The difference between the success and failure of a marketing campaign often lies in accurate decision-making. Often, it is based on our ability to make a judgement using our subject expertise and the information available to us.
In the modern business space, we have abundant metrics related to traffic, leads, customers, and conversion rates, to look at and reach a conclusion. However, these are still insufficient to inculcate a business decision involving an entire organisation.
The result—a vast majority of marketers still struggle to make the best use of data and metrics to navigate economic growth.
So, what’s the solution? The simple solution to this issue is, leveraging a tool that helps achieve accurate marketing and sales reporting.
What Is Marketing and Sales Reporting
Marketing and sales reporting is the analysis of various marketing and sales metrics and building valuable information around it to make informed decisions. Reports also help generate actionable insights, enabling you to meet your organisational goals.
Inherently, you can use reports to analyse your internet traffic and identify where the leads are coming from, what type of content they like to interact with, and the time it takes to convert a lead into a customer.
With companies needing quick answers in the form of detailed reports, HubSpot offers comprehensive reporting features that cater to your diverse business requirements and help you resolve even the most complicated marketing and sales issues.
Let’s have a look at different types of HubSpot reporting tools and how they help you achieve your business goals.
HubSpot Reporting Tools
HubSpot offers various reporting tools to help you analyze your marketing and sales performance. HubSpot reports give you a clear overview of your current activities and determine what you need to do to drive results.
The powerful marketing, sales, and CRM platform offer three different types of in-built reporting tools—reports, analytics tools, and dashboards. Let’s discuss each one of them and understand where and when you can use them.
Reports
HubSpot offers comprehensive reporting capabilities for evaluating your marketing and sales performance. Each report provides a detailed assessment of business data, allowing you to understand how your campaigns are performing, and what changes you can induce to maximise the results.
Analytics Tools
HubSpot analytics tools provide a robust analysis of your organisational data, offering an extensive knowledge of different marketing and sales trends and customer behaviours.
Here are the four main types of HubSpot analytics tools you can use:
- Traffic Analytics: HubSpot analyzes your website traffic to track where your website visitors are coming from, how individual web pages are performing, and which traffic tags you can use on your traffic data.
- Ads Analytics: It helps you analyse the effectiveness of your online ads in the form of reports and performance overviews.
- Web Analytics: It includes metrics that measure your website’s performance such as bounce rate, average time spent per page, and more.
- Campaign Analytics: It measures the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by tracking social media posts, CTAs, and other marketing efforts.
Dashboards
Dashboards offer a comprehensive overview of your reports with a focus on the most common marketing and sales metrics such as conversion rates, email performance, the total number of page views, number of deals closed versus expected number, sales performance, and campaign productivity.
Creating a HubSpot Reporting Dashboard
To create a reporting dashboard in HubSpot, you need to follow these steps:
- Log in to your HubSpot account, and select Report.
- Click on Dashboard, and select Create Dashboard.
- You can select any existing dashboard and edit it. Or you can also start from scratch by choosing Blank Dashboard.
- As the next step, type the name of the dashboard and configure its accessibility. You can then add the reports you want to see.
HubSpot lets you create over 300 different reporting dashboards with different accessibility functions for your organisation.
Identifying the Right Audience for Your Marketing or Sales Report
Marketing and sales reports are highly customizable, depending upon who is going to use it and for what purpose. Here are the three important methods you can use to create audience-specific reports:
Understand the Requirements
Understanding the requirements of your target audience can help you create effective reports. For instance, if you know what data a CEO or marketing manager needs to analyze, you may consider using it to create a marketing or sales report.
Get the Jargon Right
Marketing and sales reports can include different terminologies and jargon that may not be understandable to executive teams outside your organization. So, it is important to consider your audience when creating a report and choose the terminologies that they understand.
Be Audience-Specific
While you may create reports for a mixed audience, it is always better to create separate reports for different audiences. For instance, using the same marketing or sales report for your co-workers and your CEO would create information gaps, making the information irrelevant. Hence, create specific reports for different audiences using the right data and metrics.
Advantages of HubSpot Reporting
HubSpot streamlines sales and marketing reporting with a wide range of features and capabilities. Using HubSpot reporting is to garner multiple benefits for your business.
Large Choice of Marketing and Sales Metrics
HubSpot offers you a variety of metrics for measuring your sales and marketing performance. You can use personal contacts, first conversions, traffic, session over time, and page performance to measure your marketing efforts.
Similarly, you can use sales metrics such as daily sales, most converting landing pages, and abandoned carts to get an overview of your sales performance.
Intuitive Interface
HubSpot is an all-inclusive sales and marketing platform that allows you to generate accurate reports without any need for third-party tools or integrations. It has an intuitive interface that allows easy creation of reports within a single dashboard.
Deal Forecasting
To stay up-to-date with dynamic business trends and future requirements, it’s important to have marketing reports that can accurately predict future performance.
HubSpot reporting offers a visual representation of your existing organizational data including your marketing and sales performance, along with a forecast of future possibilities, based on existing and historical trends. This helps you make necessary changes to your current marketing and sales campaigns, and minimize any future anomalies.
Productivity Assessment
HubSpot reporting dashboard enables you to evaluate the performance of your campaigns or a team member. It lets you analyse the total number of calls, emails, and other efforts of your team for a specific duration, and compare it with the outcome for productivity assessment.
Best Practises for Creating HubSpot Reports
Even though using the HubSpot platform for sales and marketing reports is a seamless process. Here are some best practises you can use to maximise results:
Create a Recurring Reminder
It is highly useful to set a recurring reminder to create reports and send them to the right audiences. You can use the HubSpot Marketing Hub Reporting add-on to schedule your marketing reports and send them to your team members.
Obtain Feedback
When you send feedback to your team members, it is also important to ask them for feedback. This will help you create audience-specific reports and improve productivity.
Using Report Templates
If you’re using a similar style and format for each of your marketing and sales reports, it is beneficial to convert the style into a template and use it for any future reports. It helps you save both time and energy.
Using Visualizations
It is advantageous to use visual representations of your data in the form of graphs, pie charts, and tables to help your audience understand the information faster and in a more interactive manner.
Conclusion
HubSpot is a highly effective platform to create sales and marketing reports, supporting up to 300 customised reporting dashboards with a wide range of features. It also offers detailed analytics and tools to measure your campaign effectiveness, sales progress, and revenue forecasting.
In this article, we have covered an overview of various HubSpot reporting features and best practises you can use to optimize your HubSpot reporting and maximize your sales and marketing performance.
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