Reporting is an essential but perhaps sometimes tedious task, as it consumes your productive hours. Tackling complex data might take a few hours to several days, depending on the number of clients you have.

If your agency client needs a smaller reporting frequency, i.e., weekly, it might become quite taxing for your team. What makes it even more challenging is that you need to be meticulous while preparing those reports as marketers use them for critical decision-making.

What Is a Reporting Tool?

A reporting tool for an agency, or marketing reporting software, is a system that fetches information from various channels and re-arranges it in graphics charts, tables, and visual presentations. It makes the complex information easy to understand, interpret and consume for better decision making.

If you want to turn your agency into a reporting powerhouse, here are a few tips:-

1. Customize Your Dashboard

Different clients have different priorities, so you need custom metrics for each. However, one thing is common among them - most want to evaluate their performance across various channels. You can combine data from different integrations into a single exclusive metric to communicate the campaign performance as per the client's requirement.

Custom metrics give you the needed flexibility because generalized metrics only give you an approximate idea of what is happening.

DashClicks uses multiple metrics and integrations to present data into one organized dashboard. So, you can see your campaign performance according to other channels. All you need to do is drag and drop the items to communicate your campaign's success.

2. Manage Everything From a Single Dashboard

Too much data can lead to analysis paralysis, which is why most clients prefer to keep it minimal. They find it convenient to control everything from one dashboard. It allows you to pull necessary data and use the relevant metrics for crucial decision-making through numerous integrations.

Using a visual dashboard, you don't need to look further. It can paint a good picture of how your campaign is faring.

It allows you to use the specific metrics you should track. Marketing today has become highly complex with too many channels, increasing competition, and exploding volumes of data. You might need to switch between platforms, consuming a lot of time extracting the information you're looking for.

Using a platform like DashClicks, you can easily connect numerous digital marketing channels in a few clicks. DashClicks offers 30+ integrations with channels such as Facebook ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google My Business Insights, etc.

You can combine these channels with digital marketing tools such as a keyword rank tracker. Besides a white-labeled dashboard and fulfillment services, DashClicks offers a whole marketing ecosystem for agencies. Its software apps such as Contacts, Deals, Analytics, Inbound, and InstaReports come equipped with built-in tools.

It will make your life easier!

3. Use Storytelling

You can make your reports even more engaging by storytelling. It is the desired value addition you can provide to your client. You can set goals and keep clients updated on the campaign's progress by highlighting the achievements.

If you fail to communicate your successes, your clients will never realize the value you're offering. Furthermore, you can use data and visual elements to tell the brand's success story, saving time and increasing engagement. It's also suitable for your agency's branding.

4. Make Your Client Feel Special Through Personalization

Adding personalized insights and commentary to the report is an excellent way to make your clients feel special.

You can easily do it on your custom dashboard by adding specific comments for each section in the report and providing an overall campaign summary at the end. Based on it, you can also make recommendations that will make decision-making easier for your clients. If there are any unusual data patterns, you can highlight them, and your clients will appreciate that.

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To ensure more accuracy while automating your reports, you can set up mechanisms such as getting prior approval for each report. A brief review will make sure that the report doesn't miss anything.

Pro Tip: It's a good idea to double-check each report's content before they are automatically sent to the client so that you can find the opportunities to upsell and identify the faults in the campaign. A brief review of your report can significantly enhance your report's face value by opening the doors for upselling and improvement in the campaign.

5. Use Visual Elements

Sometimes your clients cannot interpret the complex reports because they are unaware of the specific metrics used. It often happens because they don't have the time to study marketing and the related jargon.

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Data visualization will go a long way in helping such clients. Your visuals should be arranged in a story format with different scenes that weave an exciting story together.

Visual elements can make the report lucid, clear, and precise, so even a naive person can interpret it.

Search online for marketing report samples and see how you can creatively use visual elements to present stats and facts in your digital marketing reports.

6. Organize and Streamline Your Workflow

Streamlining your workflow inside your agency is a crucial step you need to take to scale and grow your agency, and it begins with effective delegation. Therefore, you should learn to delegate smartly.

Using a white label platform helps you seamlessly delegate tasks. You can create staff accounts on your white label platform and assign them different campaigns.

The platform provides them access to the tools they might need during the campaign. DashClicks allows multiple employees in your agency to access their platform using different login credentials. So, they can use it according to their needs, improving the workflow.

The platform will also allow you to track your agency's overall performance on different campaigns. You can improve the overall performance of your ad agency and its success rate through intervention.

7. Make It Easy for Your Clients to Access Their Data

One significant advantage of using a white-label platform is that it builds trust by offering tremendous transparency.

With the rising trend of on-demand services, most customers want to access their data per their needs.

DashClicks provides you and your team members with access to its dashboard. So, your clients can log in and see their campaign performance in crisp detail.

It simplifies client management and makes it convenient for your clients to review the campaign performance across different channels in one place.

It also allows you to navigate different accounts and find the information you want in a few clicks.

8. Share Reports in Different Formats

You can export digital marketing reports in various formats such as XLS, CSV, and PDF. You can also send it through email.

You can use these formats for ease of use and convenience for different clients.

You can directly share them from the dashboard using marketing reporting software like InstaReports, which can generate the entire campaign report within a few seconds.

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InstaReports is a highly convenient reporting tool for agencies that saves them time and effort. You can utilize this time in other productive ventures such as marketing and project management. The reports created by InstaReports are easy to understand and full of graphics and illustrations.

9. Use Pre-made Templates With DashClicks' Template App

DashClicks' Template App offers many dashboard templates, such as email and SMS templates. You can choose them according to your convenience and priorities in the marketing ecosystem.

These templates allow you to personalize your messaging by injecting data from apps, team users, contact records, and other data sources.

