Reporting Is Useless Unless You Do These 3 Things

Reporting the status with a bunch of metrics doesn't help anyone.

And it wastes a ton of your time.

Here's how to do reporting that's actually useful - and leads to better results.

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Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about reporting. Because as a marketing director, you do a lot of reporting. And reporting really doesn't matter if we're honest about it. What matters from reporting are the insights and the actions. What did we learn and what are we going to do differently moving forward? And so I want to unpack this for you so you can have the right perspective about reporting. When to do reporting, how much reporting to do, and how to actually make your reporting useful. Reporting is something you'll always have to do, and it's something you should be doing, but we need to be careful that we're not reporting for the sake of reporting, and that we're not creating documents and reports and dashboards just to have them, but rather that they help improve our marketing, that they help guide our marketing so we know what to do, and so we know how the things we're doing are working, and most importantly, so we can actually do something different about it. So let's talk about reporting. If you don't have any reporting, of course, that's a problem because you need to know where you're headed and where you've been and how things are going. And when I talk about the 30-second scoreboard, I often use the analogy of a sports game, even though I know nothing about sports. You know, baseball is perhaps, I think, one of the most boring sports in the world. The ball is in play for such a little time and you're sitting there for so long, but I digress. In baseball, what's really cool about it is if you show up halfway through the game and you sit down in the stadium, you have no clue what's going on or what's happened. But if you look at the scoreboard in a baseball game, it tells you everything you need to know instantly. It will tell you the scores of each team, of course, but it also tells you which ball they're on, if there's been strikes or not, how many bases are loaded. It gives you all this context, all this useful information at a glance. And so despite coming halfway through the game, you can sit down and you can see what's happened and where are things going. And this is how your dashboards, your reports should be that useful, that simple, and that clear that anybody can look at it and understand what's happening. But today I want to focus on the next step, which is generating insights and actions from your reports. Because it's one thing to make sure your reporting is clear and useful and helpful, but the next question is what are we going to do about it? Either your marketing is working or it's not. And in any case, in either case, we need to know why and how do we exploit that or how do we adjust to compensate for that. So if you don't have reporting right now that generates insights and gives you actions, then you're missing out on opportunity and you're reporting for the sake of reporting. And that's not useful. Plus, you're not able to optimize to improve because you don't have any next steps. You don't have any guidance on what do we do differently? And that means you're leaving money on the table. That every day that you spend another dollar on marketing, whether it's through paid ads or managing your team or outsourcing, it's being wasted because you don't have clarity about how it's performing and more importantly, what to do differently to get better results. Marketing is actually really easy if and only if every day and every week you know how it's going and you have ideas or thoughts on things to test to improve things. As long as you keep taking steps forward and improving things, your marketing will get better, your spend will become more efficient, and you'll reach your goal eventually. That's what we want is progress. Not necessarily success today, but progress. And you don't have that unless your reporting tells you the insights you need to take away from it and the actions of what to do next. More importantly, though, if you are just reporting numbers and status for the sake of reporting, how does that look to leadership? How does that look to your team? Your team is left confused about what are we really doing and what should we do next? And they're gonna be reactive and not proactive because they don't have the direction, the guidance on how do we change things, how do we do better. But more importantly, leadership is gonna look to you and be frustrated and say, what is marketing really doing? And what should marketing be doing? Because the reporting doesn't reveal that to them. And so this is our job to be explicit with our reporting, to say, here's how things are going, here's what that means, and here's what we do about it. And if your reporting can do all three of those things, that's success. So clearly, if you have solid reporting, here's how to tell. You can instantly tell from the reporting how are things going, what have we done, what's working, and what's not. And it should be evident the things that have happened that have caused it to be good or bad. And there should be some process in place to analyze, to reflect, to understand what's happening and what should we do about it. Let's unpack that so you can see practically what this looks like. I think there are three distinct stages when it comes to reporting. The first is having the framework to fill in the blanks of what's happened and what's happening. And so you need to have a dashboard, you need to have some metrics, some KPIs here that you're looking at. And we can talk more about goals in a future episode, but it needs to be simple. And I've talked a lot about this before in terms of measuring what matters. There are so many things you can measure in marketing. Most of them are irrelevant, most of them do not matter. And so don't fall for this trap of measuring things just because you can measure them. We want to measure the things that actually matter. And so in this first stage of reporting, pulling the numbers, putting the data together, we want to look at the key things, the key levers that you're actually paying attention to, the ones that matter, the ones that will have an impact. We want to look at those and collect the data and get all the pieces together. This is what most people think of as reporting, but it's just the first step. It's getting all the data, putting it together in a way that's simple and that's clear to see the status. You can think of this as if you're driving or taking a road trip. You know, you have the speedometer that shows you the speed you're going, and you might have navigation in the car that's telling you the direction you're going. And maybe you can see the mile markers out the window that tell you how far you've come on your trip. That's generally reporting, that's a dashboard that tells us those key pieces of information. But then we have the next step. And the next step is generating insights from this. And generating insights is really about understanding what does this mean, really? If your leads are down, what does that mean? What has caused that? What are the possible reasons that that's the case? If conversion rate has increased dramatically, or maybe you have more inbound inquiries, why is that? What happened? What's changed? Nothing improves or declines dramatically on its own. There's almost always an outside force causing it. And so if a number, if a metric, if something has changed, we need to dig deeper and understand why that has changed, what could have impacted it? Sometimes this is really obvious. Maybe you had a sales rep who did more outbound research. Maybe you have more content that you're posting or your YouTube channel is taking off. But sometimes it's not as obvious. And