Strategic B2B social media marketing is not just about having an account with a pretty feed that attracts a lot of likes. Nor is it about shoving your products down people’s throats. It’s about using social media strategically to build relationships with your prospects.
B2B social media marketing often falls into the trap of being devoid of personality, out of fear of not appearing ‘professional’ enough. But it’s important to remember you’re not communicating to a business—there’s a real person at the other end of your post you’re trying to reach, human to human.
One of the key differences between B2C and B2B marketing is that the sales cycle is usually much longer for us B2Bs than for B2Cs. We need to spend longer building and nurturing relationships with our prospects. Your sales team can be in contact with someone for a year or more before the sale goes through. If you think about your social media audience as that contact, what conversations would you like to have over the course of that year?
You could argue that building relationships through social media is even more important for B2B brands than for consumer brands.
Social media offers us a place to meet our prospects where they are. A smart B2B social media marketing plan will outline the strategies you’ll use to meet your business goals.
More than half the world is now on social media.
Worldwide, more than 2.7 billion people are on Facebook. More than a billion are on Instagram. LinkedIn has more than 675 million users. Closer to home, Australians spend an average of 1 hour and 47 minutes on social media each day, a figure that has been slowly increasing over the past 8 years.
B2B buyers research before making a purchasing decision and they use social media as part of that research. A LinkedIn study concluded that social media interactions influence 84% of C-level and VP-level buyers before they purchase a product or service.
By ignoring or playing down the importance of social media in our overall marketing plan, we’re handing our competitors the knife to carve off a great slice of pie for themselves.
Despite the prevailing cry of ‘be everywhere’, this is absolutely not true for B2B social media marketing.
B2B social media marketers can and should be far more discerning.
You don’t need to launch a TikTok account just because its popularity is rapidly rising. (Phew! Frankly, my cat’s not that interesting and who’s got time to learn how to dance this week?)
And you don’t have to use every new function of each platform you’re on. It’s OK to be on Instagram and not use Reels for your business.
Use our Customer Research Matrix to help you figure this out and create a clear picture of your ideal customer. When you have great clarity around your target audience, you’ll know where and how your brand should be on social media.
Just like any other business function, don’t bite off more than you can chew. As part of your marketing plan, consider which resources your business has that you can assign to manage your social media presence.
While LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram might be a good fit for your business, if you don’t have the resources and budget to maintain a professional social media presence, show up regularly across your chosen platforms and create fresh content, instead, focus your efforts on the top performing channels and do these well.
There needs to be a good reason for joining a social media channel that aligns to your marketing plan. A hastily set-up and soon-abandoned social profile does not reflect well on a business.
When people visit social media, they’re there to connect with others, be entertained, informed or inspired. They don’t visit their social media channels to be sold to.
Even if sales are your end game, keep in mind that you need to build relationships with people first.
This means your social media accounts should not be self-serving where you push out nothing but promotional posts dipped in sales messages. Otherwise, it will reflect badly on your brand. Promotional posts are fine, so long as they are in moderation and make sense in context.
You should look to educate, entertain, engage or inspire your target audience via your social posts.
Use a mix of social media posts to educate, entertain, engage and inspire
| Educate Share a link to a breaking news story or share an opinion on an industry topic. Share ‘how to’ tips for a common task in your industry. Turn one of your blog posts into multiple social media posts to help build your authority on a certain topic. | Entertain Share a funny meme that highlights a myth or stereotype about your industry. It doesn’t have to be one that you created. Share a video that’s relevant to your audience that you found entertaining or even amusing. Write a personal story that shares a funny experience that relates to your business. | Engage Ask your audience a question about a topic relevant to your industry. Add a poll to a post about a contentious topic in your industry and ask your audience to vote. Ask for help. Share a problem you’re having and ask your audience to solve it. | Inspire Share results another client has gained from working with you. Share a testimonial that outlines how you helped a client overcome a specific problem. Share statistics from your industry that show the positive side of an issue in your industry. |
To avoid appearing too salesy, keep in mind that you’re trying to build a relationship with prospects. B2B social media marketing is still B2-human communication. And because you’re communicating to a real human and not some faceless business brand, your social posts should feel more like a conversation than a billboard.