Final Words

DashClicks' automated reporting system is a game changer. Make life easier for you and your clients and save countless hours doing repetitive and monotonous tasks such as generating reports.

With numerous integrations and an intuitive dashboard to find the data you are looking for, you can easily track your campaign's performance through DashClicks' white label reports. These reports can be the greatest weapons in your arsenal for decision-making.

SEO software can be the most deadly weapon in your arsenal if you run a digital marketing business. So before you sign up for a subscription, make sure that the software has everything you need to run your business processes and that it's compatible with your pre-existing technologies.

So what are the benefits of using an SEO software?

Digital agencies always struggle while offering quality SEO services. It begins with finding clients for your agency. It would help if you had qualified SEO leads that you could nurture, engage and convert to maintain a steady revenue stream.

Businesses need traffic, leads, and sales from the web. SEO can help you with that, but it's not a cakewalk, so you need a robust SEO software program to help you.

Later, you will need to monitor your clients' campaigns and ensure they also get qualified leads for their businesses.

So, the best SEO software will address your pain-points and help you manage your workflow.

How to Find the Right SEO Software for Your SEO Business?

An SEO tool is not just a piece of software but the extension of your team through which you can perform repetitive tasks and handle numerous activities in the agency environment.

It makes your teams more productive and efficient. If you are successful in selecting the right tool, your growth is almost assured. So, without further ado, go through this SEO Software Guide and learn how to find the right SEO software for your agency.

1. Identify Your Pain Points

Identifying your pain points before selecting an SEO software is essential. Sometimes, all an agency wants is to automate a process, but most agencies need tools to manage and organize the information received from different channels. Some of the pain points agencies face are as follows:

• Organizing contact information
• Measuring campaigns
• Nurturing leads
• Conversion
• Tracking keywords
• Automate processes

2. Enumerate Your Agency's Workflow

Mapping out your agency's workflow is essential before buying an SEO software tool. Having a fair idea of your business processes and pain-points always helps find the right solutions.

Write down your agency's daily routine, including its activities.

For SEO agencies, these activities can include managing communication, lead generation, following up on leads, tracking campaigns, generating reports, on-page, and off-page SEO, and more.

Once you successfully map your agency's workflow, identify where you need help to minimize the time and effort involved.

Pro Tip: Using DashClicks' white-label platform and fulfillment services, you can do all these things efficiently and even set reminders for your team to do a certain task.

3. Does It Allow You to Conduct Competitor Analysis?

It's essential to dissect your competitors' SEO strategies and using that information, formulate a robust keyword and content strategy to achieve top rankings. It becomes even more crucial given the rise in shady marketing and SEO practices today.

Understanding Your Competitors' Backlink Profile

The right SEO software will also tell you about your competitors' backlink profiles and how their content is faring on different platforms. Your site authority largely depends on your backlinks. So, you can make a long-term plan to reach out to those websites with links pointing to your competitors' websites. It will save you both time and money in building quality backlinks.

4. How Good Is It for Website Auditing?

Website issues are akin to cracks in a new building. The sooner you fix them, the better it is for the website's health. Such in-depth SEO audits give you a host of facts and critical issues in your website. But, if you try to perform these audits manually, it will take ages to complete. Some SEO tools allow you to do audits of multiple websites simultaneously.

Some website issues that an audit can track are:

• Pages where users and search engines can’t reach, i.e., orphaned pages
• Missing page titles & meta descriptions
• Broken links
• Page depth, i.e., the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page
• Page server errors

Pro Tip: DashClicks' white label website audit tool, InstaReports, automates this process and generates a user-friendly report based on these issues. These reports provide a complete blueprint of what needs to be done to remove these errors from your website and make it more feasible for search engines to crawl.

5. Does It Allow You to Find High-Converting Keywords for Content Marketing?

The failure and success of a website depends on your ability to find the right keywords. So, in short, it's not easy. Most SEO managers list specific industry terms based on search volume and competition on search engines. The criteria for choosing the keywords is that they should have a high search volume and low competition.

But, it's simply not enough. There are other factors too that should be taken into consideration. You should also differentiate those keywords based on "search intent."

The keywords seeking "free information" aren't the same as the ones used to "buy a product."

So, ensure that your SEO tool provides you with a wide variety of high-converting keywords for content marketing.

Finding New Keyword Opportunities

You may soon hit a wall with your existing keywords and wonder what to do next. A white label SEO software program allows you to discover the existing and new keywords your competitors are ranking for. The SEO tool will also provide related keywords to expand to new markets. Some tools can generate hundreds of keyword ideas instantly.

With numerous relevant keywords, you'll never fall short of keywords for your content, especially blog posts.

6. The Features Your SEO Software Should Have

Here are a few features that your SEO software should have:

A. Lead Generation Tool

Lead generation is tedious, and your white-label SEO software should simplify it. DashClicks' Inbound lead management software streamlines all the lead data and helps you manage all your inbound leads across multiple third-party platforms and distribute them among your sales team for instant follow-ups. The added advantage is that it comes with the deals app that streamlines all your sales activity, making it easy for your team members to collaborate better.

B. SEO Audit Tool

You need to perform an SEO audit to understand your client's problems and get insights into their website's SEO. It's an integral part of SEO services. Doing it manually can be extremely tedious and time-consuming, so it should come with the SEO software you subscribe to. DashClicks, a white label SEO agency, offers a complete SEO audit as part of its white label fulfillment services.

C. Lead Nurturing and Closing Features

As explained above, both the Inbound and Deals apps help you view your leads in the funnel along with all the necessary information and actions pertaining to those. It helps you nurture and close these leads.

