Show Notes
As marketers, we are always in the hotseat to prove the value and effectiveness of a marketing campaign. A great way to combat skepticism is with regular reporting. This podcast explores:
- The Importance of Reporting
- How the Iterative Marketing Report is different from your standard marketing report
- Components of an Iterative Marketing Report
Reporting is important for a few reasons:
- It establishes marketing’s value within the organization by setting expectations and demonstrating how marketing has met or exceeded those expectations.
- Reporting can make or break a promotion because, if executed properly, it makes you look good in front of the decision-makers.
Marketers can earn more budget because reports prove what you are doing is effective. - Good reporting showcases the department’s value within an organization because it provides a good track record.
- Reporting displays to the C-suite that you are a focused financial steward and you are able to report on ROI, which is the most important metric to stakeholders.
How the Iterative Marketing report template differs
- This report splits your investment between revenue-generating investment (ROI) and capital-investments (assets).
- It provides insights that extend beyond the marketing department and can be applied to the entire organization.
- Resource: The 4 Elements of Effective Reporting
How to use Projected Review in an Iterative Marketing Report
- ROI is the primary component of effective reporting because organizations think in terms of money – not leads.
- However, there is a lag time between our marketing activities and ROI. Because of this, ROI can only be reported after the sale has occurred. For most markets this is 3-12 months AFTER the marketing program.
- We report on projected revenue because of the lag time between our actions and the realization of the sale our actions influenced. Projected revenue is the actual estimates of future performance based on KPI’s. Marketers can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to predict revenue.
How to report on KPIs
- KPIs are leading indicators of future performance.
- There is a direct correlation between the trajectory of the KPI and overall performance.
- Types of KPIs include: marketing qualified leads (MQLs), sales qualified leads (SQLs), brand awareness, leads, phone calls, demos/trials
How to determine your KPIs
- Find metrics that correlate to revenue.
- Look backwards 3-12 months, depending on your sales cycle, and identify a strong correlation between KPI and revenue.
- KPIs could be initial sales meetings, product demos, free trials, sample requests.
- Reference: Proving Your Marketing ROI Is Better With KPIs
How to report on assets
- Short-term assets include: media, creative and payroll.
- Long-term assets include brand, content and data.
- Resource: 3 Key Assets for Future Marketing Success
- Resource: Episode 28: Marketing More Effectively With Long-Term Assets
- Reporting on long- and short-term assets demonstrates where marketing dollars are going, and shows how they are important to future growth and profitability.
Why to report on insights
- Insights are a new piece of information that adds value to the organization as a whole. They are the most universally valuable.
- Reporting on insights takes marketing out of a demand generation role and puts us into a leadership role with the rest of the company.
How to structure the report
- Group ROI/revenue reporting by program or maximum insights. Include a high-level summary that focuses on what the C-suite, executive team, investors, or other departments care about.
- In our experience it works best to look at major audience segmentation and report on each objective.
- Resource: Episode 15: What’s So Wrong About a Campaign
Resource: Whatever You Do, Don’t Launch Another Big Campaign
What to include in the report
- A one page high-level summary for each program to show what the organization is getting for its investment. Include metrics such as investment, impressions, sessions (engagements), KPIs (varies by business).
- Show KPIs that contribute to projected revenue and ROI.
- Graph the most important metrics to you to show a trend over time, not just one point in time.
Share long-term assets such as: addressable market (total cookies and leads), brand and content. - Add insights that apply to the organization as a whole.
Key takeaways:
- Reporting is valuable to your department, stakeholders and on a personal level when it comes to job performance.
- The components of a report are ROI, Projected Revenue, KPIs, Assets and Insights.
Charity of the Week:
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net, follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing Podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Robinson, and with me as always is the spontaneous and serendipitous Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I am well. How are you, Steve?
Steve Robinson: I am having a great day. What’s new in your world these days?
Elizabeth Earin: Well, as our listeners know, my family and I bought a new trailer to go camping in this year and we had a couple of run-ins with it so we just dropped it off at the dealership to have it looked at, but it looks like it might be a lemon, so…
Steve Robinson: Really?
