4 Reasons Why Client Reporting is Essential for your Marketing Agency
If you run a marketing agency, you know that client reporting is crucial for the agency-client relationship.
Detailed reports educate clients and help them better understand your hard work. This short guide will explore client reporting: what it is, why it is essential, and the top benefits of adding client reporting to your agency’s process.
What is client reporting?
For agencies, client reporting is a crucial part of their business and performance that details the services an agency performs, and how close they’re getting to achieving the client’s goals. Client reporting is all about client communication. Those reports become the focus points around your discussions, but it’s also a way to show progress and prove your value.
While client custom reports are essential for you and your client’s business, it might feel like a time-consuming process to many agency owners. Thankfully, modern tools make reporting much easier these days.
Creating those reports is the key to your digital marketing agency’s success and the right automated reporting tools mixed with a solid reporting process will help you use client reporting to your advantage.
But before we get into all of that, let’s review some of the benefits of client reporting.
The top 4 benefits of client reporting
Keeps both parties accountable
Your client reporting process is destined to keep your business and your client accountable to one another. Have your clients involved from the beginning, from establishing marketing goals to determining the key metrics you will be tracking. You can start with these questions:
What are your business/marketing goals?
Who is your business's target audience?
Who are your ideal clients/customers?
What type of relationship do you have with your audience?
What marketing metrics do you currently track (if any)?
What is your definition of marketing success?
Not only will they feel like they are part of the process, but it also opens a discussion about the client’s expectations. This will help you know your clients better and tailor your work to those expectations.
Raises your value
As with many businesses, your clients are paying you for your work, and they probably want some proof that their investment is worth it, and that’s where client reporting comes into play.
One way to showcase and eventually raise your value is to regularly report back to your clients on how well their digital marketing is going. If you set different milestones and use a streamlined client reporting process by providing the client with quantifiable metrics that summarize your work, you give them solid evidence that they were right to use part of their budget to pay for your services.
Besides that, it’s also an excellent opportunity for upselling. Getting tangible results can provide optimization opportunities that can be used to upsell your clients into creating new marketing campaigns or trying different social media strategies.
Builds a better client-agency relationship
Being transparent about what is or isn’t working also creates an atmosphere of trust, which is essential to building solid relationships with your clients. One way you can achieve transparency is to regularly stay in touch with them. By sending them regular reports and gathering feedback, your clients will know they can ask questions and that you are available to talk about their progress.
Client reporting allows you to check in regularly, whether it’s weekly or monthly, to discuss their progress, but it can also be a great selling point for new clients, as they know they will get regular conversations about their investment.
Educates your clients
As you provide your clients with valuable data, make sure they understand what you’re talking about. By educating your clients, they are more likely to want to continue their relationship with you for the long term. This will also facilitate the onboarding process with your clients, and this valuable information will be beneficial for your relationship as they will better understand your value and efforts.
Don’t be afraid that your clients won’t need you anymore. Instead, by providing them with that value, they might understand better and appreciate the hard work you’re doing.
How to create the perfect report for your client
If you still can’t tell, client reports are an integral part of your relationship with your clients, and therefore, you want to use them to their full potential. But before you get to creating your monthly reports, you might want to identify the essential key performance indicators you want to measure.
KPI examples
Marketing campaigns results metrics:
Click-through-rate
Cost per click (CPC)
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Conversion rate
SEO progress metrics:
Organic traffic
Bounce rate
Keyword ranking
Number of backlinks
Social media metrics:
Likes
Engagement
Followers growth
Website clicks
E-commerce metrics:
Average order value
Customer lifetime value
Shopping cart abandonment rate
Returning customer rate
Marketing goals and their corresponding metrics depend on your business goals, and once you understand your key business KPIs, you can align these business goals with your marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to drive more conversions to your website from social media, you might want to measure engagement, website clicks, social media ad metrics, etc.
Once you have a list of your goals and your KPIs, it’s time to streamline as much as possible the reporting creating process, and a reporting dashboard software can be of great help.
There are many client reporting tools you can choose from, from Google data studio’s graphs to Excel spreadsheets to a reporting software like Dashthis.
With Dashthis, you can create automated reports in three easy steps:
Connect your marketing platforms, integrations, and data sources (Social media, Google Analytics, Google Ads, etc.).
Choose between report templates to track KPIs for SEO reporting, marketing campaigns, PPC, or social media, or start a report from scratch.
The tool will gather all your most important KPIs into an automated dashboard so you can see your metrics in real-time.
You can then embed the Dasthis report in a custom page inside your SPP workspace, and link to it via the sidebar menu. The report will load for your clients inside their white label client portal so everything is in one place.
Summary
Properly done client reporting ensures that your marketing agency can retain clients, it makes you look professional, and both parties are on the same page. At the same time, you spend less time explaining your process and deliverables to clients as they can track the progress of your work on their own terms.