D. Customer Relationship Management Feature (CRM)

Without a CRM, you might be losing numerous sales opportunities. When you sign up for DashClicks' white label services, you get access to our Deals app, a sales pipeline management CRM software that considerably simplifies lead and deals management for your sales team.

E. Data Analytics Feature

Without analytics, all that you're doing is just shooting in the dark. That's why your SEO software should have an advanced analytics feature. When you sign up for DashClick's white label platform, you can access our advanced analytics software that tracks and reports on all your marketing campaigns in one place.

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F. Report Builder for Clients

Lastly, reporting is an immense pain for agency owners and their teams. It eats up a lot of productive time and is incredibly repetitive in nature. So, your SEO software should have an automated report builder. DashClicks' InstaReports comes as a relief. It automates report generation by generating professional-grade SEO reports with a single click.

Final Words

Selecting the right SEO software is a crucial decision for an agency. The above tips will help you evaluate your options and choose the most suitable tool for your business. Your SEO software should be compatible with your workflow and meet your business needs. It should also save time and effort and help you deliver the best results to your clients.

While CRM and marketing automation may sound similar, there is a vast difference in how they work and the benefits you can drive through each.

The prime difference between the two is that they serve two entirely different purposes. While CRM is an essential tool that assists you in sales, marketing automation is mostly used for various marketing tasks and outreach.

Integrating them in your operations can have magical effects on your business. It will improve your customer experience as well as business capabilities.

So, let’s dive deeper into their usages and differences, and how you can use both in combination for the best results.

What Is A CRM?

CRM, or customer relationship management, is a tool many industries use to manage customer contact and relationship data. It’s focused on sales and the existing relationship a business enjoys with its customers.

For example, if a customer has a savings account, a personal loan, a credit card, and health insurance from a single bank, it would be their existing relationship with the bank.

So, a CRM is a tool that tracks and manages customer relationships throughout the entire sales funnel.

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What Are the Benefits of CRM Software?

The most significant advantage of using a CRM is that it increases your chances of converting prospects to loyal customers.

Here are some significant benefits a CRM offers:

1. Streamlines customer data, i.e., name, address, and phone number (NAP.) for easy tracking and organization. It enables everyone in your organization to access and use customer information for better customer support and lead generation.

2. CRM also saves your time by reducing the routine tasks that consume more time.

3. It also improves customer engagement by ensuring consistent, personalized, and targeted messaging.

4. You can use CRM to identify increased sales opportunities by tracking your customers’ buying patterns. You can use this information to get insights into themes and trends that can help you identify new sales opportunities.

5. CRM also enables centralized sales to progress tracking across your entire organization, which is vital to pushing the prospect down the funnel. It will also help you identify areas of improvement, bridge gaps, and assign leads to salespersons.

6. Have you ever seen highly personalized communications from brands you buy from? CRM helps you do that.

For example, a customer browses sports shoes on Amazon or any other eCommerce site and soon receives personalized emails or messages about offers and discounts on selected sports shoes. It’s possible because of a robust CRM that tracks everything. Today, even AI is being used along with CRM and other marketing tools to closely predict what a customer has on their mind.

How to Personalize Your Communications?

Many CRM platforms provide tools for personalizing your messaging to customers. It boosts lead conversion. An Infosys study reveals that 86% of consumers reported that personalization influences their buying decisions in a big way. There are many ways you can personalize your communications, such as:

• Adding customers’ names in your emails
• Target campaigns based on their buying behavior
• Sending emails based on where they are in their customer journey

Things You Can Achieve With a CRM Software

You can achieve the following with the help of a CRM software:

• Increased engagement
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Increased sales

You can easily drive sales through CRM by tracking the customers’ stages in their buying journeys.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing doesn’t work in a straight line. There are various steps and aspects, and automation allows you to automate and streamline critical marketing tasks and workflows.

Automation covers everything from lead generation to segmentation and lead-nurturing. Marketing automation also facilitates account-based marketing and customer retention.

The primary purpose of marketing automation is to speed up processes and eliminate repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks.

Marketing automation is also used to create targeted marketing campaigns for individuals using targeted content. The result is a better customer experience.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

With marketing automation, you can save time by automating vital marketing tasks. When you free up your resources and eliminate wasteful activities, you can utilize your time and money to implement other targeting strategies.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

With marketing automation, you can achieve a high conversion rate, improve workflow, boost productivity, create custom content, and enable personalized buying journeys. The most significant advantage of marketing automation is that it helps you generate high-quality leads, faster.

How Do CRM and Marketing Automation Work Together?

We have discussed the benefits of both CRM and marketing automation. What if, we combine both? The combined strengths of the two can do wonders to your marketing campaigns. Marketing automation supplies detailed info to your CRM, so your entire team can get actionable insights about your prospects and existing customers.

It’s crucial to understand the difference between the two, so you can figure out why it’s best to integrate them.

Marketing automation facilitates lead generation and nurturing, while CRM is a sales tool and doesn’t serve your core funnel marketing needs. But, when you integrate the two, you can do the following:

• Build a relationship and engage your prospects. It also helps you push them down the funnel using targeted content before sending them as a hot lead to sales. This, in turn, minimizes the uncertainty and pressure on the sales team.
• Use detailed and closed-loop reporting aided by micro-analysis to see what’s working and what isn’t.
• Improve lead quality.
• Help sales reps understand the entire customer history and their behavior from when they come to your website as a visitor, until they become interested in your product.
• Send targeted messages to support and nurture leads.

Key takeaway: When we combine marketing automation with CRM, it becomes our biggest marketing & sales weapon. It ensures a consistent flow of leads and sales.

