If you’re looking for marketing agency reporting tools, you’ve come to the right place. With 2024 shaping up to be an industry-disrupting year for the digital marketing industry, it’s more important than ever to optimize your time and resources with professional agency reporting tools. Staying agile is critical–especially with the arrival of AI on the scene.
While all these fast-paced changes may seem intimidating at first glance, they also offer a world of opportunities to passionate and creative founders looking to make an impact in the industry.
Here at Slam Media Lab, we’re proud to be the polar opposite of gatekeepers. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to our favorite marketing agency reporting tools and resources.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- Essential features to look for in a marketing agency reporting tool
- Create a marketing design exploration agency deck with reporting tools
- Social reporting with Slam’s marketing agency tools
- Website reporting with Slam’s preferred marketing agency tools
- Slam’s favorite marketing tools for SEO agency reporting
- How Slam’s template and courses elevate marketing agency reporting
As an award-winning design agency and the nation’s #1 Hispanic marketing agency, we’ve learned a lot of important lessons in our 10+ years of existence. In 2024, we’re offering our friends and supporters two valuable resources for digital marketing success:
- Marketing agency report template
- How to Start an Agency Masterclass
In this article, we’ll discuss these great resources and what they mean for your ROI–including a few freebies that every digital marketing agency needs in their reporting toolkit!
Essential Features to Look for in a Marketing Agency Reporting Tool
We get it–it’s hard finding the perfect digital tool on the internet in 2024. In the era of AI, it seems like every product in your search results promises to be the “cutting-edge tool that will make you stand out in a competitive digital landscape.”
The challenge for every agency founder is to find a marketing agency reporting tool that gets the job done quickly and efficiently, without breaking the bank. At the end of the day, you’re the cutting-edge solution that makes your agency stand out–you just need the right tools to support your creativity and ambition.
Here are three key features we recommend keeping an eye out for in a marketing agency reporting tool:
- Customization options
- Dynamic visualizations
- Productivity and communication support
By prioritizing these features when choosing an agency reporting tool, you’ll have everything you need to do the most for your clients and your goals.
Our marketing agency report template has all these features and more–priced at $19.99 for a limited time only.
Customization Options
As digital marketing agencies, we work with a diverse range of clients with unique objectives and metrics. In other words, a one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work. That’s why we need our tools to be customizable, so we can tailor reports to our clients’ specific needs.
For instance, when working with an e-commerce client, it’s important to prioritize metrics like conversion rates and revenue. A customizable marketing reporting tool can be configured to emphasize these metrics, showcasing the direct impact of your agency’s efforts on the client’s bottom line. This flexibility will keep your client happy with relevant insights while establishing you as an expert who understands the assignment.
Dynamic Visualizations
Data is a powerful thing–if you can make sense of it. Unless your client has advanced knowledge of data analytics, they likely won’t appreciate you showing up to a meeting with spreadsheets full of raw, unintegrated data. If you want to tell the right story with your data, you need an agency reporting dashboard with dynamic visualizations.
For example, consider a social media campaign. You’ve scheduled a meeting with your client to give them an update on how things are going, and you’d like to highlight certain aspects of your performance by adjusting date ranges and filtering specific metrics. If you want the meeting to be collaborative and productive, it’s important to show up with dynamic, interactive visuals instead of static graphs or–worse–an Excel spreadsheet. This will provide a more engaging and impactful report, which will prove your agency’s value.
Productivity and Communication Support
If you want streamlined workflows and great collaboration with your team members, you need a marketing agency reporting tool with productivity and communication support–period.
Let’s say you rely on a project management tool like Notion. The ability to integrate your reporting tools is critical for assigning tasks, analyzing data, and more. This integration will ensure that your reporting process is well-coordinated, deadlines are met, and feedback is easily communicated without delay.
By providing a centralized hub for collaboration, your reporting tool will go from a mere means of presenting data to a fully integrated productivity catalyst.
Create a Marketing Design Exploration Agency Deck with Reporting Tools
Consider the following scenario: you’ve been hired as the marketing agency for a restaurant. Your new client has asked you to come up with a plan for their new website, which should reflect their unique aesthetic and overall vibe. For this client, an on-point brand strategy and identity are absolutely essential. That old saying about people “eating with their eyes” applies to the digital space, too!
When it comes to designing a restaurant website, you aren’t just converting to sign-ups or purchases–you need to convince people to actually visit your client’s business in person. That means you’ll need to put a lot of work into creating a stunning and easy-to-navigate website that communicates the live experience offered by your client.
