If you’re a modern marketer, you probably live and die by your company’s KPIs, and you can probably talk in detail from memory about your monthly traffic. But communicating that information to others isn’t always so easy, which is why your team needs a stable of marketing report templates.
Learn more about what a marketing report template is, why you need one and why you’re missing the boat if you’re not including engaging visuals in your marketing reports. And when inspiration strikes, use Venngage’s report maker and marketing report templates to create a professional, informative marketing report for your company or agency.
Click to jump ahead:
- What is a marketing report?
- What is the content of a marketing report?
- Marketing report examples for informed decisions
- What is the use of a marketing report?
- How do I write a marketing report?
- What makes a good marketing report?
What is a marketing report?
A marketing report is a document that analyzes the performance of your marketing strategy or the success of marketing campaigns, and/or makes recommendations regarding potential future campaigns.
A marketing report presents an analysis of all the data gathered from a particular marketing strategy or campaign, measured against a predetermined set of goals and key performance indicators (KPI). From there, you can understand what works and what doesn’t, and learn about ways you can improve future marketing efforts.
It can be a one-pager like this one, which focuses on a company’s website traffic across different devices:
But it can also contain multiple pages, like this marketing report that analyzes the performance of marketing efforts in Q3 as well as next steps for Q4:
As we’ll explore later, there are many types of marketing reports, but most often, these reports include marketing metrics like traffic and engagement rates.
What is the content of a marketing report?
Like many other types of reports companies generate, the content of a marketing report typically extends to facts and data.
In this case, though, the facts and data are most often related to the marketing efforts a company is undertaking. They differ from, say, financial reports, which will typically focus on metrics like sales, expenditures and revenue.
And just as a financial report can be used to gauge the fiscal health of a company, a marketing report can be used to better understand the state of a firm’s marketing efforts and how they’re measured against KPIs, like in the example below:
The most common types of content in a marketing report include:
- Goals
- Projected outcomes
- Campaign results
- Budget
- Spending
- Strategy
- Impressions
- User analysis
- Traffic
- Recommendations
Of course, depending on the type of the report (which we’ll talk about in a second), the content can vary. Here’s an example of a quarterly marketing report that focuses on product sales and strategy:
What is the use of a marketing report?
Marketing reports have a wide range of uses, from keeping tabs on campaigns in nearly real-time to making recommendations about budget and strategy to better understanding users. The best use of a marketing report for your company will depend on what you’re hoping to get out of it.
Here are some good questions to ask before deciding what type of marketing report to use:
- What marketing data do we collect?
- How often do we collect it?
- Who makes our marketing decisions?
- What types of information will inform them best?
- How much time do we have to review reports?
Marketing report examples for informed decisions
Generally, you can divide marketing reports into two broad types: data-driven and text-driven.
While both types should, of course, have both data and text, the difference is that in data-driven marketing reports, the numbers are the star. Conversely, with text-driven marketing reports, the purpose is analysis or recommendations.
Let’s look a bit closer at the differences:
Data-driven marketing reports
Digital marketing report
In our internet age, digital marketing accounts for the lion’s share of the average company’s marketing spending. In fact, in 2021, one report found that digital marketing comprised 58 percent of marketing budgets — and it’s expected to grow by another 15 percent in 2022.
This template, based on our analysis of Hubspot data, is an excellent entry point for how your company can better visualize all types of information for your digital marketing report.
We partnered with HubSpot to create this report, containing up-to-date data on marketing trends and insights you all need to know for 2022. Want to see the full report? Download it for free here.
Social media marketing report
For most companies, social media is one of their most important ways to reach consumers. Social media reports can cover broad areas or specific campaign results — or they can do both.
This social media marketing report presents the performance of three different social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) for a marketing campaign called “Make Someone Smile”:
If you want some more inspiration, here’s another social media report template for the same campaign. This particular one focuses on the planning phase of the campaign, as it talks about the objectives, the target audience, as well as the actual strategy:
You can certainly use both templates to plan and report on the performance of your social media marketing campaigns!
Monthly marketing report
Marketing isn’t a one-time, set-it-and-forget-it prospect, so having several templates on hand that can help your company track metrics in close to real-time is important.
Consider using a monthly marketing report template like this one, which is ideal for companies that need to get better insight into their user base.