Elizabeth Earin: Not quite sure what’s going to come out of that, yeah.
Steve Robinson: So are you getting a new trailer or –
Elizabeth Earin: I don’t know. They are supposed to call us this week and let us know. So I guess we’ll find out if they can fix what’s wrong with ours or if we are going to be going shopping for a new one.
Steve Robinson: I think you should just make this a habit and get a new trailer every year.
Elizabeth Earin: Well, is that what you are doing because I know you have got a little bit of a lemon in your life.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. I have got one of those fun Dieselgate Volkswagens, so the good news on my end is they are for sure buying it back and they are going to give me a couple extra thousand dollars to boot, so at least I will come up money ahead. I hope the same is true for you.
Elizabeth Earin: As long as we are not behind, I am good, so we’ll see what happens.
Steve Robinson: Excellent. So what are we really talking about today besides lemons of vehicles and trailers?
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, today we are talking about reporting, specifically how to build a report that you’ll share with your internal stakeholders that is effective and is what they are looking for.
Steve Robinson: And through the course of today’s podcast, we are going to kind of outline the why behind this report and why reporting is so important because this is the second podcast that we have done on the topic, so obviously it’s important to us. Here’s why it should be important to you. And then we’ll go through the actual report format and then wrap up with the details of the structure of actually what needs to be in this document.
Elizabeth Earin: So Steve, you mentioned this is our second podcast on reporting. Why have we dedicated an entire second episode to this?
Steve Robinson: In my mind, there’s lots of reasons why we as marketers need to do a better job of reporting. Reporting is really, really important along a number of vectors, but probably they all roll up into a lack of respect, I think, that marketers get within the organization. And if we connect what we do back to something tangible to real numbers, it shifts that away from the idea that marketing is fuzzy and artistic to no, we are business impactful and we generate revenue and build insights, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, it’s not just that we like the color blue. There’s a reason why we are doing what we are doing and the strategy behind what we are doing and I think having been in that world, a lot of – sometimes even the C-suite but definitely internal — other managers within the organization don’t necessarily see marketing that way, so helping to change that perspective will get marketing the respect that it deserves.
Steve Robinson: And not just respect at the departmental level either. This can actually improve your career, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, definitely.
Steve Robinson: The other thing — and this is where we have seen this have the most impact with our clients — is if you do a really good job of reporting, you can actually get more budget. Do you want to explain why we have seen that?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah. When we are able to prove that what we are doing is effective, we can ask for more money and get it because they are more willing to invest in us if we have this proven track record, and so reporting does that for us. By continuously reporting on that and showing what we are doing and showing that improvement over time, when we go in and say we need X dollars for this new program and here’s why we think it’s going to work, that has more than just I have got this gut feeling going in and talking to your finance guy.
Steve Robinson: And that creates like a virtuous cycle, right? Because the more budget you have, the more awesome things you can do, which means the more awesome things you can talk about in your next reporting, which means you get more money and etc., etc., so…
Elizabeth Earin: Exactly. I think there’s another component where this impacts money though and that’s your personal wallet in that when you are able to prove the effectiveness of what you are doing when it comes time for negotiations or promotions, you now again have this track record to fall back on and it makes it that much easier to ask for and give reasoning as to why you think you deserve that promotion or why you deserve that raise and so it’s not just money in your department’s pocket. It can be money in your own pocket as well.
Steve Robinson: And if you don’t get the promotion that you are asking for, you now have a bunch of statistics to put in your resume.
Elizabeth Earin: Exactly. I think the other area why this is so important and one of the reasons I am so passionate about reporting is having been on the corporate side. And I have sat there and struggled each month with what is it that I am going to report up to my C-suite? What is it that I am going to share with my organization? And as marketers, we sort of straddle that what’s the right amount of information and what’s too much information, and finding that balance.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. I think you’d found a statistic that 69% of all marketers feel that their strategies have an impact but they just don’t know how to prove it. They don’t know how to demonstrate that, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, and I think it’s important, if you are feeling this way, you are not alone.
