Automated reporting: saving over 8 hours of time every week?

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In a data-driven world where data available for analysis grows by 20%, marketers often struggle to identify and analyse data that proves their campaign effectiveness and value of marketing to their organization and clients. Marketing reports aggregate, analyze and present insights to stakeholders to enable them to assess performance of marketing objectives and strategy.Marketing reports are crucial for any organization and they have to be accurate and timely. Marketing reports have traditionally been generated manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Reporting automation can help mitigate manual reporting drawbacks, creating reports that are timely, accurate and enable fast decision- making.

What is Marketing Report Automation?

Marketing report automation helps to remove manual processes with a tool for creating and updating digital marketing reports.  Marketing report automation also helps to schedule the appropriate report’s distribution to all stakeholders based on their role and rights within the organization.

Report automation eliminates data inconsistencies and errors and enables uniform report formatting to deliver easy reports with great visuals that are clear and uncluttered. Automating reports helps to speed up the reporting process that enables executives to act on time for any follow-up action or course correction to their marketing campaign and strategy.

Why is Marketing Report Automation useful?

A multichannel marketing campaign generates tons of data distributed across multiple databases. To derive meaningful insights, you will have to extract data from each channel, clean data, and group data to analyze for deriving relevant insights.  The processing of marketing data from multiple channels manually requires a lot of time and effort with additional challenges of data inconsistencies and metrics accuracy.

There are basically three steps in the reporting process- data extraction, data analysis, and data visualization. An automated reporting tool uses API (Application Programming Interface) to fetch data from multiple platforms and integrate it into a system for analysis and deriving useful insights.

Marketing report automation saves time to enable the marketing team to focus on strategic decisions.  Besides, there are other advantages of marketing report automation.

What are the benefits of marketing report automation?

• Saves time and cost

The manual reporting process is time-consuming and costly. It may take an hour to extract data from platforms, but when the amount of time it takes to process the data is added then your marketing analyst may be spending 6 to 8 hours per report per week. If you factor in the additional time for client-specific customization and manual verification, then the time spent on each report per week will be 8 to 10 hours. Report automation will help you set up the report generation with a reporting tool that will automatically generate reports based on conditions specified. By automating repetitive tasks, the report automation tool is expected to save you 8 hours per week per report. Assuming that the average hourly cost of a market analyst is $27 so the weekly cost savings for your organization for each report is $216, which translates into yearly cost benefits of $11,232. The indirect cost benefits of timely, and accurate reporting will translate into much higher gains. 

• Remove data inconsistencies and inaccuracies

The information needs to be uniformly represented across reporting cycles to ensure consistency, which is difficult to achieve with manual reporting as different people have different ways to represent the same information. The report automation will reliably deliver the reports that are consistent and uniform metrics every time. 

The probability of error increases with manual process of data collation from multiple platforms, and analysis. Any wrong data can have a cascading effect and the downstream analysis getting off track.  A business professor Raymond R. Panko, in his research paper, has published that the probability of human error was between 18 % and 40% when manually entering data into a spreadsheet.  

The report automation tool eliminates the potential for human error, resulting in higher accuracy levels of the reports. 

• Provide valuable insights

The value of marketing automation is not limited to time and cost savings, but the value of insights and ability to present a story about facts at scale are additional advantages. Data granularity is achieved with report automation, and you can get insights such as Return on Advertising Spend(ROAS), Customer Acquisition Cost(CAC) calculated at the campaign level. 

Additionally, new reports can be generated with higher frequency due to real-time data refresh, which is difficult to achieve with manual processes. This helps analysts to stay updated to capitalize on the latest trends and opportunities.

• Improve marketing strategy

Report automation frees up the time of analysts who can spend more time on strategy and leverage insights to improve campaign performance. The tool provides cross-channel analytics and customized metrics that can be used by decision makers to fine-tune marketing strategy and improve overall marketing performance. 

How to Automate Marketing Report?

The best way to automate marketing reports is to find an automation tool and integrate it with your marketing technology stack.  You can use selection criteria such KPIs and integrations, reporting frequency, number of integrations, and others to determine the best fit tool for your business.

Book a demo and talk to our product expert discover how this mighty tool can help you automate marketing data like never before. To automate your marketing reports, just choose data sources and columns (metrics) in under two minutes. Spend more time thinking about strategy and less time doing mundane activities. Without a technical background, all you need as a digital marketer is a basic understanding of spreadsheets.