How to Create Effective Marketing Reports: Some Useful Strategies for Academic Institutions

By ASMA On Feb 6, 2020

4 min read

Admissions at most of the institutes will get over in next 2-3 months especially B-Schools. Thereafter, admission teams will mull over the results achieved. They will evaluate their marketing campaigns vis-a-vis targets set. During this time, admission marketers in various institutes will be needing a comprehensive matrix to measure performance.

To do so, academic institutions need to know what’s working and what isn’t – what’s driving their target audience, what’s bringing engagement etc. They must know the right indicators to measure campaign effectiveness.

But it is not enough to simply measure performance in terms of number of clicks and likes a particular campaign got or how much traffic landed onto your website. These can give a lopsided picture of what’s driving business or what are your weak spots. Perhaps this is not sufficient to arrive at a strategic conclusion. So, challenges are many when it comes to preparing a well presented marketing report which captures each and everything in correlation with overall data points.

Today, measuring the key performance indicators in social media has become very critical in marketing of academic brands. In this blog post, we’ll find out some useful strategies for your marketing team to prepare a comprehensive social media report. You will also find in this blog, tips on how to present your social media report in a crunchy and interesting way.

In this blog post, we’ll see how we can come up with some useful strategies for developing powerful marketing reports for your college marketing teams. You will find in this blog, useful tips on how to present your marketing reports in a crisp, clear and analytical format.

Let’s Get Started!

To begin with, first and foremost a marketing report must ensure sufficient data points for building analytical inferences. It should enable your academic brand to uncover meaningful insights to drive your efforts more efficiently. It should help you align your institutional goals and set them in the proper context for setting the right way forward for achieving success.

It must ultimately offer the value proposition your marketing team is looking for the institution.

A good marketing report should have following characteristics:

Measure campaign ROI against marketing goals set.
Presents a complete SWOT Analysis of your work and suggests way forward.
List down the best and the worst performing channels and inventories.
Identify content that generated maximum engagement (both text and video based).
Includes analytical inferences for each data set so that the team is clear about its strategies.
It should also suggest the next way forward to optimize marketing performance.

How to Build an Effective Marketing Report for Your Institute: Useful Strategies

1. Do you know the beneficiaries of your report

Do you know for whom you are preparing the marketing report. Is it for external audience or internal assessment? Who is the ultimate beneficiary?

While developing your marketing report it is important that you have clarity about the intended audience. You can list down the stakeholders who will be involved in the discussions related to the report. These could be teams from the same department or different one including senior management. The marketing report can also be an internal branding exercise to document progress and present final analysis of outcome achieved.

But, above all, your report should offer tangible values to all the stakeholders involved.

Besides, you should also be clear about the purpose of your marketing report. The data points should not be mentioned in isolation. It should derive actionable inferences from those data sets.

The marketing report can broadly include some of these aspects:

Performance metrics of publishing channels.
Performance matrix of marketing inventories.
Budget analysis
The way forward.

2. Analytical framework

It is important that your report must present an analytical framework that captures user expectations, in this case, your stakeholders.

Reporting of data should be substantiated by supporting inferences. Your marketing report should learning derived which will consolidate your decision-making.

Analysis presented should be time-bound. It has to be done periodically so that you have sufficient time for review and campaign tweaking. Based on the requirement of your marketing plan, you can prepare reports on daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly and yearly basis.

3. Benchmarking your performance and set the targets for the future

Forecasting is an important element of any marketing report. Growth projections for the future should be practical and reasonable. It should take into account the targets you wish to achieve. Your forecast for the next season should also consider emerging trends that can influence or impact your projected targets.

4. Report presentation

How you present the report is also very crucial. Present your data in pictorial form using graphs, infographics etc. Your graphs and charts need to convey meaningful insights that will help establish measurable linkages between the quality of the data and your campaign priorities and goals set initially. You can use Google Analytics or any other marketing CRM to generate analytical reports of your marketing campaigns.

Avoid cluttering of information. Use illustrations to make your report interesting. Examples should be supported by visuals of your campaign to explain results. Finish with takeaways and analysis highlights.

Do not forget to summarize your analysis in the end.

Finally

The habit of creating regular marketing reports should be an essential part of your marketing efforts. It helps to track progress of your campaigns and the return that you are getting from your marketing budget.

The report should factor key statistics and draw appropriate inferences.

So, all the best for your marketing performance this year and keep following our blog contents and updates for getting all the latest marketing insights.