Image created via @louddesignstudio
Q1, we're done with you, but before we let you go let's take one last look at you. Queue montage music.
We've been creating quarterly reports for a while now but boy do we remember our first time. If you've never done one before the idea can be as daunting as your first day at grown-up school. So that you have no excuse to procrastinate with questions like 'where to I start?' 'are these actually useful, anyway?', 'who has time for reporting?', we're throwing you in at the deep end with this useful little blog post. *NB it's not that little, I'm just throwing in the odd belittling word to make it all seem less intimidating. Is it working?
Where to I start?
Goals, everything starts with goals. Why are you doing all this social media post and email marketing stuff in the first place? Luckily, because you were really well behaved and did what we told you to do at the start of the year, you have a missions statement and you have goals. Time to crack open the document or note pad you wrote them in and take a looksey:
Can you cross any off? ✅
Update the numbers associated? Were you a liiiittle unrealistic about getting 300,000 new subscribers to your newsletter each month with zero budget allocated? Or are you getting 100 new followers a month in your sleep? Honey, lets be a little more aspirational. 💯
Are there any that you've ignored completely? Maybe some have become totally irrelevant (because life moves on, Tesla put a car in space before you did, *next*).
Are they actually useful? Yes.
Who has time? You do, because what's the effing point in doing marketing that isn't proactively helping you achieve anything?
How do I create a report?
With marketing and retail today, we need to look at the whole customer journey to see if our overall strategy is having an effect. We can't necessarily attribute one sale to one campaign or post to we need to look at the whole customer journey. We may open a store that leads to a huge spike in online sales to we need to review e'rr-thing.
Look at your mission statement
Look at your goals
Look at your marketing & sales activity
Question everything
Are there any new trends?
Any consumers you should be focusing on?
What are your competitors / aspirational brands doing?
Make change
Questions
Social Media: Do you use a scheduling platform like Hootsuite?
No: That's fine. Each platforms has an 'analytics' or 'reports' section.
Yes: That's great. All your reports will be in one place in neat little charts
Which platforms have the most interaction? Should you invest a little more time in this platform, or looking at the others to see if you're missing a trick?
Which posts have the highest reach?
Does video or photo perform better?
Is there a pattern in posts people seem to ignore? Do you need to make them more eye catching or cut them completely?
Email Marketing > platforms like MailChimp have reports for each campaign and each list.
Are people opening your newsletters? If not, take a look at your subject lines & sending times
Google Analytics or website data
Not sure where the other people are coming from? You can find out on Google Analytics.
Are they using mobile or desktop? Can you do anything to make their purchase journey easier through their preferred method?
Are loads of people getting to your home page and then dropping off? There must be more you can do to encourage people to have a look around. It may be as simple as making sure you 'call-to-actions' are clear.
Are people getting to checkout and dropping off? Perhaps it's not that easy to check out.
SEO & paid searches
Are you making a ROI on your time and money?
Have you seen an increase in sales?
Is it worth outsourcing this or bringing someone in house?
Sales > ultimately we need to know if our overall efforts are resulting in sales. If so, yay, but what can we do more of to capitalise on this? If not, let's make a change.
Online
Stockists
In store
Events & pop-ups
Ambassadors
Really don't want to create a report? Get in touch, we'll just do it for you 💕