Four ways marketing reporting software can make your life easier

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What can a reporting dashboard do for you and your business?

If you’re a busy marketing manager, then you probably know first-hand how producing monthly stakeholder reports can become a huge drain on your time. One of the most common problems is that information is often siloed across multiple platforms.

You might be accessing social analytics from your channels, customer analytics from your CRM system, as well as web traffic results and insights from email campaigns. You may well have found yourself running static PDF reports or creating graphs in excel or PowerPoint, sometimes even taking screenshots from various platforms. Sooner or later, it becomes one of those dreaded tasks that take time away from your other work.

But, it doesn’t have to be like this! By using the right marketing reporting tools, you can bring your data insights together to share with the right people. Want to know more?

We’ve listed four ways marketing reporting software can make your life easier…

1. Sharing insights made easy

sharing insights made easy with marketing reporting software

You are probably already sharing reports of some kind with your wider organisation and stakeholders. This might be through email, a static document or in a shared workspace. But, sharing reports in this way can present a few problems. Such as, making sure everyone has access to the right versions, keeping the reports up to date, and let’s not forget the effort involved in generating the reports. However, marketing reporting software can help share the right insights with the right people, with very little effort.

Marketing reporting software often allows you to build interactive dashboards which can be accessed by others via their browser. These dashboards are live, so they are always up to date, and can usually be viewed on any device. Rather than teams relying on someone to provide the reports, they can access the insights themselves – also known as data democratisation.

You can even set up automated notifications to stakeholders, meaning they can be alerted when something important changes. So, they don’t have to spend time going back and checking on your dashboards each day.

As well as helping you gain stakeholder buy-in, sharing data across the company makes making data-driven decisions much easier.

2. Data visualisation

data visualisation and marketing reporting software

When it comes to analysing data, presenting it in a digestible format makes a world of difference. Effective data visualisation helps bring the story behind your data to life. Marketing reporting tools will translate data and insights into visuals, such as maps or graphs, to make data easier for our brains to understand and pull insights from. These visuals enable you to quickly spot trends, outliers and understand performance in your data.

Any marketing reporting tool worth its salt will allow you to create (and swap between) the following chart types:

bar graph
column graph
pie chart
area chart
radar chart
multi chart

…whatever visualisation works best for the story your data is telling!

Being able to annotate your charts is really useful too, making it even easier to share insights across the company suitable for all levels of understanding. In short, visualisation enables you to make better decisions.

3. Saving you time and keeping your campaigns moving

keep marketing campaigns moving with marketing reporting software

Imagine you’re a few weeks into a campaign, and you’re not getting the results you expected. Maybe your response rate is poor, or maybe you’re getting the volume but just not the quality. This is where a marketing reporting tool can help keep your campaign moving.

Rather than waiting until the end of the campaign, you can dig straight into the data and see what is happening immediately. What part of your campaign are those low quality leads coming from? Which audience is less responsive? With the data to hand, why might that be? The more information you have to hand, the easier it will be to fix.

Marketing reporting software is also ideal for pulling together those last-minute reports and presentations without needing any warning. Instead of manually drawing information from multiple platforms, campaign reporting tools automatically bring data together and allow you to access comprehensive insights in real-time. This means you can get on with the rest of your tasks on that ever growing to-do list.

Automated dashboards and reports allow you to cut down your lead time between seeing the results of your last campaign, planning for your next one and putting your testing in place. Allowing you to move your campaigns on at a pace that suits your wider company and customer base. Real-time analytics allow you to react quickly to customer trends and market changes, helping you to stay relevant to your audience. And it’s so easy to do!

4. Reliable and secure

reliable data with marketing reporting software

By operating through an online platform, you can reliably send anyone in your business data and insights without the stress of maintaining a small file size or using a third-party file sharing platform. It also gives you access to good quality data as it removes the chance for human error and pulls data straight from each source. And good quality data means reliable reporting. This allows you to make business decisions with peace of mind, knowing they are backed by evidence you can rely on.

As well as accessible, your dashboards also need to be secure. A secure platform will safeguard your organisation’s insights by making them accessible to everyone who needs them, but nobody else. You can enable access rights that allow you to control who sees the dashboards and insights without having to go back to IT each time. Ensuring the right information is going to the right people.

Apteco Orbit

Apteco Orbit is a good example of a tool that allows you to share your data in a live dashboard, as a single source of truth. As an additional bonus, because Orbit is linked to FastStats, you can use it to run an audience selection without having to go back to your data team.

For example, if you are looking at a report in Orbit that tells you 50% of recipients have not opened your last email, you can then select that audience for a new communication. Hey presto, you have your next targeted audience selection without leaving your reporting tool. In a world where 40%* of marketers have to go to their data team to create an audience selection, this could make the process a whole lot easier.

Reporting as we know it is changing – don’t get left behind

When it comes to picking the right marketing reporting software, it’s not just about how the data is laid out. It’s also about how easy it is to share real-time and relevant information with your stakeholders and your wider business. The right software will allow you to communicate the story that your data is telling, in a format that’s accessible for everyone.

If you’d like to know more about how to use data for the best marketing results, take a look at our article: Is Your Marketing Strategy Based on Strong Data Analytics?

*We recently asked attendees of our webinar how they currently made audience selections