Steve Robinson: Speaking of proving it, some of us don’t just feel like we want to or should be proving it. Some of us are being told that we have to.
Elizabeth Earin: Exactly, exactly. There was a great article that came out on cmo.com and it was ten great expectations what CEOs want from their CMOs. And even if you are not a CMO, I think this message still applies because the number one thing, the first thing on that list that CEOs are looking for is a focused financial steward. And what that means, what that comes down to is ROI. They don’t want to know that – just hear that you want more budget. They want to know how you justify that expense and what that’s going to mean for them in the future, and that’s where effective reporting really comes in.
Steve Robinson: And I think that’s only getting worse as more is shifting to digital because there’s this perception that everything in digital is immediately attributable and totally measurable and there’s no question where the dollars are going in digital, and that’s not exactly true, but that’s the perception that we battle as we talk to executives and we talk to the CEO.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think that’s one of the things that makes effective reporting so hard is that CEOs do want to see that that connection back to ROI, but just based on how marketing is structured and what we do, that’s not possible. And we are going to talk more about that a little bit later, but it’s a really interesting perspective that I don’t know if everyone is considered is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to report.
Steve Robinson: So before we get into exactly what goes into this report, I know that the majority of our audience is doing some sort of reporting today. What are we talking about today that’s so different from what people are already doing?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah. I think that’s a great question. So what we are really talking about is looking at our investments and splitting them apart between revenue-generating investments and capital investments. And what we mean by revenue-generating is our ROI versus our capital which are our assets, and we are going to get into that in more detail later in the podcast.
Steve Robinson: And the other component is the insight reporting because if we are practicing Iterative Marketing — and I think a lot of what we are talking about today applies even if you aren’t practicing Iterative Marketing — but if you are practicing Iterative Marketing, then the experiments that you are running are generating more than just incremental improvements and revenue. They are generating insights and those insights are another way that you can demonstrate value to the organization and should be included in the report. I think this is probably a great point for us to take a quick break, so why don’t we take a second and go talk about how we can help some people and when we come back we’ll get into what goes into these reports.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I would like to take a quick moment to ask you iterative marketers a small but meaningful favor, and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by Nereus Dooley of Doubleberry. Nereus asks that you make a contribution to the Genesis House, a transitional home offering love and hope to young mothers having a difficult time making it on their own. Learn more at genesishousewi.com or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the “Share a Cause” button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And we are back. So before the break, we talked about the why behind reporting. Why this is so important and then introduced some of the ways that what we are going to talk about now is different from what you might be doing today. Now we are going to jump into what goes into this report. How do you actually build this thing out?
Elizabeth Earin: And I am excited about this because I think we all see the value in reporting. We all want to do it and this sort of gets to the heart of where marketers struggle and it’s what do I include and what do I talk about? So what are the components that are included in there? And I think the very first one we have to start with is we have to address what it is that our leaders are asking for and that’s ROI. And so how do we report on ROI?
Steve Robinson: ROI stands for return on investment. So this is measuring the amount of money that you are getting in compared to the amount of money that you are putting out. And to calculate it, you are going to borrow a formula from general ROI and adapt it a little bit to marketing. If you are Googling this or looking it up online, you’ll probably find it listed as under the acronym ROMI, Return on Marketing Investment, rather than ROI but the formula is very similar. I am going to say it here on the podcast. Fair warning, this is math via audio. This is not the ideal format for this but I feel like it would be an omission if I didn’t put it in here. So the way that you calculate this is you are going to take your attributable revenue, the revenue that you know that marketing contributed to and/or created, you are going to subtract out the cost of generating that revenue. So these are just your marketing costs that go into the short-term gains associated with that program. So this is things like media and any production costs for content that is specific to the short-term goals of the program. And you are going to subtract those costs out of the attributable revenue. What you are left with is a number that’s similar to a profit, right? This is what we made through our efforts. This is the money that we made. Then you divide that by, again, the amount of money that you invested or your costs. You are going to end up with a percentage. Now to move the decimal point a couple points over, and before you put the percentage sign on there, you are going to multiply that number times 100 and you have your marketing ROI or your return on marketing investment, or ROMI value and this is what you need to be including in the report.
