Building a Digital Marketing Reporting Strategy That Drives Results
Digital marketing reporting — enabling key stakeholders to see what’s working and what’s not — is essential in today’s competitive markets and will become more important with the growing use of AI.
As companies gather more digital marketing metrics, they also need to focus on how they are reporting them.
Using a range of operational analysis and business intelligence techniques and strategies, Prime 8 helps clients build digital marketing reporting strategies designed for peak performance.
Digital marketing reporting is a keystone of good marketing. It starts with good data, and today, there’s no shortage of that. Most companies now have a wide range of data at their disposal.
Companies that dig deep into this wealth of data — making the effort to truly understand the specific digital marketing KPIs that drive sales — are gaining the edge in today’s highly competitive markets. But as you gain advantages, you also need to communicate them by maintaining active communication with key internal and external stakeholders on what’s working and what’s not.
Unfortunately, with so much data to manage, it’s easy for digital marketing reports to come up short. In this blog, we’ll look at three common scenarios where Prime 8 used its expertise in business operational analysis and business intelligence to help clients get their digital marketing reporting on track.
Strengthening Communication for an Indirect Channel
A large technology provider had long relied on its partner channel as a marketing multiplier — amplifying marketing messages to customers at a local level (where its enterprise-oriented direct sales force could not reach) and consistently hitting sales objectives.
Over time, however, partner amplification had gone tepid. When it came to selling a specific set of cloud services, partners seemed unaware of the overall value proposition and uninterested in using the marketing support provided by the company.
When Prime 8 was engaged, we quickly prioritized solutions to get more partner mindshare devoted to selling cloud services. Working with the client, we built a dedicated partner management resource — a team of several dozen people — to help individual partners navigate the sometimes-complicated set of marketing resources provided by the company and also activate their benefits.
To enhance the effectiveness of this team, our consultants also built an extensive online learning program. This included a digital playbook of best practices as well as resources for communicating efficiently and effectively to the partner community: email templates, call scripts, and a cadence of what to discuss with partners each month.
Finally, to ensure continuous feedback on the effectiveness of the program, our consultants implemented a marketing analytics dashboard to present information on partner performance in a clear, visual format.
The dashboard, combined with the new partner support structure, created a scalable, communications-oriented program that delivered real results: the number of partners that could be managed effectively more than doubled, helping to generate a 67% increase in cloud services revenue.
Enhancing Communication and Optimizing Digital Marketing Reporting
Inconsistencies in underlying performance data is another common challenge that can undercut digital marketing reporting.
We worked with a tech company that was investing heavily in global marketing efforts (including extensive use of incentives and rebates) but lacked real insight into their comparative performance value. Because multiple regions, departments, and channels all reported their results differently, it was impossible to get a consistent, global view of exactly how money was being spent.
In an extensive effort, our consultants worked with teams around the world to get a consistent approach to how data would be measured and interpreted. We then put in place a global data-gathering system, making it possible for our client to collect, analyze, and compare information in ways that had been previously impossible.
We then developed nine marketing analytics dashboards that analyzed worldwide investment. Using this dashboard, teams located anywhere in the world can quickly see how money is being spent down to the category level and make data-driven decisions about how to spend their budgets.
From Data Overload to Data-Driven Decisions
Another common problem that undercuts many digital marketing reporting efforts is over-reliance on Excel spreadsheets. While Excel remains a valuable tool for managing and running ‘what if’ scenarios on a finite set of variables, it’s less effective at extracting insights from today’s larger and much more diverse data sets and then presenting findings in an actionable format.
Prime 8 consultants worked with a senior manager at a leading technology company whose team was struggling with this very problem. The team had been charged with distilling a vast amount of data — drawn from five different data sources — into reports that would stay true to the original information while providing clear, quick insights for use in shaping ongoing strategies.
Our work with the tech firm's team led to the development of a completely bespoke management dashboard. Developed using PowerBI, it delivers a range of reports and tools including a total addressable marketing report, an in-depth ROI analysis, PowerApp forms to simplify target restatements and much more — all tailored to the unique needs and permissions of users across multiple regions and business units.
Previously, team members spent hours creating PowerPoint presentations — filtering multiple tables and copying/pasting data to make it presentable and actionable. Now, a preformatted report can be generated with a simple click.
Preparing for the AI-Powered Future of Marketing
AI in digital marketing is changing the game. Reporting is critical today and is only going to become more important as AI plays a larger role. According to the 2023 Global Trends in AI Report, high-quality, well-preprocessed data ready for AI is essential for making better predictions, reducing bias in AI models and keeping compute, storage, and energy usage under control.
Are You Ready with Digital Marketing Reporting that Drives Success?
Where are you right now with your digital marketing reporting? Are you successfully meeting the needs of your multiple channels? Are you taking full advantage of all the data available to you? Using the right set of tools? Ready for AI? Talk to Prime 8. Let our consultants help you address these challenges and implement a reporting strategy to help you make the most of your marketing data.