Your tone of voice should match your brand and position in the market. For example, if you make a utilitarian, no-frills products, then your tone of voice should come across in a similar way — no fuss, informative and functional. If you’re not selling high-end, complex software, don’t try to sound like you are.
If you’re selling data analytics or accounting services, you need to communicate to your prospects in a way that matches your brand and their expectations.
While you can (and should!) give your audience the kind of content they expect from you and in the way they expect it, it’s OK to be creative and try different approaches so long as you remain authentic to your brand. Standing out from your competitors can help your posts get noticed in your prospect’s cluttered feed.
Social media presents an opportunity for us to give our audience a peek behind the curtain and show the human side of our business. It’s where people can see the interesting things we’re working on and get to know us and the other people in our business, better. Consider passing the social media baton to your team members from time-to-time to help humanise your business. It’s a great way to show that there are real people and stories behind your brand. Plus, it keeps your content fresh.
Having a good marketing plan in place will set you up well to create an effective B2B social media strategy.
If you haven’t already identified your core brand pillars (those 4 or 5 top-level categories all your products and services fit under) then take the time to decide what those brand pillars will be. These are the key things you want your business to be known for.
Social media planning is all about working out what you’re going to say and when.
Plan topics and themes under your brand pillars. This will help you streamline your posts by staying focused on those core messages.
Think about important dates in your business—product launches, busy periods, seasonal influences, sales cycle predictions—and plan content to lead up to those events.
Prepare content in batches so you’re not having to scramble for fresh stuff each week. Batching social media posts saves a lot of time. Refer to the educate, entertain, engage, or inspire matrix to produce a good mix of content themes.
Use a social media scheduling tool to line up your posts in advance so they publish automatically across the week or month ahead. Then during the week, you’ll only need to set aside time to respond to comments to encourage more engagement and build those all-important relationships.
While B2B social media marketing might make you feel anxious about creating and executing a plan that perfectly balances a mix of post types that sound authentically like your brand while incorporating your end goal—sales— it doesn’t have to be overly complex.
We’ve prepared a DIY social media calendar to help you create a month’s worth of social media posts aligned to the topics you set under your brand pillars and to ensure you get the right mix of promotional and other post types.
Join the DIY Marketing Project for access to our calendar and plenty of other tools and resources to help you with your marketing.
The key to social media success for B2Bs is to use your authentic voice and let your personality show through while showcasing your knowledge and what you do best.
Keep an eye on your metrics to see which posts get more engagement and which posts don’t. Use these metrics to continually refine your social media calendar.
Use a spelling and grammar checker like Grammarly or ProWritingAid to avoid embarrassing typos that can make you look unprofessional and reflect poorly on your brand. You can hire a graphic designer to set you up with templates that reflect your visual brand and look great, or choose stock images and resize them yourself—we have resizing templates you can use on our DIY Marketing Project platform.
But perhaps the greatest tip is to remember that good B2B social media marketing is all about connecting human to human, not business to business. By showing the human side of your business and offering that personal touch, you’ll have a greater chance of bringing in enthusiastic customers who are on board with what you do.
If you’re a DIY marketer and need inspiration and guidelines to boost your marketing efforts, visit the DIY Marketing Project. You’ll find lots of resources and templates that will help you run your B2B social media marketing campaigns in less time and for better results.
Marketers often talk about sales, marketing and content funnels. Mastering your funnel is the key to business growth. But it’s not a case of one size fits all.
Read on for tips on designing your own funnel, and making sure each section plays its part.
You probably get the idea of a funnel as a broad term – it’s about the mindset of people as they move along a journey.
Many people enter into the top of the funnel (the wide part). The group gradually gets smaller, and their intentions stronger, as we progress towards the end of the funnel (the skinny part).
