Introduction
Understanding how to create a report is a crucial ability that all marketers striving to remain competitive and employed need to acquire.
Although your recent successful strategies may be yielding results, it is quite unlikely that your superiors will be satisfied with just recognizing the success of your marketing endeavors.
They’ll still require a report that precisely demonstrates your actions, the successful experiments, and the failed ideas. How do you approach writing this report? At which point do you begin? What ought to be incorporated in it? What is your approach to organizing each part?
In this article, I will outline my systematic method for creating impressive reports that are well-crafted and impactful. So, without any further ado, let’s get started.
Report Writing: What is It?
A report is an official paper that gives a thorough examination of ongoing or finished research, initiative, project, or campaign relevant to your job.
The purpose of a report is to assess the progress achieved, identify any challenges or barriers that influenced outcomes, and make recommendations for future actions. Various kinds of reports may need to be generated based on the specific area of marketing in which you specialize.
The following are included:
- Reports on marketing through social media.
- Reports on email marketing
- Reports on content marketing
- Reports on PPC marketing
- Reports providing information about marketing in general.
As per the writing services, no matter the type of report they follow the same structure. And it’s done by outlining the activities, methods used, and the outcomes or potential impact.
How to Write a Report?
Writing a report can be difficult, especially at the beginning. However, if you know how to do it and follow a specific set of rules, I’m sure you can do an excellent job.
In this section, I’ve offered a few tips that I personally follow while creating a report. Hopefully, they will help you out as well, as they work for me.
1: Understanding the Objective of Your Report
The initial step is to consider the purpose behind creating the report and the goals it is intended to achieve. Without a purpose for writing a report, you could inadvertently include unnecessary information and produce a report that generates more confusion than clarity. Ask yourself:
- What is the purpose of this report?
- What data do I aim to disclose?
- What is the intended message for the reader to gain from reading it?
Perhaps the aim is to validate your marketing budget, showcase the effectiveness of a campaign, or clarify the need for additional resources to handle the growth initiative. Having a goal in mind will assist you in narrowing down the focus of your report to the most relevant data.
2: Learn about Your Audience What They’re Looking for
Next, I consider the intended audience for the report.
If I’m making a report just for the marketing team, I can use industry-specific language, be less formal, and freely express my opinions on trends or the outcomes of our strategies. I’m unable to perform that task with reports intended for the CEO, board members, or external investors.
They would be less focused on analyzing metrics and data breakdowns, and more interested in understanding how those numbers impact the business’s ROI and revenue.
Being responsible for creating blog posts and other digital marketing content means that any data you create could be significant. Will the executive team discover the AB tests performed for the newsletter, or is the impact of the number of opens and click-throughs created important?
Prior to starting your report, consider: Who will be reading it, and what information would be relevant to them? For instance, the finance director will be interested in understanding how your marketing expenses are impacting sales and affecting overall profitability.
Alternatively, the marketing director will require a summary of various marketing initiatives and their impact on key performance indicators such as –
- Conversions,
- Lead generation, and
- Other metrics related to profitability.
Knowing the person you are reporting to is essential for determining how to structure your report and adjust the tone, language, and content to match their preferences.
3: Collate Your Visuals and Information
Having understood the objective of my report, the target audience, and its contents, the next course of action is to commence collecting the necessary data for the report. I typically begin by creating a list of the important measurements that need to be included in my report, following the plan I developed beforehand.
The next step is to remember where I will find each of those metrics and data from. Next, I incorporate all this data into my outline based on the corresponding headings and subheadings.
I suggest including visuals with your data to prevent your report from being solely comprised of dull numbers and text.
Charts, images, icons, infographics, and other visual aids can be used to illustrate your message and emphasize the data you are presenting. After completing all tasks, it is time to start writing.
4: Ensure that the Body is Written and Edited Well
We are now diving into the main content of your report.
You have already composed your outline, collected your research, and prepared your cover page, table of contents, and introduction. It implies that you should have a clear understanding of the primary content of your report, making it simpler to delve into the body.
Although the length of reports can differ, ranging from 7-15 pages for shorter reports to 30-50 pages or more for longer reports, it ultimately depends on the topic being discussed. Brief reports center on a single subject while longer reports address several topics.
5: Recommend an Action Plan if Needed
This is the final part of your report where you can outline your discoveries and address their implications for your organization. I enjoy suggesting additional steps to enhance performance and give the business a competitive edge.
If, upon reviewing the data and results, you believe your company would see advantages from a higher paid advertising budget, or from implementing strategies such as influencer marketing or releasing press statements, feel free to bring it up.
If your report is convincing and you show your understanding and skills, superiors will probably approve and have faith in your suggestions.