The Importance of Reporting Revenue for Agencies
All agencies are familiar with monthly reporting for clients and while each agency may have its method of reporting the purpose is the same – to demonstrate how your marketing has provided value to your client. There is no absolute in what should be included in a monthly report as each agency and each client is different. Still, if your agency isn’t reporting on client revenue, you are missing out on providing your clients with numbers they will understand and care about.
Do Your Clients Read Your Reports?
So you are faithfully creating reports every month for clients. Why? Because reports communicate value. They communicate the value your agency is providing to your clients, but only if they are read, and only if the information in the report is perceived by the client as important to them. Most reports are full of stats and numbers and pretty graphs that look nice but don’t convey why they are important to the client. But there is a number that all businesses will understand – revenue. Simply put, Show Them the Money!
Stop Talking Stats, Start Talking Revenue
Let’s say you are one of the few agencies that have super-engaged clients who read their reports with interest. They are thrilled that open and click-through rates are high, that the website views continue to grow, and that the trend for leads is upward. But what does that mean to them in terms of revenue? Are your agency clients thinking, “I see you did a lot of things for us, and these stats look good but does all this make me money?” As an agency are you prepared to answer these questions?
- Did they make money this month? How much?
- Did they do better this month than last month?
When it comes to reporting for a business the real question they want to be answered is, “Did I make money this month?”. If you can’t answer this question for them, your clients are missing vital information about the health of their business and your agency is missing an opportunity to demonstrate your value to your client.
Here’s how to provide clients with the revenue data important to their business and additional methods to demonstrate the value of your marketing:
Step 1. Connect Marketing and Sales
Marketing and sales have to get out of their data silos! Each has data that the other can use to better understand the user journey from prospect to customer and
giving each other the stink eye from a distance wastes time, effort, and MONEY! From a marketing perspective, integrating your agency’s CRM provides a full customer journey dataset from the first touch to the final sale. Plus now you have the results of your marketing campaigns in dollars and cents. And what better way to prove your value to clients than with cold hard cash?
But what if your agency currently isn’t using a CRM? If your agency is still using whiteboards, spreadsheets, or project management software (link to blog post) to manage sales data, you are not capturing the full picture. It’s easy to close the data gap with ActiveDEMAND’s agency CRM for only $20/month with unlimited users.
Step 2. Understand the Customer Journey with Funnel Attribution
One of the best tools we have found in terms of demonstrating instant value is a marketing funnel builder (sometimes referred to as a marketing funnel mapping tool). With table data, it is difficult to demonstrate how a prospect found a business, how they moved along the customer path, and where they became a customer. But with a marketing funnel builder, you can instantly see a customer’s path from the first touch to the last touch.
And once you have the data overlay from marketing and sales, ActiveDEMAND’s marketing funnel builder can show instantly funnel attribution including real-time metrics of how each marketing channel is performing and know how many visitors, MQLs, and Sales are being driven by each channel. Now you can see which marketing channels drive the most traffic, how they interact with landing pages and emails, where MQLs become Sales, and the revenue they generated.
And with ActiveDEMAND’s marketing funnel builder you can click directly on elements in the funnel to get drill-down report data – including revenue – that can be added to your reports.
Step 3. Utilize White Label Scheduled Email Reports and Client Branded Dashboards
Let’s get back to those client reports! So now you have the data from a complete customer journey from prospect to the final sale and you can confidently report the revenue your clients are generating with your marketing efforts. Is your highly valuable and talented staff spending wasted billable hours still pulling data from multiple sources and doing a lot of copy-paste? This is such a waste of time and talent when all of the data could be pulled from one source and sent out in white-labeled scheduled email reports or displayed daily on client-branded dashboards.
Once More with Feeling
Reporting to your marketing agency clients should demonstrate the value of your campaigns and marketing efforts in a clear language they understand and care about. And when you include funnel attribution, you can clearly show the point of entry to a campaign, the path followed, where the sale happened, and the revenue made. There is nothing more valuable for agencies and marketers than the ability to prove marketing efforts are working for clients.
Start reporting revenue for your clients today with AgencyREPORTER by ActiveDEMAND. Get started with a 2-week trial.