In the context of sales and marketing, this funnel’s journey generally starts when a decision-maker first starts thinking about a challenge, and ends when they make a purchase to fix that challenge. Some funnels follow the prospect a little bit beyond that purchase, through to when they start recommending their solution to others.
Why do you need to know your funnel?
Each funnel is subtly different depending on the industry and the department using it. Let’s look at the different types of sales and marketing funnels and how they work together.
This classic sales funnel might bring to mind Mad-Men-era print advertising, or Alec Baldwin’s character in the film Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s a good simple template to follow when selling pretty much anything, and a salesperson can apply face-to-face or digital tactics across the whole journey.
The idea here is to capture the prospect’s attention, and then be interesting enough to hold their attention while you explain the benefits and create some desire for your product. Then, give them the confidence to take action without fear of disappointment.
The marketing funnel follows roughly the same trajectory as the sales funnel – the only difference is that it was created by marketers, not salespeople. This means it naturally has a little more complexity and a few more moving parts.
This funnel is more focused on the mindset of the prospect than the action of the salesperson. It’s especially relevant in B2B marketing (what we do!), where sales journeys are significantly longer, take a lot more thought and involve many more people.
Here, the prospect has an awareness of their challenge, then weighs up potential solutions before converting into a customer. From there, you want to hold onto them to retain their lifetime value, and enable them as an advocate so they can do the selling for you.
Now we’re talking specifically about content marketing, and mapping the content you create across the buying journey. The content funnel closely mirrors the marketing funnel above, but simplifies it into three main sections:
This makes it easier for a content team to create pieces which span the whole buying journey.
You’ll notice the loyalty and advocacy stages from our marketing funnel don’t feature here. But that doesn’t mean you should forget about them. If you engage with your existing customers when creating content – for example, asking them what they’d like to see from your content, or coming to them for an interview – it reinforces their commitment to your business.
Your sales and marketing functions should work in harmony, with content as the fuel in the engine.
Create content for prospects at every stage of the funnel. That way you’ll have something for your sales team to take out to a meeting or send to a prospect whatever stage they’re at, and you’ll have plenty of ammunition to use for remarketing ads and email campaigns.
Good content comes from good communication. Open the channels between your content creators and customer-facing members of staff so that your content is directly informed by customer challenges and queries.
Even if you’ve never heard the term before, you probably have a good idea of what email marketing is just from the name. And you’d be right; email marketing is just that – marketing messages sent via email.
B2B email marketing campaigns are just one of many channels in the marketer’s arsenal–and with more and more shiny marketing tools and platforms popping up every day, good old email marketing is becoming perceived as ‘outdated’ in some circles.
But implemented well, with a solid strategy, great tech and amazing content, you won’t get better bang for buck anywhere. It’s still one of the highest-converting channels for middle and bottom-of-funnel leads.
But the art form is evolving – and to predict the future, we first need to go back a little.
Email marketing has progressed in three main ways:
In the ‘old days’, email marketing was only employed by a few forward-thinking marketers and salespeople. The copy followed a letter correspondence-like format. It was regular, intimate, and effective.
One of the first movers into email marketing was Gary Vaynerchuk.
“When I was building up business for WineLibrary.com, I relied heavily on email marketing. It was 1996, and email marketing had not taken off yet, but our list had 400,000 contacts. And my open rate back then? 80%. No joke. Now, they’re in the twenties. They’re in the twenties for everyone. But I reaped years and years of benefit from the 80% rates because I hopped on email early.”
Then the deluge came.
Businesses would purchase huge lists of contacts without making sure the people on those lists would actually care about their offer. They’d blast a sales message out and see what came back. Open rates could be slim and conversions even more so.
(This practice still happens today and we strongly recommend against it. You’ll end up blacklisted from your email provider and known across the internet as a no-good spammer).
The backlash began.
Filters were introduced to our inboxes. The Spam Act was introduced to Australian law in 2003. More recently, government regulations like the GDPR in Europe introduced huge deterrents to businesses who obtain customers’ details or contact them without express permission.
