The Power of Insights: Why Reporting Matters

Why does reporting matter?

Reporting should be the backbone of any organisation’s digital marketing activity. By collecting data from across your channels on a regular basis, you can dig into what is and isn’t working, and take stock of whether your content is reaching the right people, at the right times, in the right places.

The digital landscape is so fast paced and changeable that reporting becomes fundamental to understanding your digital presence and navigating these changes.

Learnings from reporting can then be used to inform your creative approach (what creative assets are performing the best?), your channel approach (are the channels you are on the right ones/ how much of a priority is each one?), your audience strategy (are you reaching your desired audiences?), your overall digital strategy (is your digital marketing activity supporting your organisational goals?) and much more. 

Ultimately, by spending time and energy on reporting, you can be more targeted with your approach to digital marketing, and therefore more efficient and impactful in the long-run. 

This is particularly key for many charities, non-profits and purpose-led organisations who are carrying out important work with limited resources.

What should you be reporting on?

Some of the most impactful ways that organisations can build reporting into their digital marketing approach are:

• Regular monthly reporting of key metrics from across your digital channels including social media, website analytics and email marketing.
• Social listening during key moments, such as an event or launch.
• Campaign-specific reports that measure impact and gather key learnings from big moments to take forward.
• Annual benchmarking of competitors / similar organisations within your space or sector.
• Annual audience landscape analysis in order to take stock of who your audiences are across your channels, and whether this is inline with who you want them to be.

By carrying out all of these different yet complementary ways of reporting, organisations can ensure that the work they are doing is reaching the right audiences and creating as much impact as possible.

How we approach reporting at Empower

At Empower, we have spent lots of time refining our approach to reporting and gathering insights. 

Some of the methods that we use to gather these all-important insights include:

• Tools partners including Audiense and Brandwatch – Empower partner with a number of insights platforms. This allows us to offer our clients access to a greater amount of data that would otherwise be hard to access and time consuming to analyse. This includes the ability to carry out social listening, competitor benchmarking, and in-depth audience research. We have dedicated Account Managers that we work closely with at our partner tools, enabling us to stay at the forefront of new insights and features, as well as understanding how to get the most meaningful data and learnings for our clients.
• In-platform analytics – We understand what analytics are available natively, and we know how to use each platform’s tools to dig into the necessary data.
• Benchmarks & KPIs – In order to make reporting data really clear, and to focus on how we can reach key organisational goals, we like to set key performance indicators and benchmarks for our clients. These allow us to track progress, and also to compare performance against both internal and external activity. This enables us to accurately measure and understand what good looks like for individual organisations.
• Strategic Recommendations & Insights – The numbers are nothing without understanding what they mean, and how we can tactically use learnings to improve performance. With quantitative data, there needs to be qualitative explanations, to ensure that what we learn is really utilised and implemented in a strategic way – whether as part of regular monthly reporting, or as part of an annual audit.

To find out more about putting insights into action, read about how we used competitor benchmarking to gain valuable insights and strategic recommendations for WBCSD. 

Or, learn how we provided a comprehensive audit and digital strategy that Breast Cancer Now could confidently roll out to achieve their goals.

Contact the Empower team to find out more about how we can supercharge your insights and analytics.