Elizabeth Earin: So that sounds easy, right? I mean it’s sort of easy. It’s math, but if you are really bad at math like me, I am sure you can find a formula of some sort online or even an online calculator that can do it for you, so that part gets easy. Where it gets a little bit more complicated is that you have to know that attributable revenue to be able to figure out your ROI and that’s where we have a hard time. And that’s because how marketing is structured and what we are doing is structured. And the problem is that true ROI can only be reported on after the sale has occurred. And so for a lot of us, our marketing efforts today are influencing sales that are happening 3 or 6 or 12 months down the road and so we can’t report on ROI because we don’t know that attributable number. So what else can we use?
Steve Robinson: In this case, I think we need to move over to projected revenue. And this isn’t true for everybody. If you are in e-commerce you can probably get away with reporting on actual revenue because most of your marketing efforts are going to result in sales that are within one or two reporting cycles of when you are performing those efforts. However, if you are in a B2B scenario, sometimes those sales like you said are 3 or 6 or 12 months down the road so we have to project out what that revenue is going to look like. To do this, we are going to have to figure out what is the math that we can use to estimate future returns, future revenue, and that’s going to be based on what are called KPIs or key performance indicators. You want to take a quick second and define what a KPI is for our audience?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, of course. So KPIs are leading indicators of future performance. And this is going to really vary based on your business but it can be things like marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads, brand awareness scores, actual leads, phone calls, demos, trials. Sort of again those indicators that you are moving in the right direction.
Steve Robinson: And those KPIs have a direct correlation to revenue. So as KPIs increase, so does revenue and you have to figure out which of those KPIs you want to focus on that has that nice tidy direct correlation and then figure out the math to support it. Once you do that, you can take a KPI value and turn it into a projected revenue value. Let’s get a concrete example here because it’s kind of hard when you are talking figuratively. Let’s say that you are in the business of generating leads and leads are your KPI, marketing qualified leads, and you know that for every ten marketing qualified leads, you are going to get one sale. So you generate ten leads, one sale comes out, and you figured that out by looking at about maybe 12 months-worth of past data. You also can establish what is the value of that sale, what is the lifetime value of a new client. So you look at that number going back one or two years and you realize that a new customer is worth $10,000. And so if you know the new customer is worth $10,000 of a lifetime of that sale and you know that one in ten leads close, you can take that $10,000 divided by 10 and now you have the value of a lead in revenue is $1,000. Now that’s in revenue. It doesn’t take into account how profitable that particular account is. Not all of that is money that the organization gets to keep but it’s enough to be able to project revenue off of a lead. Each lead is $1,000 in projected revenue. I mentioned that all of this is based on KPIs. You really need to report your KPIs too. Why is that, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, that’s a great point. It’s not any different than when we were in school, we had to show our work. And so that’s what we are doing when we report on the KPIs, is that we are showing the numbers that led to that projected revenue. So we are showing that we didn’t just pull a number out of the sky. We are basing this on things that were able to track today, things that we are tracking today and so there’s a correlation there.
Steve Robinson: We had talked a little bit earlier about what some of those KPIs are. You are going to want to be selective about which KPIs you include in your report and you may want to be looking at other KPIs behind the scenes. At the end of the day though, you don’t want to be looking at more data than you have to. So you are going to want to pick only the KPIs that have a direct correlation or direct impact on revenue or on other objectives of the business.
Elizabeth Earin: Now we touched on how to do that but if you’d like some more details, we have a great blog that will link to in the show notes.
