, and using the right technology can help agencies effectively showcase their value to clients.
If call tracking is an important part of your story, CallRail’s Custom Reports feature can help agencies visualize their call reporting. By providing a basic framework and user-friendly adaptability you are able to showcase the value of your work through impactful reports.
It’s not just about the information, or how it’s presented, but it’s also about filtering to show certain KPIs, data ranges, dates, different types of metrics, and more.
The right reporting will let you:
- Create, name, edit, and save reports easily. Any time a report is created or updated, it can be overwritten or saved as a new report for later use. Providing unique identifiers guarantees easy access in the future.
- **Mix and match different metrics for a customized reporting experience. **Gain access to time and call volume analytics, filter each report using different elements such as location, answer status, device type, and more.
- Edit table columns for maximum flexibility. Compare visual data using tags, date ranges, and more. This feature can be used within each Custom Report to select the metrics that appear within the report’s table.
- Save customized filters to display certain metrics fast at any time in the future. Access these filters that provide specific data insights surrounding one or multiple clients.
- Compare data using the Call Log Custom Report. Access and compare your client’s call volume from separate periods of time with just a few clicks. Agencies can choose a date range provided, or create a custom date range that fits the needs of the client.
- Include call tags in Custom Reports for deeper insight about numbers, categorize calls with customized tags that can be created, edited, and color-coded.
Learn how CallRail's agency partner, Digible, turns reporting into storytelling.
Visualization and marketing reporting: What information do your clients want to see?
Every client is different. While some businesses benefit from seeing just the metrics and hard data, others may prefer charts, graphs, or written analyses and case studies. Clients have different reporting standards, and your agency should understand what’s valuable to each client.
Pro tip: CallRail offers a number of data visualization integration tools. Whether you’re looking for business analytics and KPI dashboards, aggregate campaign performance, or simply combine your CallRail data into Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, or Excel — we’ve got you covered.
Once you’re familiar with your roster of clients and their preferences, you can better anticipate any marketing reporting questions they may have. Then, use the proper visuals to build your narrative, communicate important data, and draw attention to any key points that demonstrate your agency’s value and prove ROI.
Show clients the value of your agency’s services
Knowing how to collect, measure, and interpret data to tell your agency’s story may sound like an arduous task, but CallRail can help. CallRail’s arsenal of products can help marketing agencies showcase their value to their clients through lead generation, call reporting and transcription, building and displaying customized reports, identifying the most successful marketing campaigns, and more.
For more tactical tips, download “The marketer’s guide to proving ROI” or click here to start your 14-day free trial now.
