Author: Judith Lewis
Communicating your value to decision makers or potential investors can feel like trying to hit a moving target—after all, pleasing everyone involved with the project is crucial, but different roles will care about different aspects of your work (i.e., implementation, results, etc). So, to demonstrate the great work that your team does, your reports need to communicate the right information to the right people as effectively as possible.
In my experience, the more senior-level stakeholders you report to, the more they focus on the bigger picture. I once presented a report to a group of vice presidents; what they focused on and asked questions about was completely different from what the subject matter experts asked about. While you might take a lot of interest in the minutiae of your data and results, a more senior-level stakeholder could find this irrelevant, distracting, or a waste of time.
To create reports that hit the mark—regardless of who you’re delivering them to—you’ll need to:
Create an organizational chart
Before you begin your report, work with your stakeholder (the person who you report to) to create an organizational chart that helps you understand who might view the information.
An organizational chart is a way of positioning your stakeholder within the company at large. Whether you are in-house or at an agency, map out who you are reporting to as well as their manager (or whoever they report to).
You may report to a marketing manager, brand manager, etc. who then needs to report to more senior-level decision makers. By understanding everyone’s roles, you can determine who is likely to read your reports, which enables you to reflect their priorities in both your campaigns and your reporting.
Share insights that align with business impact
In your reporting, focus on delivering unique insights and recommendations that will have a business impact.
Why? Because any tool can tell you how your rankings or traffic changed this month. What you (as an expert) are delivering is insight into:
Why those changes happened
What you’re going to do to keep improving
Future opportunities and risks
You are the expert and this is where you will shine.
If you share your reports with subject matter experts (SMEs), they’ll often require more data around actionable insights. These insights need to be specific and tied to business outcomes.
That means that if, for example, the business has specific targets for volume of sales, leads, etc., then you should focus on them in your reporting. These data points should cover a specific reporting period and illustrate the value of your SEO work.
Use KPIs to demonstrate success
Subject matter expert reporting should focus on agreed-upon key performance indicators (KPIs) that:
Measure outcomes that result from the specific actions you take and the specific way in which they are implemented. E.g., the rankings and traffic gains from title tag optimization. You can even contextualize your KPI by analyzing it against (in this case) the time it took to A/B test the new title tag structure and compare that against the revenue impact of having not made those positive improvements.
Track the progress you (or your client) are making towards business goals.
When KPI targets aren’t met, you’ll know that you need to adjust course.
For example, when I optimize a web page for a client, a key performance indicator would (for some clients) be an increase in traffic and/or an increase in keyword rankings. If the page decreased in rankings or traffic (and no other factors were to blame), that indicates that the actions I took failed to meet the target KPI. KPIs may seem stressful or difficult, however they are an excellent way to agree with your manager or client on a minimum definition for “success.”
Focus your SME reporting on the agreed key performance indicators. While you can include some of the detail behind your approach to meeting (but hopefully exceeding) target KPIs, this is not always necessary or useful within the main report (but, you can include some of these details in an appendix, which I’ll discuss later).
When reporting on work in-progress, you can still demonstrate your progress using the same KPIs. In house or agency, do not be afraid to challenge, reset, or add more KPIs in order to ensure you’re able to demonstrate success.
Customize reporting for your C-suite
For stakeholders at the executive level (such as the CMO, CEO, or similar), your report should focus on the bigger picture of the overall business and how your work fits into those objectives. So, you need to design your reports differently for this higher-level view of the business.
While KPIs can be helpful for reporting back to the CEO or similar, this is not always practical as they may be too specific to one business unit, without a clear enough picture of how important that metric is in the grand scheme of the business.
Work with your stakeholder to establish what the business goals and desired outcomes are, then identify how your work feeds into these goals to demonstrate success. Sometimes reporting to the owner of a business can feel like reporting to a CEO, and sometimes it is like reporting to someone who believes they’re a subject matter expert. Whatever the situation may be, it’s on you to understand the business, discover what the stakeholder (or client) wants, and create reports that work for them so that you can get the recognition you deserve.