Today, email marketing hasn’t slowed down – but the approach has gone from a shotgun blast to more of a gentle hug. Instead of shouting into the void, we’re trying to start a conversation – and new technology means we can make that conversation a lot more relevant to the individuals within our audience by personalising our content.
We’re now able to split our audiences into smaller, much more interesting segments than ever before. We can split audiences by the actions they take, as well as being able to segment by demographics. Basically, we’re trying to recapture that early email magic, and achieve the relevance and intimacy that those first email marketers enjoyed.
We all love a good stat. In fact, the only thing better than one is a bunch!
Here are a few email marketing stats that every email marketer needs to know about in 2021:
Email continues to go from strength to strength, continuing to prove itself as one of the most cost-effective ways to build an audience and a business.
Campaign Monitor (a service we use and endorse 👍 ) updates its email benchmarks each year. 2020’s Australian results make for some interesting reading. A few highlights:
The events of 2020 have also had an effect on B2B email marketing – however not strictly in the way you might expect. From emfluence’s 2020 Email Marketing Benchmarks report:
We generally split email campaigns into three different ‘types’:
One email sent around a promotion, topic or trigger. They can occur regularly, but won’t be linked to each other. This could be a one-time sales blast to your contacts or a monthly newsletter.
Emails which send automatically based on an action your contacts take. For example, delivering a piece of content they may have ordered, or notifying them about an offer you might have if they visit a certain section of your website.
A series of emails sent at predetermined intervals in a particular order. These emails will normally interlink thematically, like separate parts of the same story.
Which you’ll use will depend on your audience and your offer. B2B businesses will need a different approach to their B2C counterparts as the sales cycles are typically longer and more information needs to be shared. That’s why email sequences are a great addition to any B2B email marketing strategy.
Let’s dig into each type in more detail.
One-off campaigns: like your monthly newsletter, new product announcement, or an alert for special EOFY pricing.
It’s important to still segment your data and tailor your emails to each segment. You don’t have to create completely new emails for each, but choose a section or portion of the email to personalise, such as the introduction or one of the pieces of content you’re promoting.
If you have a really well set up database with good segmentation, you can use ‘conditional content’ to show different people different things, depending on what’s most relevant for them.
Trigger-based emails: triggered by an action the contact takes – e.g. clicking a link in another campaign or visiting a page on your website.
Sending emails based on triggers requires you to have a little bit of tracking set up on your website. You may be able to do this through your email provider (or we can help).
Here’s how it works. An existing prospect (someone who has already entered their details on your site) revisits a particular page – for example, one of your product pages. They then get an email an hour later asking if they have questions about the product or offering them a 10% discount.
Another example is someone visiting a specific page on your website but quite converting (ie not filling in a form). If they’re already in your database, you can send them a ‘how can we help?’ email.
General email sequence: a predetermined suite of emails that you send out to your contacts over time regardless of their behaviour.
A prospect enters their details through your website and is added to your system as a ‘cold’ lead. The idea of this campaign is to pique their interest by sending them content they might be interested in.
You could trigger a general email sequence when a prospect takes a specific action which is linked to an email delivery – for example, enters their details to unlock an ebook download. You might then send one email to deliver the ebook, one a day or two later to remind them to download it and then another in a week to see what they thought and suggest something else.
Nurture email sequence: You can take the single action-based email a step further by applying the same logic across an entire sequence.
This is similar to a general sequence campaign but with an added layer of personalisation which comes from the actions your prospect takes.
For example, if the reader visits a certain page on your website, or clicks a certain link in a previous email, they might trigger a series of emails with more information about the topic they’ve clicked on.
Of course, an email is no good if nobody is there to read it.
You’ve got to start somewhere – so don’t let a small list of contacts stop you from developing campaigns and sequences.
However, you must include email list building into your overarching email (and marketing) strategy, because sending campaigns to the same people week in week out isn’t going to get you the results you want.
