Use Reporting to Sell Your Digital Agency

Lack of Reporting Hurts Trust

After an ambitious initial pitch, many clients start their agency relationship with high expectations. These expectations may quickly turn to disappointment if two months into the project, the client hasn’t received a report of results to date.

Even though the agency staff may be working hard on building out paid search campaigns and optimizing a site for organic search, the client doesn’t know what’s going on without communication. From the perspective of many clients, if the agency isn’t communicating what’s happening, then no work is happening. Of course, this may not be a fair assumption, but the agency should communicate on a level that leaves no room for false assumptions.

Hopefully, you have a better reporting plan in place (if not, work on it!), but how clearly are you communicating this in the sales process? Let’s discuss some ways to emphasize reporting when selling.

Set Clear Expectations

From your initial pitch to the scope of work you hand a new client to sign, make it clear how reporting will play into your digital marketing process. Highlight reporting in your pitch and in the proposal document you provide afterward.

Let your prospect know how often they can expect to receive reports, whether it’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Clarify how you’ll review reports with them, whether planning a phone call, web conference, or in-person meeting. Describe the format or platform of reporting, such as web-based (like Megalytic) or PDF.

In addition, set expectations for what data you need from the client in order to prepare effective reports. For example, you’ll need access to Google Analytics, if it’s currently in place on their website. Other data such as historical figures for sales, lead value and lead volume will help you to more accurately compare new data to past performance.

Show an Example Report

If a prospective client wants to learn more about your reporting process, show an example report highlighting the effort you put into client reporting. Emphasize that any given client’s report may not look exactly as the same as they are customized to each client. However, you can provide your prospect with an idea of what they’ll see in monthly and quarterly reviews.

Your first option is to use an existing client’s report, with their permission of course. If you or your current client would rather not show their business name in a report, you can black out or delete any personally identifiable information. This may include mentions of the brand name, website URLs, and some keywords.

You can also prepare an example digital marketing report template that’s completely anonymous and can serve as a sales piece for multiple clients. In this case, you won’t have to worry about blocking out personal information if you build the template to be free of branded identifiers.

Emphasize Customization

While an example report gives a general idea of how a client’s report will look, a complete one-size-fits-all approach to reporting doesn’t work for most agencies. Especially if you work with a variety of industries, you’ll end up formatting reports differently for each client.

Some clients may just care about high-level numbers, such as changes in sessions or conversions over time. Other clients may care more about more in-depth data, such as breakdowns of metrics by landing page or directory. In addition, clients may want to evaluate specific metrics, like tracking sales of a new product.

You should emphasize that you’ll work with each client to craft reports that speak specifically to their needs. If they don’t understand certain metrics in a report, you’ll work to present those metrics in a way that’s easier to digest and do your best to explain exactly what those insights mean to your client’s bottom line. Your sales approach can significantly differentiate your agency from those who provide automated or broadly templated reports for all clients.

Explain Reporting’s Role in Strategy

Beyond highlighting your reporting process, it’s important to cover how reporting plays into the actual work you’re doing on your client’s campaign. Ideally, the evaluation of analytics data will drive specific actions month after month.

If you see that a blog post about morning workout routines drove more signups than usual, you may suggest writing more posts about similar content and connecting them with the high- performing post. If you see that product pages are getting high traffic but no sales, you may suggest testing variations on your call to action (CTA) or adding more content about selling points.

Ultimately, you want your prospect to understand how reporting guides a thought process that looks beyond day-to-day tasks to focus on long-term strategic planning. Proper reporting means a careful review of analytics data that produces informed actions to fluidly adjust digital marketing campaigns.

In addition, reporting can help you to go back to your client with ideas for their business. For instance, you may find that a client who only sells products locally in a brick-and-mortar store receives significant search volume from other states. From this data, you may then recommend that your client test selling products online. Ultimately, the information you get from analytics can prove to drive more revenue in the long term when turned into action.

Conclusion

If you’re not already emphasizing reporting as a part of your sales process, start now.. Describe your approach to reporting as an aspect of campaigns from the initial pitch. Provide sample reports when appropriate, and talk about how you’ll customize actual reports to meet everyone’s concerns. Explain how reporting, particularly the way you do it, can contribute to a broader strategy for your clients.

Reporting can be a powerful tool in your arsenal of selling points. Of course, you’ll need to back up your sales talk by delivering on your reporting promises once a new client starts. That’s easier to do when you have the right reporting framework in place. If you’ve invested the time, energy and resources into developing a reporting process, never underestimate how pivotal that can be when it comes to getting clients on board with your agency.