Why You Should Be Doing Monthly Marketing Reporting (Plus Free Template)

I learned a long time ago the importance of reporting. Reporting is not meant to justify your job or convince your manager everything in the world is going as well as you (or they) hoped it would.

Y’all, we’re talking startups. Stuff will break. It will take longer than you want and cost more than it should.

We measure and report so that we can adjust. This helps you and others better understand what is and what is not working, and to iterate and improve.

Click the image or button below to get the template. You can save it to your Google Drive and adapt it to meet your needs from there.

Structuring Your Monthly Marketing Report

Like any report, structure is critical if you want others to benefit from the report. Here’s a structure that I follow when creating monthly marketing reports to distribute across the company.

• Executive Summary

• Blended Department KPIs

• Summary of Activities

• Challenges

• Planned Activities

• Team Announcements

• Channel Reports

• Important Links

As your marketing program grows, you’ll likely add new channels or areas of the business to report on. While your CMO or Head of Marketing may be the one compiling, presenting, and/or distributing the report, it’s important the responsibility of assembling channel reporting is delegated to channel owners.

When you start this practice, you may only have a few channels like Email, Ads, and Social. As you build, you’ll add relevant channels. Of course, stay focused on your primary channels until you begin to see diminishing returns or obvious opportunities arise to expand efforts. To help you bucket your channel activities, reference the 19 marketing channels established in Traction. This is all part of the ever-present challenge of tuning your marketing mix.

There is no need to over-complicate this report. It shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to prepare. The practice of assembling should be beneficial in that you’re watching and tracking metrics that make a difference as well as relating those metrics back to specific activities. Furthermore, others who read the report should be able to make those connections and breeze through the report relatively easily.

Other slides that may become more relevant as your company grows:

• OKR or Rock slides

• Detailed Budget slides

• Additional Resources

• Special Project Recaps

The clearer your roadmap and objectives are, the more you’ll want to include comparisons of performance against those goals. This may look different from company to company as it’ll depend on if you’re purely a marketing org, or if sales or another department is driving performance.

What to Do with Your Monthly Marketing Report

I’ve mentioned sharing this report across the company. And that’s what you should do. Practically, this can be done very simply.

• Always create reports in a sharable format, such as Google Slides

  • Leave your reports open for comments from anyone so that you can foster discussion and/or debate

• Post to a General or All Company channel (Slack or Teams)

  • Provide some context and teasers as to what to expect within this month’s report

• Post a video overview of the highlights to go with the slide deck

  • This is where you only focus on presenting notable highlights that benefit others to know and learn

Stay Focused on Why

The why is important for not spending excessive amounts of time building reports.

Ultimately, you want to reduce the time it takes to receive feedback on your efforts. This is your feedback loop. The faster you can learn what is and is not working, the faster you can iterate on your activities.

Your reporting should aim to truly focus on needle-moving activities. Everything else is at best, secondary, and at worst, distracting. Minimize long lists of activities (this note is intended especially for whoever runs your marketing).

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Weekly Podcast Feature

Unlocking Storage Potential in All Properties with Joseph Woodbury, CEO and Founder of Neighbor.com

It's my second time interviewing Joseph Woodbury, Co-founder and CEO of Neighbor.com. It's my second time interviewing Joseph Woodbury, co-founder and CEO of Neighbor.com. In case you missed, Joseph previously joined Tyler Cauble and I for a live stream on Tyler's CRE YouTube channel. 

We get into how his company is disrupting the self-storage industry by leveraging the peer-to-peer model. Neighbor allows individuals and businesses to monetize unused space by renting it out for storage. They have operations in all 50 states, providing storage solutions at a micro level that traditional storage facilities cannot justify.

The company has experienced challenges in acquiring residential customers but has evolved its user acquisition strategies over time. We also get into the demand and supply dynamics of the storage industry and the opportunity for property owners to achieve full property monetization through storage solutions.

One topic I personally get excited to discuss that Joseph touches on is the network effects and the challenges of expanding to new markets. There’s all that and more in this one. Tune in!

Have a topic you want to see written about next week? Submit your questions here or respond to this email.