Client reporting is a detailed summary of your marketing campaign’s performance. Reports enable marketers to look back over past times to compare trending metrics and assess for optimizations. Reports also help marketers stay current, so they ensure that a client’s present position in the market is as updated as possible. Finally, client reporting deals a lot with explaining metrics that measure marketing success. All of this is crucial to account management.
Client reporting is important because it allows you to view the big picture of the data. Without this, clients aren’t able to value the effort and insight that went into their business.
To build rapport and strengthen your client relationship, you must speak frequently and effectively about these topics. Let’s learn a little more about each.
3 Reasons Why Customer Reporting Is Vital
Now that you know what a client report is, it’s important to note that whether you are a digital marketing agency or a freelancer, client reporting offers various opportunities for business relationships. These are our three reasons for what makes client reporting such a vital practice in your marketing management efforts.
- Getting better acquainted with your clients
- Allowing teachable moments in helping your clients
- Facilitating having tough conversations with your clients
There’s a lot client reporting can do for you, so let’s go into what each of these reasons entails.
Get Better Acquainted
Without a doubt, constant communication with your clients helps you get better acquainted with them, especially when you speak to them on a monthly basis. Speaking each month to your clients allows your relationship to blossom into further than just campaign results and into small talk and even rapport.
After a few meetings, you can get a better understanding of the following:
- Their approach
- What they understand about digital marketing
- Where they lack technical knowledge
- What details are they particular about
- What gets under their skin
- Formatting or presenting peeves
These points will help you adjust and customize standard templates to a pace and framework that suits your client. It will allow you to do custom client reporting more effectively.
Expert Tip: Make the most of these opportunities by attending these meetings. That way, you can take notes and tweak them based on their feedback. Don’t wait to hear things a second and third time. This will disappoint your client.
Allows Teachable Moments
As digital marketing professionals, understanding how and when to activate digital marketing strategies is essential to helping your clients achieve their goals. Let’s say that your client has one of the following scenarios:
- Wants to drive business to their brick and mortar. Client reporting allows these conversations to come up as performance data reveals opportunities. In this case, share what campaigns are most relevant to this objective.
- Has tried everything with previous marketers with little to no progress. A thorough and friendly reporting experience can help ease those doubts and concerns.
- Does not understand why a “set and forget” approach doesn’t work. Walking them through data, gaps, and optimization opportunities as data comes in can help them appreciate the work that you’re doing. Explain how long this can take, what strategies work well together, and how to add them.
In essence, reports are a space for you to share your expertise and for clients to appreciate how you are helping them grow their business’s reach.
Expert tip: If their website or online presence is crumby, explain how this affects their investment or turns off the user. All this gets them on board for the marketing efforts ahead.
Have Tough Conversations
If a client’s business’s online presence is inadequate, client reporting allows you to ease into certain topics.
After reviewing progress, it’s easier to explain how poor websites affect overall business performance as website visitors tend to get turned off and thus, also affect the client’s digital marketing investment. Client reporting gets clients on board for adding efforts ahead of time and planning out a future strategy to tackle internal issues. While rapport can give you a better idea of how to upsell your clients, client reporting backs you up on it.
As you can see, reporting nurtures the relationship between marketers and their clients. This practice keeps you accountable, and if handled well, it can create long-standing client relationships.
How to Improve Client Reporting
You can improve client reporting by making small changes. To do so, there are two parts of the reporting process that you need to know, one is the actual report document, and the second is the presentation. Now, let’s talk about each.
The Report
The report document is considered the most important piece of the puzzle because it provides marketers with all the data and information they need. Client reporting tools like AdClicks minimize the number of adjustments and ease the process for marketers to make a report document. When building our report templates, we apply the following practices to improve the experience for you and your client. These practices include:
- Structure: We organize reports and related content in a way that is easy to digest. Separating sections so that each metric can stand alone.
- Personalization: Report customization is a breeze for your clientele, giving them the impression that a lot of effort was put into summarizing their work.
- Automation: Automated reports help set a standard for your reports. The client will know what to expect and will feel less confused by how the data is presented.
There are many options out there, and we can talk on behalf of the AdClicks team and say that this reporting tool allows you to accomplish each of the practices to focus on how to speak to a client.
The Presentation
Though reporting documents can only do so much, our experts offer some of their best advice on top-notch client presentations. They’re as follows:
- Transparency: address changes and speak to hangups and opportunities for improvements openly.
- Simplicity: Don’t be overly technical and explain concepts in a simple manner.
- Consistency: Write down questions and concerns that clients may have in a meeting. When you get a chance, follow-up on these and provide them with the information that will help them feel that you’re doing all that you can to help them understand.
The actions we’ve listed above will help your client feel invigorated about where they are or where they are going. Be mindful of them when creating presentations for your client reports.
Was this post helpful? We aim to inform you of the best practices for client reporting to better communication and data analysis.
Are you still looking for a reporting platform? You should try our reporting tool! Click here to learn more.