DashClicks’ white-label platform offers CRM and marketing automation through its apps, such as:

1. Deals App: It helps you manage leads and deals within your sales pipelines CRM software.
2. Projects: Our white-label project management app provides the easiest and most powerful way to manage your projects, teams, customers, etc.
3. Inbound: Helps you manage all your inbound leads across multiple third-party platforms. You can also share these leads with your sales team so they can follow up and convert them.
4. Contacts: DashClicks’ unique contact management CRM software helps you manage your contacts easily.

What’s more, you can access all these apps through a single dashboard! So, no need to open multiple tabs and repeat logins.

Why Do CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other?

CRM and marketing automation are the two most essential tools businesses use to grow in the digital ecosystem. Marketing automation can’t replace CRM, but it sure can help increase the efficiency of your sales department. It reduces the tedious and repetitive manual tasks such as emailing and calling the prospects.

Content marketing automation helps you craft engaging content for different stages in the buyer’s journey. And it’s proven that care automation improves customer support. Together, they can help generate qualified sales leads for your fledgling business.

Case Study:

How SmartBear Software increased inbound leads by 200% using marketing automation and CRM together?

SmartBear Software is a B2B cloud software development company. The business owners decided to take advantage of technology and deploy marketing automation and CRM as an integrated process to boost their sales.

The plan was simple but effective. According to Keith Lincoln, VP Marketing, SmartBear, the management chose three objectives:

• Easily implemented
• Scalable
• Can integrate with the new CRM system

After finalizing the vendor, they called in a third-party engineer to implement the software. The consulting engineer introduced specific training programs for the in-house employees to speed up the learning curve. The modus operandi led to the automation solution functioning within a work week.

The initial days were challenging and full of implementation hassles and struggles. So, the engineer suggested that the teams go slow and keep their activities limited to running a few email campaigns. However, soon the systematically designed training sessions started yielding results, and the teams quickly learned how to implement lead-nurturing and handle a high volume of leads in different segments.

Soon, they also integrated automation with their webinar platform, adding to their outreach armor. The results proved the efficacy of combining CRM and marketing automation, and their efforts paid off. Lead volume skyrocketed to 200%. In the meantime, 80% of total leads generated came from an automated software trial download campaign. The leads generated through this trial download campaign generated 85% of SmartBear’s total revenue.

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Final Words

The absence of CRM and marketing automation software integration may lead to many missed opportunities for your business. A marketing automation system is used mainly to automate marketing tasks, such as sending personalized messages to prospects based on their various stages in the buyer's journey. It can be a total game-changer and open the doors to a plethora of new opportunities for you!

The nature of integration will depend on the business needs. So, you should have a system where you can combine the best features of both types of tools. Or else, you can outsource digital marketing services from an agency that integrates both the systems into their services. DashClicks offers a white-label platform for agencies of all kinds and sizes where you can use our CRM and various automation apps together.

Further Reading: Does Your Organization Really Need a Marketing Automation Platform?

Studies indicate that you have about five minutes to make contact with a lead if you want conversion.

Yet, you probably take hours if not days to catch up on your recent list of submissions. That means the individual likely forgot about you, found another brand, and already made a connection.

If your lead management system's results sound like this, you need better solutions.

Here are six tips for better inbound marketing lead management you can start implementing right now within your company.

1. Segment All of Your Inbound Leads

When you run a digital ad campaign, you're likely to get clicks and submissions from a variety of users.

From there, your sales representatives look at the contact data, then try to verify email, prepare their pitch, and attempt to touch base. They repeat this process until they've exhausted their list.

This approach is a mistake.

Though interest in your products or services is a common denominator, not all of your audiences will share the same characteristics.

According to a survey, 62% of marketers purport to utilize segmentation to better communicate with leads. The reason for this is that highly-personalized advertisements show a much better response rate than general-purpose ads.

You can segment your inbound leads in the following ways:

• Marketing channels used
• Age
• Gender
• Income levels
• Occupation
• Interests/hobbies

When you filter your leads into one or more of these pools, your team can build a better picture of that persona.

For example, a local landscaping company likely does business with all local properties including homes, businesses, and even municipal buildings. However, they would want to tailor specific ads to target homeowners and business property owners respectively for best results.

Fortunately, most advertising platforms like Facebook Ads or Google Ads will automatically gather data when available.

Of course, you can further qualify any leads by asking the right questions on your landing page's submission form. If your offer applies to customers of a certain income threshold, you may wish to ask for an approximation in addition to their contact details.

You'll need to test and balance this to avoid overburdening potential leads with too many questions that ultimately drive them away.

Finally, you can better optimize inbound lead management from all platforms by utilizing superior inbound management tools. One such type of software is the Inbound app offered through the DashClicks platform.

Inbound allows users to integrate their campaigns from a variety of third-party tools including:

• Facebook Ads
• CallRail
• ClickFunnels
• Instapage
• Kartra
• ManyChat
• PhoneSites
• Unbounce

Instead of checking in to each of these accounts, all of your leads will automatically show up in one unified dashboard.

From there, you can set the campaign to automatically delegate lead responsibilities to specific sales reps or via round-robin assignments. This serves to help speed up response times and avoid overburdening your sales teams with more leads than they can handle.

2. Remarket to Specific Buyer Personas

After you've done the work of segmenting your audience, it's time to get to work on creating better-optimized campaigns.

We highly recommend creating individualized PPC campaigns designed to attract segmented users.

While this may seem difficult at first blush, it's easier for content creators due to a better understanding of the target. Instead of trying to make ad copy that works for everyone, they can freely write messages to one specific type of buyer.

Customers can and will identify when your copy is speaking to them personally. Once you have their attention, you seal the deal simply by listing the benefits they can gain by shopping with your brand.

If you're working with a limited ad budget, you may need to score leads to determine which types of campaigns you wish to pursue first.

You can score leads and audiences by the weight of actions taken when interacting with the campaign. Clicking on an ad is meaningful, but filling out a form or responding to an email is more significant.

