A lot of effort goes into developing and executing marketing plans. It takes expertise, time and resources to build a plan and put it into place. So why do so many organizations then cut corners when it comes time to see if all that work actually paid off?
Reporting is a crucial element of any organization’s integrated marketing strategy, but it’s too often treated without the same level of seriousness as the customer-facing elements of that effort. However, success can never be assumed – it has to be measured. In fact, if you’re not closely measuring and reporting, then you should just assume that your marketing plan isn’t working.
At Fryed Egg Productions, we put reporting in the foreground of any marketing plan. Without it, after all, you may just be wasting your money on hard work that doesn’t amount to anything.
Establishing clear goals
An essential element of reporting begins at the beginning – before there’s anything to report. Establishing baseline goals for your marketing efforts helps to give you a clear idea of what success should look like. It is a way of making clear specifically what your investment should produce, and it sets the stage for your reporting. The more clear you are about what you hope to accomplish, the better chance you have of accomplishing it.
Measuring success
Once your marketing efforts begin, the measuring often can begin, too, giving you real-time insight into how well things are going. For everything from social media and newsletters to digital ads and search engine optimization, there are ways to gauge how your audience is responding, such as through reach, page views, engagement, and conversions, among other metrics. You don’t have to wonder if your efforts are working – you can see for sure.
Developing reports
Effective reports must go beyond the presentation of an assortment of numbers. They need context and perspective so that they can be appropriately interpreted. Fryed Egg excels at creating in-depth reports that show our clients how well their marketing dollars are being spent. For example, if you have a newsletter, we can show you not only how many recipients are opening and clicking on your content, but exactly who opened and didn’t open your newsletter and what links they clicked.
Using reports
One of the reasons that reporting is so important is that it’s not just something you do to see how you did – it’s also about understanding how you can do better. A close study of reports allows you to make adjustments to improve your marketing efforts in the midst of them and to guide future efforts. You can see what’s working and what can be improved and then pursue those improvements. Without good reporting, you will just keep making the same mistakes, throwing good money after bad. Your marketing efforts are never going to be perfect from the outset. Expert reporting, however, allows you to continuously pursue perfection.
At Fryed Egg, we help organizations build brand identities that reflect who they are, developing strategic and memorable messaging tailored to their audiences and helping them execute that messaging to ensure that it resonates. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your marketing needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.