We encourage all of our clients to focus on building up their customer and prospect databases. Ideally, you want a lot of contacts, each with a lot of data – name, business, locale and one or two other qualifiers unique to your objectives.
Here are a few quick ideas for building up your contact list:
Knowing your audience is essential when you’re developing your strategy.
Emails sent with the wrong tone of voice or with the wrong kind of content won’t resonate with your audience and will severely hamper the effectiveness of your campaigns.
You also need to think about timing for all elements of your email marketing. Random emails every couple of months isn’t going to help you build your empire – you need constant conversation.
So before you write an email, decide: what do you want to achieve?
Your email marketing is a sub-segment of your overarching marketing strategy, and as such should feed into your wider marketing and business goals.
Every business is different, but we think a combination of regular single campaigns, longer email sequences and action-based emails is a strong mix. You don’t have to build these all at once – you’ll do them over time, starting with the most important, and add functionality and content as you go.
The exact structure will depend on your industry and audience – as well as your internal goals and the resources you have on hand (or what you’re able to outsource).
Once you have the structure worked out, it’s time to write your emails.
If you have a copywriter on hand, give this job to them. If not, you might think about giving it to an agency. Your emails need to reflect your brand’s tone of voice and personality, while still getting across all the essential information and leading the customer to act in a certain way (by downloading a guide or purchasing a product, for example).
There are a few schools of thought on how you should write and what you should write about. We think a safe bet is to stay true to your roots, and focus on telling simple stories that you can then relate back to your product or brand. Businesses we talk to tend to think that because we’re writing for B2B, we need to fill our emails with technical jargon and marketing-speak. Don’t forget that B2B buyers are people, too – they laugh, they like to be entertained and they see right through you when you try to be too clever.
The journey doesn’t end when you press ‘send’ – in fact, it’s quite the opposite. You need to constantly review and refine your email sequences.
Look through the data and let it tell you what’s working and what isn’t. It’s important to adjust your structure, copy and visuals – as well as the timing of the sequence – based on the performance of the emails.
Stories: people love to hear stories, and if you can reveal something about you or your organisation, that’s win-win. Businesses are full of interesting stories. but often, our clients don’t see them because they’re too close. A story can come from anywhere – so keep an ear out, and announce to your staff that you’re actively looking for tales to tell.
Offers: There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned offer to get people clicking through.
Social proof: Case studies and testimonials from happy clients always make for compelling email content.
Teases: You want to become a welcome presence in peoples’ inboxes – and one way to do that is to build excitement for your next email. Use a ‘PS’ to promote what you’ll be talking about next time, or weave it into the body copy if you can.
Subject lines: Too often we see subject lines treated as an afterthought, when really they’re one of your most important elements. Nobody will see the email you’ve crafted if your subject is boring.
‘One-percenters’: Don’t forget the essential micro-content – pre-header copy, ‘from’ name and unsubscribe copy (a bit of humour here may stop contacts un-subbing).
That’s it: your guide to creating B2B email marketing campaigns that work. If you liked this, please let us know – we always love getting feedback on our guides!
But before we go, we have a few gifts for you to take on your way…
Email list: the list of contacts you’ll be sending emails to.
Data segmentation: Splitting up your recipient list into groups based on the data you’ve collected on them – for example, locale. You can segment this any way you like, but ensure you have the same information for every contact otherwise it gets messy.
Tagging: You can tag your contacts to segment them further or more specifically. For example, if you deal with both government and private organisations, and want to speak to each separately, you can tag them as such.
Personalisation: the act of showing each reader information that’s unique to them based on what you know about them (for example, saying ‘Hi Holly’, or giving me a Melbourne-specific deal).
Email campaign (single): Any singular email sent in isolation. These can be regular or one-off.
Email sequence: A co-ordinated and linked sequence of emails sent in a specific order, working towards an end goal.