Steve Robinson: The next component of your report is going to be assets. Elizabeth had talked earlier about how what’s unique here is that we split up our investment into revenue-generating investment and asset-building investment. When we throw around the term asset though, it might mean a little bit different in the context of marketing than it does in the rest of the business. Do you want to speak to that, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, of course. So, when we are talking about our assets within marketing, we kind of divvy them up into two buckets. The first is our short term assets and those are going to be things like media and creative and payroll and those items that are making an immediate impact, and you touched on a few of those earlier. The other bucket are our long-term assets and these are things like brand, content and data. And we cover this topic in depth in Episode 28, Three Key Assets for Future Marketing Success and I definitely recommend you go back and listen to that because it provides a great overview of each of these as long-term assets. But we report on these because it shows to other people in the organization where our marketing dollars are going. With our short term assets, we are able to — when we connect that over attributable revenue we can tie that back to ROI. We can’t necessarily do that with long-term assets. These are things that are going to be spread out over a long period of time and so we can’t necessarily report on them in one specific cycle. We are going to be reporting on their effect and their impact over multiple periods. And so to do that, we want to kind of take those out and report on them separately.
Steve Robinson: So we talked about ROI and we talked about reporting on revenue and the return on your investment as it relates to revenue for your programs. You talked about assets. The only remaining bucket is the insights that you are generating and so included in your report needs to be what insights you have generated for the organization.
Elizabeth Earin: So insights are new pieces of information that add value to the organization as a whole. And this is one of those areas where when we report on insights, we are able to sort of elevate marketing’s role. We are not only showing the ROI that we are bringing, but now by reporting on these insights, we are also showing other actionable items that can be taken by other departments across the organization to improve what they are doing, whether it’s their operations or their customer service. And so we really want to look through, to your point earlier, the experiments that we have run and the optimizations that we have made and pick out those best insights, those ones that are going to have the best application across the organizations and we share that with them so that they are able to then make improvements based on what our data has shown.
Steve Robinson: And in order for this to be most impactful, it’s important that we have a shared vocabulary with those that we are reporting with. The reason why this is important is because often these insights are tied back to particular segments within our audience. So we might say that if we are relating back to a persona, we might say that Jerry doesn’t care about this particular feature or benefit because our experiments have shown that talking about it doesn’t improve performance at all. That only works if our audience knows who Jerry is. And so this is a great reason why you need to be talking about – if you are using personas, you need to bring personas to light with everybody that you are presenting this reporting to and make sure that everybody is speaking the same language. Flipside of that is if you start talking about Jerry in meetings, people are going to ask ‘who is Jerry?’ And it’s another opportunity to get everybody on the same page and pull out the personas and make sure that those don’t sit in a drawer and they are just collecting dust.
Elizabeth Earin: We cover ROI, assets and insights in more depth in Episode 8, The Four Elements of Effective Reporting. If this is something that interests you and you want to include in your report, definitely go back and give that a listen because it really goes much more in depth into each of these topics.
Steve Robinson: I think now would be a good time for us to break this down one more time and talk specifically about what should be in that report. What should be on that piece of paper — or in the pixels, I guess, because nobody really delivers reports via paper anymore — that you are delivering to the team. Before we get into that though, let’s briefly recap who this report is for because I think that context really helps understand what should be in it.
Elizabeth Earin: So again, touching on — accomplishing some of those goals and reaping the benefits of effective reporting, we are really targeting this report at our C-suite or executive team, investors and other departments within the organization. So with that in mind, this needs to be a high-level summary.
Steve Robinson: If you were paying attention there, those happen to be all of the groups that impact how much money your department has to spend, so that’s why we keep harping on, it needs to be all about the money, all about the money. That’s because the revenue that you generate is directly correlated to the amount of money they are going to present to you in the next budget cycle.
Elizabeth Earin: In addition to tying back to the dollars, when you are looking laterally, it can help improve communication and working relationships with those other departments. I know that I have run into issues in the past where the departments may feel like marketing is telling them what to do and not listening to them, but when you are bringing insights to the table, when you are showing how you are impacting the revenue, that you have got a bigger stake in the game, they are going to be more open to listening to what it is that you have to say and working collaboratively with you or at least that has been my experience.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. Yeah, it makes a big difference when they know that the time that they are going to put into writing the blog for you or getting your feedback on this piece or the other, or even just giving you decent information for you to do your job is going to roll up into a revenue-impacting work product and it can make all the difference in the world. So how do we do that? What should be in this report? Let’s start going through the sections.
