When you're a digital marketing agency, you work with different clients who have all sorts of varying perspectives on marketing, different levels of strategic understanding and technical knowledge, and different ideas of what specific results they think they should be getting in their engagement with you.
We often see agencies sink valuable time into getting buy-in on their strategies, especially when the opportunities they discover or the approaches they want to take don't match their client's expectations.
This is why we believe the most important quality in a client reporting tool is the ability to use your data to tell compelling stories to your clients. When you can clearly explain what the data means, your clients can better understand campaign performance from your perspective and get on-board with the next moves you suggest.
In this piece, we'll look at an example client scenario that most agencies can relate to, and then we'll show you how TapClicks makes storytelling in the reporting process easy, clear, and effective at getting buy-in from clients.
Want to try out our all-in-one-reporting solution? Check out our free 14-day trial.
When the Importance of Storytelling Comes into Play: A Client's Expectations Around Budget Allocation Are a Mismatch with the Data
Let's say you're a medium-sized agency with a small roster of contracts with large enterprise brands. While digging into the web analytics of a recent campaign, one of your strategists notices a big SEO opportunity for one particular client.
The bulk of your spend for this client has been on Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and Google ads, with a small portion of their budget going towards SEO. These ads are performing decently, but they aren't providing as much direct value for the effort as SEO. Of the 210% ROI earned, the majority of it was coming from organic search. With this insight, it became clear that it would make sense to reallocate a portion of their budget to increase their spend on SEO.
But since this client came to you dead-set on focusing on PPC ads, and was already resistant when you suggested using some of their budget for SEO, you anticipate it won't be easy to get their buy-in on this. It's up to you to shape your report in a way that shows your client the opportunity you see in SEO.
In the next section, we're going to discuss exactly how you could use our client reporting tool to do this with ease.
Note: At this stage, your client dashboard would be connected to all of this client's data sources from social media to Google Analytics, pulling in real-time data for seamless (and white label!) marketing reporting. The days of reporting through .csv files and Excel spreadsheets would be behind you.
How You'd Use TapClicks' Client Reporting Tool to Get This Client's Buy-In
If you were using TapClicks in this scenario, you'd have a custom report template set up for your client to display key KPI's like so:
Your story could begin in slide 1 with spend and lead metrics to show the client their total cost per lead (CPL) which at $68.05 might seem a bit high. So then in slide 2 you could follow this up with the ROI metrics that show the value you've been creating:
With a total cost of $36.37K and $63.38K in revenue, your client can easily see you've actually achieved an ROI of 174.28%.
Next, you can show how well you achieved the specific results your client asked for. On slide 3, highlight how you performed in comparison to the targets they set for you.
Your team did well across all of the benchmarks set by your client, but now we get into the meat of the problem as you show how you achieved these numbers.
In the following slide, you can lay out what those numbers mean and introduce the compelling discovery you made about the ROI driven by your SEO efforts.
You could explain in bullets that while all the channels are performing, most of the activity is actually coming from Google Search Console (driven by SEO efforts). All your slides so far would be warming this client up to the moment that seals the deal for making this budget shift.
Finally, you could hop over into their dashboard to highlight exactly where their money is being earned. Your dashboard would be populated with visualizations that clearly show the dramatic results achieved from your $5,000 investment in organic search.
Here, the dashboard compares campaign level data across multiple platforms, and the striking difference in ROI earned through Google Search Console versus your PPC ads is apparent. As you walk your client through these data visualizations, they could clearly see how virtually all of their revenue came from SEO.
Seeing this, your client would be much more likely to have a clear understanding of the opportunity SEO is offering. Then, when you recommend shifting part of their $36.37K budget from PPC to SEO, getting their buy-in would be much easier because you would have proven the value of that channel. Not only are you not asking them to increase spend, you're showing them how they could be making more money from the same marketing budget.
Finally, if you wanted to make it easy for your client to share these insights with other decision-makers in their organization who weren't on the call, you could include a special section in their dashboard with a video that walks through the results on the dashboard.
Where your client started out resistant to prioritizing SEO efforts over PPC, after this conversation using the clearly laid out results in TapClicks, chances are they'd see your suggested shift in the budget as the right move.
The Ultimate Reporting Software for Consistently Proving Your Value to Clients
TapClicks has been tailor-made to help you shape abstract numbers and data trends into an easy to understand format that shows your clients what's working and where your efforts are taking them. This act of showing your client what the data means is the essence of using storytelling in your reporting.
When the data surprises you with an unexpected opportunity, you can easily get your clients to understand why the direction you're taking them is the right one with shareable data and visualizations from TapClicks.
If you're ready to try a user-friendly reporting platform that helps you tell a story with data, sign up today for a free 14-day trial.
