Reporting, Dashboards and Forecasting
Performance is Everything
It could be argued that dashboards and alerts are aspects of marketing reporting, albeit produced and accessible in real-time.
Reporting
Reporting become less granular and tends to focus on overarching business objectives the higher they need to reach.
Aside from reporting success against business goals, reporting should provide insight, from which action can be taken to improve marketing performance. Reports should provide a meaningful summary of metrics.
Forecasting
Forecasting also supports a fundamental business need, the ability to manage cashflow. Miscalculation of marketing performance and resulting sales can lead to a problem with cashflow. Businesses can run at negative profitability for years (Amazon is a good example of this), but a cashflow crisis is terminal (where are Enron, BHS or Carillion now?)
When developing marketing plans for clients, we always try to extract insight into conversion rates beyond the marketing process – so we can forecast an expected range of marketing performance.
Every stage should have specific marketing or sales activity assigned to it, with an expected performance outcome (refined over time). As a result, a refined and reduced lead volume can be extrapolated into the future with a knowledge of conversion rate and timeframe. Ultimately, this delivers a revenue forecast for the future.
Return on Investment (ROI) Reporting
All aspects of investment – from external agency costs, to campaign deliverables, media, advertising costs, refunds/lifetime value and even internal resource costs – should ideally be taken into account.
ROI should take the bigger picture into account and be applied at multiple tiers – tactical level, campaign level and strategy level with appropriate timeframes for each.