Action based autoresponder: An email that’s sent based on an action – for instance, someone entering their details to download an ebook will then receive an automatically triggered email to download the ebook. Another example is a ‘forgot my password’ email.
Hard bounce: An email that comes back to you because the email address is invalid. Remove these from your database, or they’ll skew your results.
Soft bounce: An email that temporarily can’t be delivered. It could be because it’s too large or your recipient’s email server is down.
Split testing: You can test all kinds of email elements like subject lines, CTA buttons or header images by sending two emails and comparing the results against each other. Your email software will most likely have the capabilities to set up and show you the winner. Remember, only test one element at a time so you know what’s making the difference.
Open rate: The percentage of people who opened your email out of everyone who received it.
Click-through rate: The percentage of people who clicked a link inside your email out of everyone who opened it.
Is your marketing a bit stale? Feel like you’ve hit a plateau? You might have heard about growth hacking from the startup world, but actually any kind of business can do some marketing growth hacking of their own to see results without huge spend.
For your average B2B business, your best measure of growth on the marketing side is your sales pipeline. So our tips here are all about engaging new leads, re-engaging old ones and making sure they slide smoothly down your marketing and sales funnel.
Here are five marketing growth hacks you can start using straight away to unlock more leads and start having better conversations.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for finding perfect prospects and engaging with them.
Use the tool’s in-depth search functionality to find who you’re looking for. You can search by company size, content keywords, even what school they went to – check out the full list here.
Then you can create lead lists (which only you can see) for specific segments – perfect if you service a few different industries or business sizes.
Don’t just rush in with a sales message – follow what they post and engage with their content. Not only is it a more personable approach, but you might be able to answer a few of your initial sales questions just by what they’re posting. You can build out a clear picture of their personality and their challenges before you come in with a pitch.
Yes, there’s lots of noise distracting from the signal on Twitter, but lots of relevant conversations happen there, and certain industries (like tech) are very active. There’s also a certain kind of discourse that happens on Twitter that you won’t find on any other B2B social media community.
Use hashtags and location search to find people talking about the topics you’re interested in. You can use Twitter’s Lists functionality to keep track of prospects, but keep in mind that every Twitter user can see which lists they’re on.
Once you’ve found your target audience, start getting involved in conversations. If you have some crossover from your LinkedIn list, engage with them on Twitter too – just make sure to do it in a manner that’s appropriate for the platform. The same works vice versa – often you’ll want to bring Twitter leads over to LinkedIn for a more work-focussed conversation.
When you find a trending topic, the next step is to start capitalising on that buzz by setting up a Google Ads campaign to direct traffic to your website (use Google Keyword Planner to narrow in on the specific keywords – the below example is a keyword search for “marketing growth hack”).
You need to send that traffic to a page that’s relevant to the topic and provides some value – for example, sending leads from a specific industry to your industry-specific website page. If you don’t already have one, write and publish a blog on the topic. Otherwise, the traffic will bounce and you’ll just be wasting your money.
Here’s an example from our perspective: if a topic was trending about the rise in small B2B marketing agencies, we could write a blog about how we only focus on B2B (and why), and then set up a compelling Google Ads campaign to direct traffic to it.
If you already have a library of blogs that perform well, you don’t need to get distracted by the need to be pushing out heaps of new stuff. You can add value to your existing blogs by adding in ‘content upgrades’.
This is content that’s more in-depth than the blog but still the same topic – for example, a research report or an infographic.
Put a link to this upgraded content on the blog, but behind a form. This is a great technique to combine with your Google Ads from point four.
Right now you might re-engage with an old contact if you happen to remember them, or you have a new product or service to pitch. But as you grow, you should have a system in place for re-engaging with old prospects.
You can set up an email automation through your CRM software – but there’s nothing wrong with an old-fashioned phone call or email as well. Just make sure you have a trigger which will notify you when it’s time to get in touch.
These prospects could be proposals you didn’t win or leads that fell quiet… there’ll be a lot of them, and it might look like an intimidating list – but remember, they showed interest in your business for a reason. If you have a shiny new piece of content (or you’ve recently updated an older one 😉) you have a perfect reason to reach out.