this is where the real digging needs to happen. So you can uncover and ask around and poke and assume and generate some hypotheses about what actually happened, what has impacted the numbers. This is the hard part of reporting. And this is what 99% of marketers are not doing because it's hard and because it's somewhat time consuming. But it's the most important part. If you just report a bunch of numbers without giving insights and understanding why those numbers are the way they are, then you're missing the point of reporting. I can't emphasize this enough. Reporting without insights is completely useless. That's just a status update and it's for vanity. We need to understand why things are the way they are so that we can decide what to do next. So insight generation is key. And here are some practical steps on how to do this. Once you have all the data together, you need to get with your team, or if you are the team, sit down and have some dedicated time to reflect and to ask yourself questions like what activities have we done differently in the last 30 days? Perhaps it's new pages on the website you launched, maybe it's new channels, maybe you increase or decrease your spend in certain areas. List out all the things that have changed. And if you have a change log, it makes this really easy. But list out what are the changes that we've made over the last time period, 30 days, two weeks, however frequently you're doing this reporting. And list out each of those things that have changed, positive or negative. And then look at the numbers, look at the results that you have in your reporting, and put those two pieces together to figure out what is the story that's being told here. We see that this went up and we know that this we changed down. Is there a correlation or is there not? And you have to understand the changes that you made and the impact that they had. That's one way to do it. Another way is to look at the numbers and to ask why. Why do we have fewer leads this month compared to last month? Why is our open rate, our emails, decreased from this month compared to last month? And by asking those questions, it'll guide you into where to investigate and who to talk to to get the answers, to put the puzzle pieces together to figure out what actually happened. And again, you may not be able to directly identify the levers, the triggers that have caused those changes, but you can at least guess. And that's better than not guessing at all. And so we want to create some insights. And sometimes those insights are hypotheses about what we think has happened. Sometimes they're clear correlations of what has happened. The third part of insights, though, is your ideas, your guesses, and your hopes. And this is about thinking ahead that maybe you'll see that we increase spend on paid search. And as a result, we saw more traffic and more clicks and more opt-ins from paid search. So a hypothesis, an idea for the future might be what if we keep increasing paid search spend? What's the limit here? Does increasing paid search spend correlate with more traffic and more opt-ins on paid search? It probably does, but that's an idea. That's not something that's proven yet, but it's an idea that we can begin to validate as we move forward. And this is a good example of how most reporting is done in isolation, that we think this month's report or this quarter's report is for this quarter and that's it. And that couldn't be further from the truth. You want to write all this stuff down so you can track these things from one reporting period to the next. And that way you can test and measure and see the impact of different changes over time. For example, we can increase paid search spend and watch the results. And then we can hypothesize that increasing spend even more would be beneficial. And then next month, when we do the same reporting, we can look at did it have a positive impact? And if so, let's increase it even more. And then we can look at the results again. And you can repeat this until you see the diminishing returns or until you notice a different impact. So reporting should not be done in isolation of a time period. You need to track these changes over time across reporting periods. So just to recap, in generating insights, you want to do these three things. First, list out all the changes that were made, positive and negative, and compare those with the actual performance, with the results that you got. Two, look at the results that you got and ask why. Why is this the same? Why has this gone up or gone down? And then three, is think in the future. Have some ideas, some hypotheses about what if, what if we change this, or what if we did this differently, what impact would that have? That's insights. And if you do this process when you have your reporting, it will make your reporting 10 times more useful, 10 times more effective. But now that you've done the insights part, that's the hard work. Now you can have actions. And this is where it makes your reporting useful for everybody and useful for you. Because you can convert your insights, the things that you've seen, the things that you've identified, and the ideas that you've had into tangible practical application. You can say, next month we're going to increase paid search spend. Or these channels are not performing. Let's make the following changes. This page that we just launched is not getting any traffic, or the conversion rate is really low. So you want to have tangible action items for yourself and the team. And those action items should be backed up, supported by the insights, which are generated from the data. So I hope you see the big picture here of these three steps. Reporting is pulling the numbers, insights is analyzing them to extract valuable, useful information, and then we convert those into actual tangible actions, tasks, steps we can do, things we can change to test, to try to improve the results for the next time period. Reporting on its own is absolutely useless. And this is how most marketing directors think about it is they're told they need to report, and so they measure a bunch of stuff and they throw a bunch of numbers at the wall and they pass up the leadership and hope that the numbers are increasing. We need to cut most of the stuff that you're measuring because most of it doesn't matter. And that will not only make your job easier when it comes to reporting, but you'll have fewer things to actually analyze and understand. That's why reporting on the right things is so key. But beyond that, don't stop at reporting. Make sure that every report you deliver, you've spent some time to analyze it, to extract the insights, and then to convert those into tangible actions that can be taken, that you can share, that you can demonstrate and point back to. Instead of guessing and doing random things in your marketing and hoping that it improves, it would be much better if the actions you take were based on the insights that you got from the reporting that you're already doing. So report and get insights and then convert those into actions. That's what useful reporting looks like. And I'd like for you to think about the reporting you're doing right now. How much of it is actually useful? How much of it are metrics and measurements that really matter? Probably some of them you can cut, if not most of them. And then do you have the time and a process, a structured way of taking the data, of analyzing it, and of extracting the insights, the valuable information of why do you think things are happening? What has caused them? And if you don't have a change log, go build one that'll help you in this process. But you must be doing your reporting and extracting insights from it. And then and only then can you come up with useful, tangible actions that you and your team can execute to create better outcomes and better results to demonstrate it and prove it in your next reporting cycle.