But first, you’ll need to prove to this client that you’re up to the task of creating a website that wows and converts. Here are a few reasons why your agency will benefit from creating a marketing design exploration deck:
- Presenting your strategy and approach
- Showcasing your creativity and design expertise
- Addressing strategies for communicating with your target audience
- Building your client’s brand image
At Slam, we create a marketing design exploration deck for each of our clients to show off our strategy, branding ideas, and more. In our deck, we often feature screenshots of the site’s architecture, our plan for organizing navigation menus, and our thinking behind certain design choices. Of course, we always tailor our digital agency reporting to each client’s interests and needs!
After introducing clients to our marketing design exploration deck, we set aside time for an in-depth discussion of likes, dislikes, and strategies moving forward. It’s important to be on the same page before getting down to the technical part of the job, and a reporting deck is the perfect tool to make that happen.
If you want to learn more about the process of collaboratively managing client expectations with reporting decks and other digital tools, check out our course on How to Start an Agency.
Social Reporting with Slam’s Marketing Agency Tools
Let’s be real: these days, social media marketing is a non-negotiable part of a successful agency reporting strategy. While more traditional methods like marketing emails, newsletters, and Google Ads are still worth pursuing, it’s essential to combine them with strategies optimized for apps like Instagram and TikTok–especially if your goal is to reach a younger target audience.
In this section, we’ll take a closer look at how to manage your social media reporting with each of these apps, along with some guidance for creating a monthly social reporting deck.
Instagram is a visually-driven platform with over a billion active users. That’s a huge opportunity for reaching audiences around the world! The app caters to diverse demographics and prioritizes visual aesthetics, storytelling, and brand identity. Whether using Instagram for a small business or nonprofit clients, the platform’s features are great for engaging with followers and building a supportive customer base.
We suggest using metrics like engagement rates and impressions to guide your Instagram strategy. Features like Stories, IGTV, and Reels are also important for visibility and growth. Further, it’s important to understand the role of hashtags in improving discoverability on the platform.
One thing to keep in mind is that Instagram is a constantly evolving platform. As marketers, we need to stay up-to-date on features, trends, and algorithm changes to maximize our overall impact.
If you’re looking for a pre-made template to help organize your content, check out our Airtable Content Calendar.
TikTok
TikTok is a rapidly growing social media platform that thrives on short-form video content. It’s wildly popular with Gen Z–no cap. The platform’s 15 to 60 second video reels are great for leveraging creative and authentic engagement with audiences of all ages, but absolutely critical if your goal is to reach younger users.
To be successful on TikTok, it’s important to stay on top of trends and create unique, attention-grabbing content that will encourage people to stop scrolling and watch, keeping the algorithm in your favor. Hashtags also play a crucial role in supporting content discoverability, so make sure you understand how to use them.
Furthermore, keep in mind that TikTok’s algorithm is known for personalized content recommendations, so knowing your target audience is key–especially if you want to go viral.
At Slam, we’ve helped several clients figure out how to crack the app’s mysterious algorithm. From small business TikTok to nonprofit Tiktok, we’ve got your back. We also offer a TikTok content planner for Notion, used by 500+ marketers to plan and organize short form video content.
Create a Monthly Social Reporting Deck
If you’re an agency founder, sooner or later you’ll need to report on your social media strategy–if you haven’t already. At Slam, we like to create a monthly social reporting deck for our clients. This allows us to transparently communicate our campaign performance, demonstrate ROI, and ensure our strategies are aligned with the client’s objectives.
While our social reporting decks vary from client to client, they generally include an overview of key metrics like changes in follower counts, engagement metrics, and total impressions. We also look at month-over-month performance to track our progress over time.
When creating a monthly social reporting deck for a client, we recommend including a slide that highlights our best-performing content. That way, our client can see the overall impact of our memes, short-form videos, and other engagement strategies.
No matter the metrics you choose to show off your value, a monthly social reporting deck is a great way to ensure you and your client are on the same page and working towards the same shared goals.
If you’re looking for a pre-made template to simplify the process, check out our marketing agency report template which is optimized for efficient social media reporting.
Website Reporting with Slam’s Preferred Marketing Agency Tools
Websites may not be the only platform for advertising on the internet, but they’re definitely a must-have tool for any business or nonprofit. A well-designed website with impeccable content writing and branding is critical for converting organic traffic into tangible ROI.