Now you’re ready to start your own growth hacking campaign with our tried and tested marketing growth hacks. With these techniques you can break that plateau and get your message out to a whole new audience.
Just make sure you’ve refined that message and your proposition is crystal clear before you start – you wouldn’t want to waste the opportunities about to come your way!
The process of reporting B2B marketing results to your boss or leadership team starts WAY before you start collecting data.
It starts back at the beginning of your marketing strategy, in the planning phase.
That’s where you agree what’s important to them and the business, which numbers matter and how marketing is going to help boost those numbers.
Yes, this is challenging, and it can be tough to get the more ‘hands-off marketing’ leaders to engage on this concept so early on. But if you don’t do this at the start, you’ll be presenting some pretty sad reports. Your Facebook ad stats, Google click-through rates and numbers of marketing-qualified leads will lack impact, and it’ll be even more challenging to negotiate that extra budget when you need it.
Use this five-step checklist if you’re struggling with B2B marketing reporting. It’ll give you some confidence in your numbers and make sure everyone in your leadership team is engaged in your monthly marketing report.
Although time-consuming, getting all your key decision-makers (or one from each department if you’re a bigger organisation) together for a marketing planning session is essential.
You want everyone to be involved in developing the strategy from the beginning, so there’s no surprises later and everyone’s expectations are set.
It doesn’t have to go all day, but leave at least a few hours.
As part of the planning stage, book two meetings. For the first meeting, ask your leadership team:
Take some time to digest this and come together again in a day or so. Now you can discuss these points:
Make sure you get everyone to agree on this. Send around an email with what was discussed and agreed upon so that you can come back to it over the course of your marketing activity to make sure you’re still on track and flag any potential issues.
When you have multiple teams, channels and platforms involved in marketing implementation, it’s tough to achieve a single ‘source of truth’ for your data.
Get together with your marketing team and spend some time working out where the best data is. From there you can develop your reporting processes, and set some ‘rules’ for who needs to supply what data (for example, all new leads from your focus landing page) and at what time (for example, every two weeks on a Wednesday morning).
You might be lucky enough to be able to automate this through your marketing platform. If not, take a look at Zapier – a connection tool that can link together apps that wouldn’t normally be able to speak to each other.
For example, you can send your website leads (from a WordPress plugin like Gravity Forms) to a list in Excel, so that you can keep track of your leads each month and be able to scrutinise between good and bad leads in a way that Google Analytics doesn’t track.
If you’re reporting regularly it’s well worth spending some time early in the process on this – you’ll thank yourself later.
Wherever you can, look for tech tools that can help you automate all (or at least some) of your marketing reporting tasks. The less time you spend on actually crunching the numbers, the more time you can spend focusing on the report itself and the story you want to tell.
While your numbers themselves are important, it’s HOW you present them that can make or break your chances of engaging your leadership team (and maybe getting that extra budget you want).
In my experience a monthly report is the right way to go. Your numbers will show growth and change, but it’s regular enough that you won’t need to re-explain common concepts and metrics.
Set up an in-person meeting or video call to go through the report each month. Ideally you want to chat through the numbers, not just email a PDF and hope for the best. Take charge and talk through each section, but keep it relevant and concise. Us marketers tend to get excited by ‘all the data’ – other people don’t ☺️
It’s important to remember that you may not nail this on your first attempt.
Set aside some time after each reporting meeting to review the process, especially if it’s new. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
Keep in regular contact with your marketing team about the other metrics they’re tracking, and if any might be worth including in your primary marketing report. Marketing is constantly evolving, and we don’t want to be left reporting on metrics that are no longer relevant because of changing behaviours or technology advancements.
Want the exact marketing reporting dashboard used by marketing agencies? Head to the DIY Marketing Project. We have stacks of templates, dashboards and walkthroughs you can download and use to create better reports and amazingly effective marketing.
