First things first: should you even automate your marketing reports?
The answer is probably yes, unless (a) most of your reporting is ad hoc, detailed drill-down analysis rather than routine, and (b) you enjoy spending hours copying and pasting data from multiple platforms and attempting to create a visually appealing format using a spreadsheet.
Automated reporting can deliver massive efficiency gains by streamlining and simplifying data integration and visualization. That gives teams back hours they can use for more strategic tasks.
Automated reporting also reduces errors caused by manual data entry and can provide refreshed data without anyone's having to update a spreadsheet.
That said, automating marketing reports requires careful planning and up-front decisions. The discovery phase, which covers deciding what to include and sorting out data to bring into the reporting dashboard, will likely consume 80% of the project timeline, with the remaining 20% spent on the actual building of it and the QA related to data and functionality.
The following 10 tips can help you think through the entire process and ensure you've considered all elements of automating your marketing reports.
1. Understand the basics
Define the business goals your team expects the data to track in your report:
- How does it help your team make better business decisions?
- Who are the stakeholders?
- How often does everyone need to see the report?
- What value does it have for each stakeholder?
Depending on the answers, you'll know whether you need a simple report or something more complex—i.e., a business intelligence tool.
2. Map goals to KPIs
Figure out which KPIs you need to track progress toward the business goals and what data sources they come from that you defined in step one.
For example, if you're mapping sales goals, do you need to measure them overall, on a regional basis, or both? Look at data sources and make sure they can be captured automatically; if they cannot be, find out what it would take to automate those processes. This is where you carefully drill down to uncover the real need.
Most frequently, a stakeholder will be presented with an immediate challenge that she needs to deal with, but it's really a question on a larger scale that will change how a report is created.
For example, a marketing manager may be concerned about visits and conversions in the previous week for paid media. If you dig deeper, however, the real question to be uncovered is that the stakeholder recently changed media vendors and she needs to track whether the new solution is getting a better ROI. That deeper question calls for a very different report from the original ask.
3. Find the right cadence
How often does your report need to come out: daily, real-time, weekly, monthly, quarterly? Do your data sources have updating cadences that have to be considered when integrating that information into the report that match back to report delivery?
Keep in mind that automated reporting makes sense for routine information; ad hoc reports like one-time asks may or may not be a suitable candidate for automation.
4. Think about AI/machine-learning tools
Incorporating artificial intelligence and machine-learning applications into your report can provide insights that help you make better decisions.
Depending on the type of data involved in creating your report, it might be appropriate to incorporate AI and machine-learning to analyze large datasets and bring to the surface patterns that human analysis might miss.
5. Determine the report medium and visual elements
Will your report be delivered in an email, in print, or via an online portal? The medium will affect some of the decisions you'll make about what context to include and the font type (serif vs sans serif fonts based on digital or print), weight, depth, and spacing based of the visual elements of your report.