3 Signs Your Marketing Reporting Needs a Strategy Refresh

In marketing, nothing should remain constant. New competitors entering the space, changes in buyer behavior, and technological advancements that upend how consumers purchase are just some of the shocks that could signal it’s time to refresh your marketing strategy. This ever-evolving dynamic also means using real-time marketing reporting to keep you investing in strategies that work.

These constantly shifting factors can leave marketers feeling like they’re playing a game of 3-D chess. But Chloe Thompson, director of content marketing at Visier Inc., points out that professionals in the marketing field today have some not-so-secret weapons they can rely on to get the win.  

“Data is power,” she says. “When you have the right reporting stack in place, you can prove impact in a much more authoritative way.”  

But this also raises the question: Are you looking at your marketing performance metrics in the right way? And do you have all the information to make informed judgment calls? If you’re not quite sure, here are three signs that could suggest you should shift your approach to embrace strategic marketing reporting.

Sign 1: You have data—but no correlation

Running a data-driven marketing operation isn’t an option for businesses that want to succeed; it’s a necessity. But when it comes to data, can there be too much of a good thing?

The reality is that marketers, as well as their colleagues across the organization, have so many tools to capture data that it can become information overload if teams aren’t careful. And holding all of this data in different platforms or storage locations can make it difficult to create a unified, single source of truth that truly captures how teams are performing in relation to each other.  

“Sharing is caring,” Thompson explains. “All of your different team members likely are going to be reporting on their own particular metrics. It's more about understanding how the metrics that your team reports on fits into what other teams may be reporting.”

To do this, you have to understand your marketing KPIs, identify what data is most relevant to these KPIs, clean up and standardize the disparate data sets, and connect your data into one centralized location. Instead of interpreting data in isolation, you can begin to see the bigger picture and start to more accurately identify those high-level trends.  

Of course, establishing links between platforms and channels can be both challenging and complex. If you’re having trouble connecting the dots, Thompson suggests calling in help from the marketing operations team.  

“That's their superpower,” she says. “Understanding: here's how all of these pieces fit together throughout all the different functions of our marketing team, and then here's how we can have the clearest output of data.”

Sign 2: You see correlation—but not cause and effect

Gone are the days of basing marketing decisions on gut feelings; if you want to spend money on new digital ads or invest in a new channel, executives will want solid intelligence behind that decision.  

To generate insights that support your marketing strategy, you need a deeper understanding of the relationships between your marketing activities and their influence on outcomes. You can’t just report the straightforward numbers and call an activity a success.  

For example, Thompson explains that when her team created an eBook to bring potential customers into their marketing funnel, they didn’t just stop at counting how many people downloaded the content. While that number was relevant, it didn’t tell the whole story. She wanted to understand what that number actually meant in terms of generating revenue.  

“So we directly tied reporting on particular organic downloads or organic engagement with our resource library to opportunities that were created,” she explains. “Then I was able to see a very clear through line in terms of the content assets that are actually impacting down-the-line revenue. When you're able to draw a clear line like that, that's fantastic because over time you can double down on what's working.”

Marketers should always be looking ahead. If you’re only reporting vanity metrics that cover a marketing activity performed but aren’t calculating the potential benefit of taking that action in the future with some level of confidence, then you aren’t using your data to its full potential to drive strategy.  

When you’re delivering your executive marketing reporting, you don’t want to just tell leaders that 50 people downloaded your eBook. You want to tell them that you're creating three new eBooks next quarter, which you expect to generate 150 new leads that will bring in a projected $30,000 in revenue. How do you know this? Because you’ve crunched not just your numbers, but also numbers from teams across your organization.  

“It's the difference between reporting on things just to report on it and reporting on things with the idea that there's an action from the reporting that you're doing,” Thompson says.  

Sign 3: You see impact—but can’t tie it to business goals

The ultimate goal of your marketing efforts is to achieve a specific company objective. Business strategy should be the reason behind your activities and your spending. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for marketing to be misaligned with broader business goals.  

Therefore, when developing a data-informed marketing strategy, step number one should always be to make sure you understand your organization’s priority goals and the role your team plays in achieving them so that you can capture the right metrics. Working within content marketing, Thompson is concentrated on making sure that her content not only ties to the business goals, but also supports product, sales, and overall marketing goals.  

“If you can create that map to revenue, then you're automatically on the right track,” she says.  

But connecting marketing to revenue isn’t the only way to have an effect. Perhaps the economy is in a downturn, and you just want to retain customers. Or you’re developing a new pricing strategy, and you need to play defense. Maybe you want to break into a new vertical, and so your content team creates a series of new case studies to show that your organization is an authority in this area.

“The way that I would report on that would be looking at the influx of new discussions and new leads that were tied to the vertical that you're trying to break into. For example, are you hearing it more on sales calls?” Thompson explains.  

The point is to tailor your metrics to the goals your business is trying to achieve and report on metrics that matter to your colleagues and supervisors, which may also require a bit of translation. If you have no sense of how your metrics make an impact across your organization, nobody else will either and that won’t bode well for investments in marketing. So, if that’s the case, now’s the time to switch up your strategy.  

Upgrade your reporting strategy

Marketers always have to understand the bigger picture. But to do that, you have to break out of your silo, talk to other team members, and understand what metrics they are tracking and why. Taking this step back will give you an opportunity to think about the impact of your work, how that ties to broader company goals, and how it can support individual teams.  

“The real magic happens when everyone is aligned around their particular strategy…and what they're trying to do,” Thompson says. “And I don't believe that you can get there without having clear data that you are then understanding, absorbing as a team, and creating these goals from.”

Let Domo help clear up that data for you. With built-in tools that can easily make your reporting more strategic, Domo will allow you to create a marketing analytics dashboard that brings together data from all kinds of sources and organizes it into a clean, unified data set, so that you can start visualizing trends and generating insights. Make the leap into managing your marketing data better with Domo.  

And if you still aren’t quite sure how Domo can improve your marketing operation, check out some other recently published pieces:

• Translating Marketing Metrics to Financial Ones ‍
• How to Calculate Marketing ROI: Expert Tips for Marketers ‍
• 3 Questions Every Marketing Leader Wishes They Could Answer

FAQs about marketing reporting

What is strategic marketing reporting?
Strategic marketing reporting connects campaign metrics to broader business goals, enabling smarter decisions and better resource allocation.

How do I know if my marketing reporting is effective?
If you can track ROI, attribute revenue, and optimize campaigns confidently, your reporting is likely effective. Otherwise, it may need a strategy refresh.

What metrics should marketers report on?
There are no specific metrics that all marketers must report on. To determine what metrics are most important to capture, you should identify what outcomes you are trying to encourage customers to take and tailor your metrics to those goals.  

What is a vanity metric?
Vanity metrics refer to metrics that teams collect to show success but are not contextualized and therefore don’t communicate actual impact.  

How often should I produce marketing reports?
Ideally, you could provide executives with real-time reporting. The metrics that you collect are meant to be used to inform decision-making. With dashboards that are constantly updated, teams across the company can view your reports without requiring you to constantly pull numbers each time a request comes in.