Performance Reporting: How to Showcase Your Results and Impress Clients

So you’ve implemented an effective new marketing plan for your clients, and it’s delivering real results. What’s the next step? You’ll need to effectively communicate these results to your clients to illustrate the return on their investment.

Clear communication builds trust and helps the client better understand what each metric is and why it’s important. This is particularly important with services like Pay Per Result SEO, which is a marketing tool many of your clients may not understand.

Keep reading to see how you can showcase your results to strengthen your relationship with clients and why it’s so important.

1. Use Clear Language

When communicating your metrics to your client, it’s important that you send them a report that’s easy to understand. Your client may not want to spend a lot of time reviewing their marketing results, so it’s important that they get the gist right away. The most effective performance reports will communicate everything your client needs to know in one document without them having to search online for new terms or concepts.

One of the best ways to do this is by providing concise commentary along with each metric. For certain terms, this may mean providing a quick definition or explanation of what the metric means. You should also make sure you’re illustrating how this metric affects their business as a whole.

For example, if you’re reporting on Pay Per Result SEO, you’ll want to communicate key information about page rankings. However, it’s also important to illustrate how a strong page ranking leads to a higher click-through rate and potentially even higher conversions if that’s applicable for your client.

Showing your clients exactly how your services help them reach their goals goes a long way in building trust. When clients understand the results you’re generating, it improves loyalty and can even encourage them to expand the marketing services they buy from you. According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Report, 81 percent of consumers across all geographic markets say they must be able to trust a company to do the right thing in order to continue working with them. This is why trust-building actions like reporting are so important.

2. Provide Visuals

An easy way to showcase your results is to provide visuals to go along with your metrics. Visuals like pie charts, line graphs, bar graphs and infographics are helpful ways to communicate your results.

In our highly digital world, our attention spans have become shorter. Studies by Microsoft have shown that the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015. By using visual tools, you can communicate important pieces of information in a very short amount of time. Using visuals in your performance reports can also give them a sleeker, more professional look.

3. Customize Reports for Each Client

As a digital marketing agency, it’s likely that you’re generating reports frequently. To make this easier, it’s helpful to have a standard reporting template that you can use for any client.

However, it’s also important for you to customize this template as needed to fit each client’s unique marketing strategy. According to a Salesforce research report, 76 percent of B2B clients expect businesses to meet their unique needs and expectations. By customizing your client’s reports, you can offer more detail to better communicate each metric. You can also make sure your report is tailored to each client’s specific goals.

4. Offer Regular Client Check-Ins

It’s normal for clients to have questions after receiving their marketing performance reports, especially when they first start working with you. Instead of just sending their results via email, try to schedule a check-in that’s in-person or by phone or video call. This gives them an opportunity to ask any questions they may have, and you can provide any necessary further clarification. You want to be sure you can address all client concerns when they read their reports.

5. Be Transparent

Not every digital marketing campaign is going to go perfectly. When creating your performance reports, it’s important to be transparent with your clients even if the strategy isn’t quite delivering the results you had hoped. Use your report to explain exactly what happened, why it happened and what steps you will take to correct it. This honesty is crucial for building trust with your clients. Often you will try a tactic in order to test it. Testing is critical, and your clients need to understand that.

6. Customize Each Client’s Metrics

The metrics you’re reporting may vary slightly from client to client depending on the marketing strategy that they are using. However, there are some key metrics that should be included in any report. The most important is total web traffic to your client’s website. This should also include where the traffic is coming from, whether it’s coming from someone going directly to the site, coming from another site (and which site), coming from a search or coming from social media.

On top of that, you’ll want to include the bounce rate, which is the number of people who leave your client’s site after just visiting one page. Finally, your performance report should include any key conversion rates that are important for your client. Among other things, this could include the number of people who make a purchase, sign up for a loyalty program or sign up for an email list. These standard metrics give your client a clear picture of where their marketing strategy stands.

From there, you can add in any other relevant metrics for your client’s strategy. This could include in-depth SEO reporting, social media metrics, email marketing metrics and more.

Umbrella Can Help

By consistently providing performance reporting for your clients, you’re showing them exactly why it’s so important to invest in your marketing services. One great way to expand the services you provide is with white label Google advertising services.

Umbrella is a white label digital marketing agency that can help you provide more for your clients. We offer Pay Per Result SEO, Google advertising, social media advertising, email marketing, and more, all under your agency’s name. With our services, you can take on more clients and offer comprehensive marketing packages without the extra stress. Contact Umbrella today to learn more about our white label services.