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PPC reporting, Running an online Agency, SEM

The Benefits Of Using Marketing Report Templates

By
18 September 2019

Most marketers dread the process of taking their successful campaign information and pasting into a spreadsheet. But when it comes to making presentations, communicating complex information, and keeping your team up-to-date, marketing report templates are an incredibly powerful tool. 

Rather than spend countless hours manually creating weekly reports, free up your time and energy with templates. In addition to looking sleek and professional, report templates have a host of benefits. From reports with simple SEO metrics to comprehensive campaign data, having a template will save you time, allowing you to focus on your marketing strategy and execution. 

Marketing reports improve your own and your clients’ campaigns, and are a fundamental part of any marketers job. It not only keeps you updated on the results of your strategy, but helps your team make more informed decisions and lets your clients see the results of your efforts. Whether you love or hate making presentations, reports are here to stay. That’s why templates are so powerful, since they help streamline this vital process and create efficiency.

What Are Marketing Report Templates?

Marketing report templates are exactly what they sound like. Rather than spending a few hours every week compiling key metrics into a report, templates are a pre-built presentation that require much less effort. You simply have to integrate your Key Performance Indicators, and then you’ll have an instant report based off your template.

Automated marketing reports can depict weekly, monthly, and annual metrics. They can break down improvements, areas that need more attention, and more. This gives you vital data that you can share with your team in an easy to understand format.

Marketing platforms like Swydo offer a host of templates and tools that help you compile and communicate important information about your KPIs. You can use pre-defined templates for your social media, PPC or SEO campaigns. Or you can make a custom template for more unique strategies, giving you full control over your campaign metrics.

Types Of Marketing Report Templates

Just like there are a number of different marketing channels, so too are there different types of marketing report templates. You can turn to different templates based on which campaign you’re focusing on. Then, the data will be presented in a more understandable way, allowing you to optimize your campaign and budget allocation based on the best metrics. There are plenty of report templates to choose from, but these represent some of the most common and important types of reports out there.

SEO Templates

Any SEO strategy is going to focus on a few key specific SEO KPIs to maximize success. Bounce rate, organic traffic, conversion paths and more will be on the docket. An SEO template will offer you enticing visuals that help you understand the visitor’s journey to your site. You’ll be able to see what keywords bring in traffic, where visitors bounced, and more in an SEO template. With a comprehensive report over time, you’ll be equipped to make the most informed decisions about your organic traffic strategy.

PPC Templates

PPC campaigns are unique in that they provide almost immediate results. Having a report tell you exactly which Google Ads campaigns are generating the best ROI is indispensable. You can see which Google Ads draw in the most customers, which ones result in the most conversions, generate the highest revenue. In platforms like Swydo you can easily connect your Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or other PPC accounts to get actionable insights. 

Social Media Marketing Templates

A social media marketing template can provide comprehensive information about social activity across a range of platforms. Whether it’s follower engagement on Twitter or organic Facebook results, SMM templates are perfect for compiling data from several platforms on one report. You can easily see side-by-side comparisons, find out which social channels have high engagement,  are bringing in the best leads, and make better decisions about your social media strategy.

Custom Templates 

Most marketers will want to custom make their own template for more unique strategies. Whether it’s to compare landing pages, A/B testing, or testing influencer marketing ROI, having a custom template is a helpful tool. Rather than making a unique report every week using Excel or Word, a custom marketing report template lets you plug in your data and get instant charts, graphs, data on your campaign.

Benefits Of Marketing Report Templates 

Marketing report templates don’t just help you save time. They’re tools that give you a distinct advantage over creating reporting manually. They’re more efficient and accurate, can help communicate complex information with ease, and are more visually stimulating. Both agencies and in-house marketing departments can take advantage of these benefits of templates.

Save Time

Copy and pasting thousands of columns between spreadsheets can take hours away from your week. That’s time that could be used implementing marketing strategies, analyzing data, optimizing campaigns, and creating copy. When you add in the time it takes to make graphs and charts, you could be looking at a huge time sink. But by using an automated template, you can avoid this waste.

Marketing templates save you time in a few ways. They automatically update with the latest metrics from your data sources, keeping your team from entering data manually. They instantly create compelling visuals to make sure that your presentation will be easy to digest. Lastly, they can be set to automatically be shared as PDFs or dashboards.

Avoid Mistakes

When you’re working with an endless sea of data and numbers, you can easily make mistakes. An extra zero in a spreadsheet or an inverted X axis on a chart could have a huge effect on your report. Mistakes like these could cause you to waste time and money fixing problems that don’t exist. Or you could be putting more resources into channels that you thought were yielding more results, but weren’t. This is an inevitable part of relying on manual data entry.

Marketing report templates are more reliable and accurate, since they can draw information directly from the source. By cutting out the chance for human error, templates effectively create flawless reports using data only from your specifies sources. By reducing the risk of error, you can move forward with your campaign with confidence.

Communicate More Effectively

Visuals are a vital part of breaking down and understanding complex information. Odds are that your graphic designer doesn’t want to be stuck creating stunning visuals for weekly reports. This means that you’re stuck with using stock graphs and pie charts from other programs. Or you omit graphs entirely and stick to spreadsheets. Clunky visuals like these can make reports difficult to understand for you, your clients, and your team. 

Either way is less effective at communicating information than the sleek visuals of a reporting template. With an intuitive interface, platforms like Swydo let you break down your report in clear, concise visuals that help your team and your clients see how your campaign is performing. Marketing strategies are complex and have big moving parts. Getting the right visuals is essential for clear communication.

Be More Consistent

If you’re making a brand new report every month, or just letting your team parse through the data, you’re lacking consistency. It can be confusing to see variance in reports across time, which could concern your clients or mix up your team. Or worse, you could mix up reports that look too similar.

Marketing templates also look the same every time. You won’t forget to include a key piece of information, or switch a bar chart to a pie chart. Instead, you’ll have consistent reports for every marketing channel. This will instill confidence in your clients and help your team stay organized. 

Brand Your Reports

Aside from a custom header and footer on an Excel or Word document, it’s tough to brand your reports. Including your brand on your reports is a vital part of the process. It not only looks and feels more professional, but reminds your clients that your firm is getting these results. Using a watermark as your brand just won’t communicate that.

With a report template, you can easily incorporate your logo, color scheme, and brand name into the final product. A consistently branded report is the perfect finishing touch to maintaining that relationship with your clients. It may seem small, but it’s the kind of detail that helps you stand out from the competition and increase your brand visibility.

Get Better Results With Marketing Report Templates

Marketing report templates have gotten more sophisticated and robust over the past few years. Creating an automated template will give you a huge advantage when it comes to reporting. By connecting your data sources to an automated template, you’ll get only the latest, most accurate campaign information.

Save time by cutting out the data entry of manual reports. Have more accurate data with instant communication between your data source and your report. Get more concise, sleek, branded reports that convey a wealth of information to your team and clients. Most importantly, take the data on each report and make better informed decisions on your strategy.

Would you like to see how easy it is to set up marketing dashboards using Swydo? Schedule a personalized demo today. Or, sign up and try our 14 day free trial.