What is the Cremarc Innovation Hub?
If you’re not a follower of the Cremarc Innovation Hub, you may not know what our focus is. At Cremarc, we strive to learn. It’s a big part of our culture. We experiment with our marketing to test and optimise. Our Innovation Hub is just an extension of this ideology. We allocate our marketing experts time to discover and evaluate new approaches, tools and tactics. Furthering this, we share that knowledge throughout our team through Lunch & Learns. The focus of the Cremarc Innovation Hub for Q4 was evaluating the different automated reporting options. Here’s what we learned.
Why do we need to automate reporting?
We know that modern marketers are stretched, and building month-end reports is one of the most strenuous parts of the marketing role. It’s clear to most businesspeople that the useful and tangible part of a marketing report is not the numbers, but what the numbers mean – the commentary from the marketer managing the activity. That’s where the real insight and intelligence is derived. So, our digital marketing team made it their mission to devise a perfect automated report that we could use to spend less time on construction and more time on insight. Making these reports always-on live dashboards was also a key part, because there shouldn’t be a bottleneck obstructing our clients from accessing their performance data.
What does the ideal marketing report include?
We have devised what we believe to be the ideal automated marketing report. It focuses on results – which should be a given – but unfortunately many marketers show off other metrics to cover a lack of results.
At Cremarc, we focus on results. Results are at the core of everything we do. After all, if you aren’t measuring your marketing on results, your marketing can’t be very good.
We’ve extended the traditional funnel to include opportunities, because marketing goes beyond conversion, and should always be measured on the quality of business opportunities it generates.
More important than the data is the insight offered alongside. We include commentary on every page of our reports. We see this as a value-add for clients. They can view their data themselves. What we do as a marketing agency is tell them which metrics they should be looking at, and what those metrics mean. That’s out value-add.
We also split out our marketing mix to show the best channels for each funnel stage. We often get asked ‘Why should we continue investing effort into Organic Social?’ and we explain that it’s a vital channel for community engagement and prospect research. Now, we can show our clients the data that breaks down their best channels for reach, engagement and conversion.
Omnichannel marketing is paramount. In fact, providing quality can be maintained, and content can be accurately tailored to them, brands should be on as many channels as they can. Read this case study on how we improved SilverCloud’s marketing by implementing an omnichannel approach.
Why are we looking at particular metrics?
The general view of marketers is to build huge dashboards that measure everything. Although marketing telemetry is important, not everything should be looked at all the time. Data should be collected, processed and stored, but shouldn’t be viewed on a blanket basis every week. Best practice is to have a full view of all the important metrics and then a faster view of overall performance that can be analysed regularly. We split our marketing reports out into two. Section one includes the general funnel overview, and channel attribution. Section two includes a deeper breakdown of every channel, each with its own page. This way, the data is there when its needed, but doesn’t distract from speedy analysis and checks.
Tools for building automated marketing reports
We chose to use Google Looker Studio to build our dashboards. Having a direct integration with the rest of the Google Suite like Google Analytics and Google Ads makes it easy to connect your omnichannel data. Google Sheets can also be integrated for automated data processing.
We combined Looker Studio with SuperMetrics – a tool that integrates data from 150+ different platforms and makes it analysis-ready through consolidation. For example, SproutSocial, our scheduling tool, has some excellent social listening and business profile data in it, but it doesn’t integrate directly with Google Looker Studio. So, we pull that data across to our consolidated Single Source of Truth dashboard with SuperMetrics as the go between. SuperMetrics also gives us the opportunity to blend data. That’s how we combine data from different platforms into one unified metric. For example, our ‘Leads’ metric pulls together Call Ad data from Google Ads, GTM conversion data for phone call clicks on the website’s Contact Page, and HubSpot form fill data. This gives us a definitive number for omnichannel conversions.
How to automate your marketing reports today
Acknowledging the time pressures faced by marketers, our aim is to streamline the reporting process, affording more time for insightful analysis. Hopefully, this blog gives you some insight into what you can do today, to improve your marketing reports. Hit two birds with one stone – better data visibility, and less marketing admin!
Our optimal automated report not only showcases results but also delves into the quality of business opportunities generated. Emphasising transparency, we provide clients with comprehensive commentary on metrics, guiding them on what matters most. If you’d like a demo of our marketing dashboard to see how we approach marketing telemetry, get in touch today and we’d be happy to walk you through it!
In 2024, the Cremarc Innovation Hub will be investing more time into R&D for intent-based marketing. This year, we’ve investigated generative AI, automated reporting, 3D modelling, and AI-optimised landing pages. We implemented new tools and approaches for our clients, generating more results across the board. Proof that as you experiment, you achieve more. Read my blog on experimentation in marketing and creative here.