Finally, remember that segmenting your campaigns will improve your ROI overall. That means a smaller cost-per-lead and more budget available to use toward more unique campaigns.

3. Create Highly-Targeted Landing Pages

This is more a continuation of the last tip but bears noting nonetheless.

Your ads should not only target specific audience segments but should direct them to highly personalized landing pages.

The landing page equates to an in-person or over-the-phone sales pitch. Any representative with experience will tailor their approach to what they know about that individual or group.

Using this same practice when designing a page, uploading images, and writing your copy will result in:

• More clicks
• Longer session duration
• More form signups
• Better email marketing metrics

Furthermore, any sales representatives assigned to this specific campaign will already know about the leads they're dealing with ahead of time. This grants the opportunity to continuously analyze and refine your sales tactics for that audience segment.

4. Implement Chatbots for Superior Response Times

While we already acknowledged the importance of a quick response, there are limits to every sales team.

Thanks to modern tech and a bit of know-how, you never need to worry about leaving potential leads in limbo.

There are countless chatbot platforms available for marketers and business owners to implement in no time at all. Sites like Chatbot and ManyChat provide you with all you need to set up your bot script and get the leads the information they require.

This is superior to leaving users with a message like We'll be in touch soon on your landing pages as nothing beats instant satisfaction. Furthermore, you leave users feeling empowered by keeping them in the know and directing them to resources that can help with their purchasing decision.

Chatbots not only help users feel heard but can help you to continuously qualify leads that have already demonstrated a high level of purchasing intent.

Tools like ManyChat are among the list of previously referenced integrations that you can incorporate into your DashClicks account for better lead management overall.

5. Offer Trials or Demos

What's better than getting a lightning-fast response?

Taking away something useful for absolutely zero cost.

Successful marketers know this, and that's why so many ad campaigns and landing pages come complete with some form of lead magnet.

A lead magnet is any free item or service that offers immediate value and benefit to the lead simply for providing their contact information. The less information they need to provide, the more likely the lead magnet is to swing the conversion in your favor.

Lead magnets do not need to be particularly elaborate or expensive to put together. A common tactic is to put together short eBooks that help educate the customer about aspects of your brand. For example, real estate agents often push eBooks that teach buyers what to look for when shopping for new homes.

However, the best type of lead magnet is one that allows the lead to sample the product or service.

Offering something that doesn't hurt your brand's bottom line can make for excellent conversion tactics. These might include:

• Free classes
• 7-day free trials
• Trial-sized products
• Free professional consultations
• Free software demos

There's no better way to sell a product or service than to let it speak for itself. Think of ways that you could create a free, cost-effective experience for leads to make more sales.

6. Nurture Real Relationships

Finally, the best tip of all is to treat each new lead like the individual they are.

This can prove to be difficult for unprepared teams, but there are technologies available to help with audience nurturing.

By real relationships, we mean going above and beyond the standard marketing messaging.

When customers show interest by filling out the forms on your landing pages, send out a message addressing them by name thanking them for their time.

If customers take the time for a call and hear your pitch, let them know that their time is valued and appreciated. Showing your customers that they're worth more than their wallet goes a long way in not only landing a sale but building customers for life.

Improving your ROI is not just about capturing leads for less ad spend, but building a relationship that increases customer lifetime value.

Other tactics like sending exclusive sales and discounts to loyal customers are another great way to help them feel appreciated while providing an incentive to make additional purchases. Customers love to know that their business is more valued than someone new to the scene.

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Better Lead Management is Readily Available

With so many platforms and automation tools available, poor lead management should never be something that holds your business back.

Not only do PPC platforms like Facebook and Google automatically provide segmented data, but platforms like DashClicks can also help unify all of those metrics into one place.

With all of this personalized data on your side, your paid ads and content teams should have an easier time curating ad content and landing pages for specific groups. The better focused your content is, the more likely you are to drive conversions.

Finally, valuing the customer's time is essential. Make sure to be quick with your response times by having reps ready to call or a chatbot ready to point users in the right direction. Strong lead magnets will also help leads remain engaged and empower them to make informed purchasing decisions.

You can refine all of these tips in a way that works best within your existing lead management system. The better you are at establishing and nurturing relationships, the more likely you are to improve your ROI over time.

A quality marketing report can make or break a relationship with a client.

Due to the varying timetables of how long it can take to get results, you need meaningful metrics to make an impact. Clients need to be able to understand those metrics in a way that makes sense and promotes further action.

Let's define what a marketing report is, how often you should present one, and the six most important things you need to include.

What is a Digital Marketing Report?

A digital marketing report is a collection of data that illustrates how your marketing efforts are helping a business achieve its goals.

You can generate and present marketing reports weekly, monthly, quarterly, or any other period that fits the agenda. Many marketers will present different marketing reports for different timetables that focus on short-term or long-term goals respectively.

What’s included in a marketing report can fluctuate depending on you and your client’s unique goals. Therefore, any report might include:

• Website analytics
• Social media analytics
• PPC campaign metrics
• Email marketing data
• Any other data that demonstrates where you are concerning the objective

However, if you utilize any marketing reporting tools, you’re likely to find yourself overwhelmed with data. Even though certain channels might provide a wealth of metrics, it does not mean you need to include everything.

Doing so will often confuse your client and obfuscate the hard work that your team accomplishes within a given period.

Though sorting through the data can be challenging, it's much easier if you understand your objectives. For the most part, however, there are the six most essential things that virtually every marketing report should include.

Let's get into it.

1. Your Objectives (with Supporting Research)

Before you begin taking any course of action, you always start by defining your goals and objectives.

Likewise, your client needs a reminder of what the goals are for the period. This will ensure that any following data will make sense and be understood in the context of those objectives.