Email marketing report
Email continues to be a critical channel for marketers, and email marketing reports are a necessity for modern teams. Given the plethora of metrics related to email marketing, it’s even more important for these types of marketing reports to be straightforward and simple to understand. Lots of email marketing tools like HubSpot or Mailchimp will come with built in marketing reports included in their platform.
Weekly marketing report
While this template was created for a sales team, it’s perfectly applicable on the marketing side of operations as well. Using this type of template for your marketing team is an excellent way to make sure your colleagues (and executives) take note of important metrics as they occur.
SEO marketing report
Search engine optimization is one of the services most commonly offered by marketing agencies, teams and departments, so being able to chart things like organic traffic and engagement with charts like those in this report is crucial.
Did you know we did a survey about the role of visuals in content marketing? Check out the results of the survey here.
Marketing KPIs report
As they say in sports, stats don’t lie, and marketing teams often live and die by KPIs. Use a template like this to visualize how your campaigns are going on various channels and how well you are engaging with users.
Marketing statistics
In addition to keeping tabs on how successful your company is in marketing itself on a weekly or monthly basis, the concept of marketing itself can be the subject of a marketing report, such as in this example, which shares a series of marketing statistics.
Text-driven marketing reports
Marketing research report
When your marketing report doesn’t need to focus on rapidly changing metrics, consider a template like this one that will allow you to dig into the WHY of your numbers, telling data-driven stories that can help your company’s decision-makers chart the best course for the company.
Learn more about using data to tell a story about your brand.
Marketing analytics report
Marketing analytics reports can be in-depth, as the previous example, or they can be short and sweet, sharing a few key metrics but focusing largely on taking the reader through the information with well-placed analysis.
Marketing strategies report
Whether you’re a consultant or an internal worker, marketing strategies reports can help you explain why you think a certain strategy or tactic is best. Use this template to sell your services or sell your higher-ups on a bigger budget or emergence into a new channel.
Marketing agency report
Marketing agency reports can also help your company establish its thought leadership in your space. Take a page from this template and forecast trends in your field or make a policy recommendation by creating a whitepaper.
Team marketing report
Use this project status template as a team marketing report to keep your department on track. Particularly if your marketing team is remote, ensuring everyone is working toward the same goal on the correct pace is critical. If you’re launching a new campaign, a template like this can help everyone visualize what’s to come.
How do I write a marketing report?
Some marketing reports will be almost entirely data, meaning you won’t have to write much at all. Others can be very heavy on text, including analysis and recommendations.
A good rule of thumb, though, even if your marketing report does rely heavily on data is to make sure that each chart or table is clearly explained with a small header, usually above the chart. Here’s an example of how that looks:
Depending on its purpose, you could also provide more analysis or key takeaways within the body of your marketing report:
The easiest way would be to choose the type of marketing reports you want to create, pick a template of that type and edit using the existing content! If you want to make your marketing report reflect your brand, you can add your brand colors and logos using Autobrand:
And apply all branding elements to the report using My Brand Kit:
What makes a good marketing report?
Regardless of whether it’s data-driven or text-driven, a good marketing report should tell you something you didn’t already know. In the context of a company or marketing team, that means providing insight about your marketing campaigns.
For example, if you’re creating a marketing report for your colleagues, they may already know that a certain social media channel is your most successful, so simply reporting those numbers may not do much good. A truly useful marketing report will help them make mental connections. That could mean showing that the previously mentioned channel has had a certain number of weeks of growth or decline, or some other useful insight.
Wisely using visuals can help in this effort. That’s because the human brain processes things like charts and graphs more quickly and more effectively than text.
This marketing report about user demographics, for example, can give readers information in the blink of an eye that they would need to read paragraphs of content to understand.
And even if they understood it intellectually, visualizing data can make information more memorable, and in the context of a fast-paced marketing department, making information sticky is critical.
Related: 20 Professional Report Cover Page Examples & Templates [100% Customizable]
In summary: Marketing reports can tell you where your company sits in the minds of consumers — and where you need to go.
There’s no shortage of marketing data generated by the average company over the course of a day. In fact, in the time it’s taken you to read this post, your KPIs have probably changed a little bit. Harness the power of data visualization and analysis to enable better decision-making in your company.
You can easily create a marketing report using Venngage’s easy-to-edit templates. It’s free to get started.