Make your stakeholders look good
Remember, your job is not just to do great work and brag about it in your reporting—you also need to make your stakeholder contact look good to their boss. If you’re in-house, this can help you secure more buy-in in the future and advance your career; if you’re at an agency, this can help you maintain a client over the long term, which can be crucial depending on your agency pricing model.
To do this, you need to understand the KPIs, OKRs (objectives and key results), and any other metrics by which your stakeholder is measured.
For example, I once had a B2B client whose key performance indicator for his annual bonus was tied to how many subscribers he could gain for a mailing list. My team used white papers and paid media to direct more people to the landing page and managed to gather more new subscribers to the mailing list than at any time in the company’s history.
That made the stakeholder look good in front of his boss and got him his annual bonus, but was only a small part of the work we did.
It can be very advantageous to understand your stakeholders’ key performance indicators—not just KPIs for the campaign overall.
Include an executive summary
Reports might get read months after they were created or used to bring new staff up to speed. This means that your reports can be read entirely out of context, without you, and possibly out of order. To ensure that the reader has some context for your efforts, include a table of contents as well as an executive summary.
I really cannot overemphasize the importance of an executive summary that references business imperatives so that someone unfamiliar with the report can read and understand it.
An executive summary is a paragraph or two that concisely summarizes the contents of the report. It should not simply regurgitate what is in the report, but rather shine a light on the overall outcomes.
In some cases, though, there may be reason to include specific data. For example, I had one client who suddenly, in one month, doubled their visitors to one specific page. This warranted a call out in the executive summary not only because it was abnormal, but because we built backlinks to that page, which helped drive that performance.
Generally speaking, the executive summary should not be too specific, though. Show how your results tie into individual and business objectives and ensure that the KPIs are clearly stated with their relevant metrics next to each one.
The executive summary is just that—a summary, and it needs to reflect its purpose. After reading the executive summary, stakeholders should be able to glean the essence of the report and, most importantly, possibly make important business decisions after reading only it.
Consider creating tailored reports
In certain circumstances, it might be useful to create different reports for your key stakeholder, the subject matter expert within the business, or the senior stakeholder that sits above the person you’re directly in contact with.
Certain clients that work with different agencies for different channels may also ask you to work together. In this scenario, it’s useful to create a specific, larger “all-hands” type of report that is then used by other agencies to present to several stakeholders. If your clients tend to outsource their digital marketing, website, social media, etc. then a template for this style of report could certainly save you time.
This will not often be the case, as the reports you create should be digestible for all stakeholders with only small adjustments. Ideally, your reports can be read by almost anyone who is senior enough to understand the key business objectives of the company, as well as a little bit about your deliverables.
Put details in an appendix
Simplify and focus your report on elements that have a business impact. I have said this before, but it is really important to confine the minutiae of the report to an appendix. Do not clutter slides with detailed graphs or words. If you really need those graphs, put them in the appendix. The appendix is your friend.
I promise you, some of my appendices are longer than the main report, so I am not practicing what I preach every time. One presentation I did for a CEO had more than double the slides in the appendix than in the main body of the presentation. Why? The appendix enabled me to present detailed charts, detailed data tables, and detailed results that were excessive in the main body of the report.
The appendix gave me what I needed to back up all the assertions in the main report. That meant I could be efficient with the content I delivered to the client, but could still answer all questions without needing to load up a tool and take forever to get the required data set up and displayed. This does not mean I am advocating for appendices that are longer than reports, only that I am saying you can do it if you need to.
Multi-stakeholder reporting makes more people aware of your success
A good report clearly communicates the results of the work undertaken. A great report adds context to that data and tailors it for the person reading it, whether they’re an SME or a member of the C-suite.
It may sound like a lot of extra work and consideration to compile your reports this way, but it’ll pay off when it's time to review your performance (or renew your contract), as everyone involved will feel like you understand their priorities and accounted for them in your efforts.
Judith is a renowned international speaker and digital media consultant, specializing in digital technologies to help businesses innovate and optimize. With over 25 years of experience, she runs her own consultancy delivering actionable business insight for M2B, B2B, and B2C companies. Twitter | Linkedin