You must always clearly define your objectives and avoid making any vague, unclear promises. Examples of poorly-defined goals might be:

• Get more followers
• Make more sales

While we can understand the overall idea of those points, it’s fairly difficult to define something so broad. Instead, we can give our clients a better sense of progress by precisely describing what we are attempting to achieve:

• Increase monthly website traffic to X amount by X month
• Improve organic rankings by X amount
• Reach X number of conversions on a specific social media platform

The platforms we use will provide in-depth metrics that communicate these finer points. In most cases, those numbers show the true journey of progress while ultimately serving grander goals like gaining more followers or generating more revenue.

Furthermore, you should attempt to support your objectives by providing research that supports those actions. As an example, marketers understand that LinkedIn is a powerful platform for B2B businesses. If you're trying to help your B2B client build traction on LinkedIn, you can include data that supports why this objective benefits them.

A quick and excellent way of generating excellent research data is through the use of DashClicks' very own InstaReports software.

Marketing reporting tools like these can instantly retrieve live data about a business in seconds. This self-contained report focuses on website data, social media, online reviews, SEO, and paid ads performance. You can use that data to highlight pain points and back your active objectives in those respective areas.

Once your client understands what you're working toward, they're ready to listen to review the next items.

2. Monthly Website Metrics

A business's SEO data is essential for every marketing report. Improving website rankings improves organic performance, meaning lower monthly spending.

In other words, your marketing team should always be working to improve the client's SEO and website performance.

There are numerous free tools for tracking metrics for any domain. The most popular is Google Analytics, which encompasses everything you could ever need to know about a web page or the entire site.

However, GA provides an immense amount of data, not all of which is necessary to illustrate your points to your client. Here are a few key metrics you’ll want to highlight:

• Daily, weekly, monthly website traffic
• Number of unique visits
• Traffic by source (how are visitors finding the site?)
• Page clicks
• Average session duration
• SEO page rankings

You'll want to spend more or less time on specific points depending on the goals for that reporting period.

If the goal is to simply boost brand awareness and traffic, highlighting unique visits as well as their origin is helpful. Highlighting areas of strong performance is what a client wants to see and will make a positive impression.

However, a great marketer won't shy away from the negatives. If you notice a trend in poor numbers for specific pages, make it known. This is an opportunity for growth and improvement, which serves to help the client's overall goals.

Including both positives and negatives also helps the client stay involved and proactive regarding their success. It also inspires their confidence in you when you are actively looking to improve instead of resting on your laurels.

Finally, we would be remiss not to highlight that tools like Google Analytics allow you to create custom conversions for the website. These will allow you to better track progress toward specific goals you have regarding the user experience. Not only does it drive your efforts, but it better communicates what you're accomplishing in the marketing report.

3. Performance Metrics by Campaign

Your digital marketing efforts will extend across many channels in addition to the website.

Examples of these channels might include:

• Email marketing campaigns
• Social media
• PPC campaigns
• Blogs

The marketing tools you’re using for any of these channels will also provide their built-in analytics tracking. Similar to Google Analytics, you’ll want to pull relevant data from the platforms you’re using to run campaigns.

A. Email Marketing Metrics to Include

Email marketing reporting is fairly straightforward and should highlight your reach and conversion rates. Data points to include are:

• Number of emails sent
• Number of emails successfully delivered
• CTR (clickthrough rate)
• Subscriber data
• CVR (conversion rate)

It helps the client to know not only that emails are going out to real contacts, but that those emails are being read by the recipient.

When users open those emails, subscribe to the listing, or convert, it’s transparent that your marketing efforts work. Likewise, a low CTR or a spike in unsubscribers could indicate that the campaign needs some attention.

B. Social Media Metrics to Include

If one of your core goals is to boost brand awareness on social, you’ll want to include some data in your report. This is also applicable if you’re running paid social ads or relying on your following to boost numbers in other areas.

Some key metrics you might include are:

• Follower counts
• Engagement rates
• Shares
• Ad or promoted post CTR
• Audience demographics

More followers, impressions, and engagement means that your social media content is making an impact. Likewise, shared content means an extended reach at zero additional cost to you or the client.

Additional insights about your audience on social media might motivate new campaign ideas depending on your findings.

C. Paid Ad Metrics

This is a necessity if you’re currently running any type of paid ad campaign on search or social media. Paying for clicks doesn’t come cheap, so you need to show your client that their money is being spent wisely.

Essential metrics to include are:

• Cost-per-click
• Conversions & conversion rate
• Cost-per-conversion
• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions)
• CTR
• Total spend
• ROI / ROAS (return on investment, return on ad spend)

You'll want to highlight similar data for each platform that features a paid ad campaign for your client. Comparing and contrasting performance on different platforms can sometimes highlight where the client's money is best spent.

Something else to consider is highlighting ad creatives that are performing well. It's not uncommon to have creative differences between parties over what they want versus what gets results. Showing off the specific ads with the data leaves both parties with a better understanding of where to go moving forward.

Also, underperforming on other platforms is not always cause to pull all ads. Instead, you can use negatively trending data to promote new ad campaign ideas for the next period with your client's final approval.

You can quickly and seamlessly track all of this data for each platform within the DashClicks Analytics app. Users can integrate platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, CallRail, and others at no cost. You can even track keyword rankings and other vital SEO data at the same time for all of your reporting needs.

4. Leads and Customers

Marketing data from the previous areas is important. It shows that your content is reaching new audiences and connections are happening.

However, many of these metrics can amount to little more than vanity if you're not capturing quality leads. Those leads then need to convert into customers.