As a B2B website design agency, we help clients create visually stunning, informative websites that act as a hub for connecting people and the services they seek. Unlike social media platforms, our clients’ websites don’t immediately generate reports on the stats we need to make informed decisions. That’s why we rely on several agency reporting tools to track our progress and evaluate the success of our strategy.
Here are Slam’s 3 favorite marketing agency reporting tools:
In this section, we’ll take a closer look at these invaluable tools and how to use them. You can also check out our website launch checklist–on sale now for $5.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool for website reporting because it provides free, in-depth insights into:
- Website traffic
- User behavior
- Conversions
These are critical metrics for evaluating client goals and offering real-time data on your strategy.
You can use Google Analytics as a stand-alone tool or integrate it with other Google services to enhance cross-channel analysis, ecommerce tracking, and benchmarking.
This tool also offers mobile analytics and continuous improvement capabilities, making it invaluable for measuring, optimizing, and showcasing the results of your digital marketing efforts.
Google Search Console
Unless everyone in your target audience preemptively knows to search for the name of your client’s business (unlikely), the website needs to appear in search results to generate organic traffic. That’s where Google Search Console comes in.
This valuable tool provides critical data on how a client’s site appears in Google search results, including metrics like:
- Keyword performance
- Click-through rates
- Indexing issues
For example, if you notice a decline in the click-through rate for a specific high-value keyword, you can investigate further within Google Search Console to identify the cause. This will help refine your SEO strategy, address technical issues promptly, and ensure your client’s website ranks prominently within Google search results.
These insights are invaluable for optimizing content and improving search visibility–and they integrate flawlessly with our marketing agency reporting template.
Google Tag Manager
We strongly encourage you to use Google Tag Manager for managing tracking codes and analytics tags. At Slam, we love this tool because it simplifies the process of adding and updating tags without requiring manual code changes, making it easier and more efficient to implement various tracking tools.
For instance, let’s say you want to track specific events, like form submissions or button clicks. With Google Tag Manager, you can set up these tags in the tool’s user-friendly interface. This will save you time and reduce the risk of coding errors.
The centralized control provided by Google Tag Manager is great for improving the accuracy of your analytics–one of many topics we cover in our How to Start an Agency course.
Slam’s Favorite Marketing Tools for SEO Agency Reporting
SEO is basically an internet science that seems like magic. It’s the formula that determines whether your client’s website shows up on the first page of search results or never gets seen at all. At Slam, we use a variety of SEO tools to track our technical and on-page strategies. That way, we’re always on top of whether our efforts are producing the desired results.
In this section, we’ll take a brief look at Ahrefs–a popular tool among digital marketers. We’ll also give you access to some in-house tools we created to help you slam your agency reporting goals.
Ahrefs
At Slam, we depend heavily on Ahrefs for making data-driven decisions about our SEO strategies. It’s an important tool for improving the online visibility of our clients’ content.
Here are a few of the specific ways we use Ahrefs at Slam:
- Keyword research
- Content research and planning
- Backlink analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Rank tracking
Armed with insights into keywords, competitors, backlinks, and overall SEO performance, we’re able to better evaluate and adjust our strategies as needed. This ensures we always deliver top-notch results for our clients–every time.
Slam SEO Tools
At Slam, we offer products and resources for pretty much everything. Whether you need to optimize your small business SEO or develop a nonprofit SEO strategy for a client, we’ve got your back with quality SEO agency reporting software.
Here are our favorite Slam SEO tools for your digital agency:
With the help of these tools, you’ll have everything you need to craft an agency SEO report that will wow your client and show off the value of your work.
If you want to learn more about the complicated but essential world of SEO, check out our How to Start an Agency course.
How Slam's Templates & Courses Elevate Marketing Agency Reporting
When our founder Silvia Li Sam first entered the industry, she had to figure everything out for herself. After turning Slam Media Lab into an award-winning web design agency, she set her sights on creating the products and resources she needed back when she was first starting out.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the marketing agency reporting tools needed to succeed in 2024, Slam is here to take some weight off your shoulders. Our expert-created marketing agency reporting template and How to Start an Agency course are designed with the needs of agency founders in mind.
From learning how to integrate digital reporting tools into a premade template, to figuring out the difference between technical and content SEO, our products include everything you need to slam your goals without overextending your time and budget.
In addition to providing digital tools to agency founders, we also love a good collaboration. Here are just a few of the award-winning services we offer our clients:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Webflow Design & Development
- Content Writing & Strategy
- Brand Strategy & Identity
If you’d like to set up a free consultation, contact our team today.