Elizabeth Earin: So again, we want to focus on what’s important to the C-suite. And if you haven’t picked up on that yet, that is revenue and so one way that we do this is we group our ROI and our revenue reportings by program so that we can have maximum insights.
Steve Robinson: And we do this by program because we found in our experience that if you just report one big lump sum number of, hey, we contributed to this much revenue or this much revenue for this particular reporting period, that that’s not low enough level of detail for anybody to really interpret it or process it or give it a whole lot of thought. But at the same time, if you bring this down to too low of the detail level and you are talking about, well, this particular tactic — and when we advertise on Facebook for this particular advertisement it resulted in this much revenue — that’s down in the weeds and these people don’t have time to sit through that long of a report and aren’t really interested at that level. And so providing a report that’s at the program-level really is this kind of the sweet spot of the 50,000-foot view versus the 5000-foot view or 5-foot view. I suppose it would be beneficial if we recapped what a program is though, quickly for our audience in case they have forgotten.
Elizabeth Earin: Yes. So a program is the intersection of an audience and an objective. And all of the tactics that are used to get to that specific audience to meet that specific objective are going to be your program.
Steve Robinson: And if you are a new listener, we strongly recommend going back and listening, reading the blog. Whatever you do, don’t launch another big campaign. We will link that in the show notes or going back and listening to, I think it’s Episode 15, we talk about what’s so wrong about a campaign. It’s a bit of a rant but it’s a good episode.
Elizabeth Earin: It gives you a lot of insights into how we think.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. So what’s the next section after we have talked about reporting on ROI and revenue per program?
Elizabeth Earin: Well, actually let’s take a step back because before we actually do that, before we get into this program summary — and I think we should provide a little bit more detail about that — we are going to provide one quick slide or one quick graph or page that shows the high-level media investment versus revenue and specifically getting to the core of how much they spend and on what programs and assets do they spend. And what this is going to be — and we have got a great template that we will share with you in the show notes that really lays this out if you are having a hard time following to the audio version — but what we are looking at is graphed over time. How much have we spent on this program and then what has our revenue been? And what that’s going to include is your revenue up to a certain point when you are able to report on it but then it’s going to include projected revenue moving forward, and so we are giving them an idea of not only what we have accomplished but what we say we are going to accomplish as well and that the connection between investment in revenue.
Steve Robinson: And then you’ll take that high-level summary and then break it down and loop through it program by program, as we said, with a focus on ROI. But as we said before, you are going to have to show your work on that ROI, so you are going to want to include some key KPIs as well as a couple of other numbers that this audience is probably going to be looking for. And those would include things like impressions, ad impressions, because they are used to seeing that in a marketing report and it gives them some sense of how you are putting their money to work as far as building awareness for the brand. Engagements is a number that we always like to include just to show that we are not just putting the brand out there on billboards and stuff. We are actually getting people to engage with the brand and driving them to the website. They are watching videos. They are doing things that go beyond just passively seeing the brand name. Get into those KPIs and then start talking about revenue. So you want to highlight what is the projected revenue off of this period’s marketing activity for this program and how does that translate into an ROI figure. So when you take that and subtract out the costs, what are we really getting in return for that effort?
Elizabeth Earin: When we are talking about revenue, ROI, whatever our most important KPIs are typically with this audience, you usually have a number representing new contacts or qualified leads, something that’s sort of showing them what’s in the funnel. We want to make sure we use graphs. Graphs are important because when we are looking at just the numbers, that’s one point in time and we don’t have any context to compare it to. But when we look at the graph which is showing a trend over time, we can show the growth and we can show where we have made improvements and that’s a really great story to tell.