In other words, your client is going to want to see the bottom line from all of the previously reported data. You can do this by highlighting:

• Qualified leads by channel (where are we capturing leads?)
• Marketing qualified leads (leads that show engagement and interest)
• Sales qualified leads (leads show motivation to spend)
• Cost-per-action (money spent for each action taken by a customer throughout the marketing process)
• Cost-per-acquisition
• Customer lifetime value (money spent by customer versus the cost to acquire)

Your marketing channels will provide you with the necessary, but these data points will likely require a bit of basic math on your part.

For example, calculating a particular cost-per-action would mean comparing your total expenses versus the number of conversions. A low CPA will indicate that you are reaching engaged customers at a lower cost. A high CPA could indicate that you need to better qualify customers or simplify the process of getting a customer from awareness to checkout.

We recommend placing this data toward the end of your report for two reasons. First, the prior data provides the necessary context for your lead and customer data. Second, your lead data acts as an effective summary of all of your efforts within each marketing channel.

5. A Full Marketing Report Analysis (In Layman's Terms)

All of your reported metrics now need an easy-to-understand breakdown. Your expertise is a big part of what they're paying you for, so now's the time to educate.

Though your client may be able to extrapolate their ideas from the numbers, they still want you to pull it all together and complete the story.

For this reason, your summary and analysis should:

• Explain positive results and highlight continued strategies
• Get ahead of negative snapshots and address the circumstances
• Propose new strategies or ideas to sustain or improve results
• Highlight exceptional achievements

Adding the final color to your marketing picture will better help nonmarketers understand the ebb and flow of the industry. Without your informed explanations, you leave clients to draw their conclusions, which can end up problematic even when there’s no cause for concern.

Likewise, a willingness to confidently address shortcomings outright can replace frustrations with new confidence. As with any customer service, letting the client know you're aware and engaged can alleviate short-term concerns.

Just be sure that your team communicates a plan to address existing issues so that you don't find yourself reporting poor results each period.

6. Future Plans and Strategies

Now that you've had your opportunity to tell the story, the client will be wondering one thing: what's next?

A solid marketing report should conclude with a clear outline of planned strategies and actions between now and the next reporting period.

Those strategies will now be informed by all of the data presented previously in the report. However, as a precaution, make sure to call back to key reporting points to keep your analytics fresh in the client's mind.

With this, the client has an idea of what to look forward to within the coming days and weeks. They're informed and empowered to connect with you if they have questions or concerns about any of your marketing efforts.

Your plans should also reiterate existing goals or propose new ones based on what fits the bill. That way, you can point back to data from the previous month and easily demonstrate progress from period to period.

How to Determine If It Belongs in a Marketing Report?

Before we conclude, we'll leave you with a few pointers that can help sort through marketing data. By asking yourself these key questions, you'll be able to eliminate irrelevant data that fails to serve your report.

A. Does the Data Explain Our Progress Towards Marketing Goals?

As discussed above, platforms like Google Analytics or Facebook Ads provide a wealth of information.

This data provides value, but only if it tells you something about your immediate goals.

For example, if you're attempting to increase website traffic by X percent for the month, stats like individual page rankings are not necessarily relevant to the topic.

Throwing in these additional facts will likely distract from the important conversation. However, a metric like bounce rate may be relevant if the website experiences a period of unusually high bounces. You may sometimes need to use your discretion and ask if this data is of immediate importance to the task at hand.

B. Is the Data Easy to Understand?

In this article, we've used a strong amount of marketing vernacular that you're like familiar with. However, the same is often not true for those that operate outside of the industry.

You want to ensure that your report contains basic vocabulary that's easy for all parties to understand. When taking the data from your analytics platform, restructure it in a way that speaks to the common person.

C. Does the Client Need to Know This?

This final point can be tricky if done improperly.

Even expert marketers will experience a rise and fall within certain metrics. Because we have expertise and insights into trends, we know when a red arrow is a cause for concern.

The same is not always true for the client and seeing negative trends will generally be a cause for alarm. Seeing numbers pointing down can end up dominating the report, even when much of your news is largely positive.

For this reason, think carefully about whether or not certain numbers need to be acknowledged or highlighted in the report.

Note that this is not an opportunity to evade talking about genuinely poor performance. Use your judgment to tell the difference and use your expertise to keep your client's concerns at ease.

Use This As a Template for Your Marketing Reports

Marketers will virtually always want these six categories somewhere within their weekly or monthly digital marketing reports.

However, remember that these ideas serve as a general template. The exact metrics you want to include will depend upon:

• The types of marketing channels being used
• What types of campaigns you’re running
• The client’s immediate marketing goals

Nevertheless, these categories will consistently point you toward the correct numbers that directly address progress. It’s then up to you to provide context for your analytics so that your client can understand where you stand even without insider marketing knowledge.

Your marketing efforts run on the client's budget, so you owe it to them to ensure they're educated. However, you have the power to tell a clear and cohesive story that they won't be able to discover themselves. Use that opportunity to show your strengths, plan new strategies, and omit obfuscatory data.

Remember, you can improve your reporting process right here at DashClicks by taking advantage of our free marketing and reporting software. Signing up for an account is completely free and you can integrate your third-party accounts at any time.

Demonstrate growth, highlight revenue increases, and get to the bottom line. This keeps clients happy and keeps them returning to your team for marketing services every month.

Marketing technologies are a necessity for achieving success and growth in the digital age.

However, simply subscribing to a new platform or purchasing new software will not make you an overnight success. Opting into the wrong digital marketing technology can increase costs, hinder productivity, and hurt your bottom line.

B2B marketing technology should primarily aid in making your team more efficient at what they do best. Here are five tips for selecting marketing technology that your brand can use today and for the years to come.

Tip 1 - Choose B2B Marketing Technology That Can Improve Your ROI

First, and perhaps, most importantly, B2B marketers need software that can provide actionable insights.

