Episode Details

Data, data everywhere! If this conjures up the green vertical parade of binary numbers from the Matrix, you’re not alone in being confused. 

You might be thinking -- I didn’t sign up for this! You didn’t go to school for statistical analysis, so what makes you qualified to produce a marketing report? 

There’s a lot that makes you qualified to produce reports, even if you don’t feel like an expert. Marketers, particularly in smaller companies, need to learn enough to be dangerous. 

The main takeaway for this episode: you need to incorporate reporting into your skillset, and it’s not as scary as you think.

Intro

• We both have a background working at an analytics company
• So much hype around data over the years, whether it’s big or small
• It can be super intimidating thinking you need to be responsible for reporting, and it’s way too easy to overcomplicate things

The difference between analytics and reporting

The terms are used interchangeably so often that it’s hard to really understand the difference.

I think that one way to think about reporting and analytics -- for reporting, you’ll almost always have a clear understanding on what you need to report on.

Analytics, you’ll likely be exploring data and not always sure what you’ll find.

This is where having a data analyst is useful -- they can look at a data set and tell you if an insight is relevant or meaningful.

Performance and exploration. That’s how I see the difference between reporting and analytics.

Most startups don’t have time to prioritize either. But in the venture backed startup world, comes a bit more process and a board of directors that ask for monthly/quarterly reporting updates.

A really nice sweet spot for learning to become dangerous is a bootstrapped startup that doesn’t have a big data team or requirements for long tedious reporting processes.

But regardless of the environment that you’re in, marketers need to learn these skills if for nothing else -- to be able to show their worth, their impact on key metrics.

Every marketer needs some reporting skills

• Where the heck do you start with this skillset?
• Confusion of reporting and analytics has marketers overengineering solutions to some simple problems. No, you don’t need to learn R and statistical analysis to be effective at reporting

Think of analytics as exploring data for unknown insights and buried treasure. We can think of reporting as being accountable for the things you get paid to do.

Start there. All my marketing reporting comes back to the question: is what I’m doing making a difference? Reporting on anything else is purely intellectual.

So this sounds simple right? Show your impact… Reality is that different marketers will have access to different tools and metrics.

But as soon as you start talking about marketing reporting, you quickly get to attribution and then multi touch points and you get lost really easy in all the noise and options of reporting.

How do you get to what’s important?

• This is the ultimate question, and where you as a marketer are incredibly important
• The absolute best data analysts on the planet are the best because they can tie all that data and insight back to business strategy
• You need to be able to answer business questions with your reporting

You should start simple. The marketing funnel is the ideal starting point for understanding marketing reporting. Map each stage of the funnel to a marketing metric and then start to fill in the data.

For example, Awareness is the total sum of impressions across advertising and social media and interest is all web sessions.

Boom - you’re already starting to get somewhere. This is how nearly every marketer structures their reporting