Steve Robinson: So once you get out of that program — revenue and ROI section where you have gone through however many programs you are running — some organizations will only have one program running so that’ll be a nice one-page short and sweet section. Some organizations will have five to ten programs running and if you are presenting, you got to whip through them pretty fast. The next step, we are going to get into the asset building. So any of the costs that went in that first section are your short-term investments. These are investing in content that is specifically tied to short-term gains in a program. This is investing in media. When we move into the assets section, now we are going to show them this is what you are getting for your money when we are investing in the longer term objects like content and in brand.
Elizabeth Earin: And again, this is important because what we built here, these long-term assets are leading to future profitability and so we want to make sure that we are documenting and again showing this growth over time. So we do that in a few different ways. We do that by looking at our addressable market. And what this is is a combination of our cookies as well as our leads and that’s often tracked through our CRM. We also want to track on brand. Now this may or may not be something that you are in a position to report on.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. It depends on a couple of things. How easy it is to get brand awareness type of data for your organization. I know that a lot of organizations do this through market research firms that are external to the organization. It’s expensive. They are lucky if they get to do it once a year so it’s hard to do our regular recurring report on brand awareness. We found a hack to get around this a little bit to be able to use AdWords to do it. We talk about that in more detail in a webinar that we did on the same topic a few weeks back, but basically you are just taking a look at how many people are Googling your brand name. If they are Googling your brand name, they are obviously aware of your brand name. So there’s some degree of proxy though that you can estimate it.
Elizabeth Earin: And again, if you are looking at that as a trend over time, then that puts it into context and you can see if that’s improved or if you have got some room to work on that.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. The last component is content. Some content that we produce is short-term, flash-in-the-pan content. It supports a particular program. It’s just creative that’s going to run to support some advertising or some other lead generation type of effort. Some content we produce however works more as an asset for us because it can sit out on our site and over time will generate more and more and more either interest, engagement or revenue or something along those lines. And when we are reporting on this, there are a couple of key metrics that we want to look at. We want to look at quantity. How much content have we produced that’s evergreen, that’s going to continue to work for us for a long period of time? Then we also want to look at quality. What is that content doing for us? So quantity is just the number of pieces. Quality, you are going to have to look at other metrics that can be gauges for how well that content works for you. One of those is engagement, total time of engagement that you have in the content that you have produced. So if they are engaging with the content, then they are obviously engaging with the brand that’s going to lead to future revenue. Sometimes, you can connect it directly back to revenue or other leads or KPIs that lead to revenue. In other words, if this content has strong calls to action, it’s persuasive content and it can convert people right on the spot. Sometimes, you can connect it right that way and that’s a good gauge of quality as well.
Elizabeth Earin: In all cases, you want to make sure that you are graphing each of these metrics to again show that trend over time. And I think the final area here is insights. And really, this is being presented as bullet points with limited texts. Again, looking for those insights which apply to the organization as a whole. This is a high-level report so you don’t need to get into all of the details. Now you just want to wet their appetite, let them know what information that we have used, and then during the course of the conversation, you can delve into some more of those details and figure out how it may be able to apply and where you may need to share additional information about that insight with other departments or other stakeholders.
Steve Robinson: So that’s the report format. I do want to remind you once again that this is really the report that’s designed to share with executives, leadership, laterally with other departments, other stakeholders within the organization, investors, etc. It’s not what you are going to be working with internally as you work to measure and optimize your program. So to do the iteration portion of Iterative Marketing, you are going to need more real-time stats and you are going to need much more granular statistics down to the individual tactic level. That’s not what this is. For that, you are going to use a dashboard or another reporting mechanism. This is specifically for sharing outside of your group.
Elizabeth Earin: And that internal report is really going to depend on your organization and the role of marketing within your organization and who you are working with, if it’s an internal team, if it’s an outside agency and really look for opportunities to report. Again, using a lot of the same components but just add a more granular level.
Steve Robinson: So I think that’s a wrap for this week. As always, I want to thank everyone for making time for us. And until next week, onward and upward.
Elizabeth Earin: If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio, Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then, onward and upward!
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