Brands and marketers alike are well aware of typical strategies for netting new leads.

Design an elegant website.

Run an ad campaign on social media.

Create the perfect landing page.

The problem is that even the best marketing team will face limitations without access to the right metrics. B2B marketers need to know where traffic comes from, who's converting, and what specifically appeals to unique customers.

For that reason, your B2B marketing team requires high-quality, data-driven marketing software for your tech stack above all else. Even if new software comes with a learning curve, any meaningful improvement in your marketing insights is worth considering.

The best B2B marketing technologies should feature built-in analytics tracking for your website, profile, and/or marketing campaigns.

Specifically, sites like LinkedIn allow you to build profiles for free. You can then bridge into creating groups or running targeted ad campaigns that fit accordingly with your budget. You'll have access to a continuous stream of insights around the clock, which ultimately help to improve your bottom line.

Businesses can also find success on other social media platforms, email marketing campaigns, or video marketing. There are numerous affordable options for each that will inform you of daily clicks, traffic sources, engagement, shares, and much more.

Tip 2 - Choose What's Easy and Intuitive to Use

The overall goal when purchasing and using digital marketing technology is to improve efficiency. That hot new tool might work well for some companies, but the benefits are lost if it takes the average team member twice as long to complete a task as it would otherwise.

Ascend2, a research-based marketing company surveyed marketers and found that more than half value ease of use above all other factors. This is unsurprising for several reasons.

First, we want our tools to help us become even more productive than we already are. We're looking to eliminate the tedious aspects of B2B digital marketing so that we can place greater emphasis on those tasks more deserving of our attention.

Second, our team members need to be able to utilize those same tools just as effectively. Ideally, we want to be able to share ideas, creatives, and insights without necessarily possessing the same level of expertise with particular software.

Finally, we want to plan and think about how easy it will be for new team members to adapt to our current marketing technology stack. The more intuitive the toolset is, the less time and resources you need to invest in training, which can impact your bottom line.

Tip 3 - Ease of Integration

This tip effectively goes hand-in-hand with tip 2 but is worth taking note of on its own.

The latest, sexy marketing technologies might boast better ROIs, better insights, and more ease of use, but how does it integrate with your current marketing tech stack?

Any time you look to adopt new technologies, you need to run a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take to integrate your existing data with a new platform.

Does the new software offer open third-party integrations? Is it easy to customize your account and establish those integrations on your own? Will you need to back up data and manually reincorporate it within the new marketing tools?

Some of the newest, most innovative digital marketing solutions are prioritizing ease of integration more than ever. For example, the DashClicks platform offers seamless transitions in the following ways:

• Incorporate all data from any pre-existing CRM
• Incorporate any sales data from any pre-existing sales CRM
• Third-party integrations with popular analytics software
• Third-party integrations with popular campaign software
• Ability to incorporate new apps with an open API call

When choosing new B2B marketing technology, you'll want to look for these types of benefits. This will allow you to take advantage of new apps and features, while still making use of your hard work to date without any additional interruptions to your workflow.

Tip 4 - Invest in Tech That Can Scale

As your B2B marketing company progresses, you'll inevitably look to invest in new marketing technologies.

Because growth is your ultimate goal, you'll want to create a foundation for success by investing in tools that remain relevant as you scale.

This could mean taking advantage of tools and platforms that offer ever-increasing resources and account limits with corresponding price changes. As your team and your customer base grow, you'll be able to make a simple upgrade to your team's account without any interruption to the service.

Continued growth also means experimenting with new marketing channels and resources. You may specialize your efforts in PPC campaigns now but may wish to offer services like web design, report building, or improved CRMs as demands grow.

Platforms like DashClicks, Salesforce, and HubSpot offer these types of expansive platforms so that you can leverage the tools you need when the time comes. Because your company data is already located within that data system, expanding and upgrading becomes simple and intuitive for any user.

Failure to future proof your marketing technology can cause your team to find itself in the same position it's in now. You'll be researching better tech, juggling countless account passwords, and looking for safe ways to transfer existing account data.

Help yourself today by choosing tech that will satisfy your needs both now and in the future. This will keep your team mobile, agile, and allow them to continuously improve their skills within a specific platform over a long period.

Tip 5 - Run a Cost-Benefit Analysis

Finally, choosing the right B2B marketing technology for your team can be as simple as running cost analysis.

There are hundreds of free and paid marketing tools available that can aid your team in every area of digital marketing. While many offer tremendous benefits, that doesn't mean investing in a new tool is the right call at this point.

When looking to cut down on costs and improve profit margins, one of the most commonly recommended suggestions is to eliminate unneeded subscriptions or services. For that reason, you will benefit yourself from closely examining how a particular tool will benefit your team daily before sinking valuable dollars into something unnecessary.

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Even if that new technology would be beneficial, you do not always need to leap today. Make a business goal of incorporating new technology into your marketing strategy by a specific date after you successfully reach certain milestones.

When your business continuously hits its marks and finds itself ready to scale healthily, you can look to invest in new marketing tech provided that it satisfies the other tips mentioned previously in this article.

Implement New B2B Marketing Technology the Right Way

Investing in the right digital marketing technology is simple when you follow these basic guidelines.

Marketing rapidly evolves every day with software creators providing new, specialized solutions to different companies. While those benefits and features may seem appealing, not every piece of new tech or software may be right for your team.

Your priority should always be on that which makes your team more efficient and allows them to attain superior results. If the new tech is not directly aiding with everyday tasks or dilemmas, it's not necessary for your marketing stack.

Follow up by researching the tech to ensure it's user-friendly, allows for simple integration with existing tools, and is capable of scaling with you as you grow. Finally, verify that you can safely enjoy all of these benefits without unnecessarily exhausting your budget.