Why Are Slides The Key When Presenting Marketing Results?

You launched your highly anticipated content marketing campaign, and now it’s time to measure its performance and craft a board meeting presentation. Any seasoned marketing leader knows that slide presentations drive your marketing results, and leading figures want to see how your efforts accelerate growth. How do your results compare to last month’s or the previous quarter’s, and what budget did it take to achieve them? The most crucial metrics of your report must be presented on the first slide of your presentation. Include only the most relevant and pivotal data summarizing your B2B marketing strategy’s performance. You probably have countless pieces of data you want to include about the content you created and how you crafted your digital marketing strategy. However, CEOs and company boards often don’t have the time to focus on anything other than the KPIs and results. Consider the types of questions they would ask you and prepare accordingly to keep it short and sweet without missing any crucial info.

8 Steps To Create A Marketing Results Presentation

1. Focus On The Outcome

Your board of executives doesn’t really care about your daily practices and whether you included dofollow backlinks in your blog posts to generate more leads or did landing page optimization. They only want to hear about the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and its results. You may be tempted to mention all the struggles you faced and the alternative paths you had to take. But stick to results. For instance, you don’t have to mention how many blog posts you published or how many emails you sent out. Highlight the revenue you generated and all the good publicity you gained on highly respected publications. Or even better, boast about how many leads you managed to collect or talk about the organic traffic increase you and your team achieved.

2. Create A Connection To Your Goals

Strategic marketing leadership entails setting goals and striving to achieve them. Presenting your marketing results to the board of directors means that you also have to draw a connection to your objectives. As an example, if you had set a goal of $800K in sales and generated $1 million, it’s important to mention this increase. Or you may have set a goal to appear in one major publication and ended up appearing in two. Such victories should be highlighted to show how you not only met your marks but also surpassed them. What happens, though, if you do not meet your goals? You still have to let your board know about it and explain the possible reasons why. Problems are part of any business. Βe prepared in case they ask how you plan to tackle the challenges.

3. Provide Context

When preparing your board meeting presentation, don’t take it for granted that executives understand the importance of the various percentages you mention. You may want to use an external or internal benchmark to create impressive comparisons. For instance, you may mention that your sales conversion rates increased by 17% compared to the industry’s 15% or your company’s previous best of 14%. What budget did you use for implementing your B2B lead generation strategies? By showing how exceptional your marketing results are, you create leverage to ask for an increase in funding. Board members can see how effective your work is and why they must invest more in your department. However, sometimes targets are met at a slower pace. Create a chart that underlines the increase in your efforts. Maybe you have not reached your goal yet but your work is steadily on the rise.

4. Be 100% Honest

Being honest is easy when you have good news to share regarding your small business marketing strategy performance. But what happens when you have not met your goals? Leading with honesty and transparency is the only viable road. This approach builds trust and helps board members understand why you had setbacks and how you can make improvements. It’s a marketer’s responsibility to explain the data and present alternatives. Before they suggest cutting your budget, you can make your own recommendations and explain your reasoning. It’s easy to fall into the trap of lying and presenting a beautified reality, but the truth always surfaces. Bad news is part of business, and your CEO and CFO know that. By being honest with them, you prove that they can trust you to experiment and try out new strategies.

5. Be Consistent With Your Format

When you start building your marketing reporting template, you should keep in mind that your audience isn’t as familiar with marketing data as you are. You are presenting a complex set of data that must be easily digestible. Create an easily shareable template and stick to it. Keep your board report template clear and simple, with a white background and the company’s logo on every slide. On the cover, mention the date and the main focal points. Focus more on visuals rather than text. Images, graphs, charts, and animations are more comprehensible and add an entertaining flair to a highly stressful environment.

6. Collaborate With Sales

Whether it’s small business content marketing or any other form of digital marketing, board members may be quick to cut your budget if they don’t see good results. Marketing teams that justify their spending and prove revenue solidify their worth. So, how do you build such a strong case for yourself? Stay close to the sales department. Your collaboration should start before you begin implementing any strategies. Present your proposals to sales experts, receive their feedback, and approach the financial department with your budget plan. When it’s time to showcase your marketing results, ask sales to be in the room with you. They can vouch for you and explain how your unified efforts increased sales. You generated B2B leads, and they pushed them down the sales funnel.

7. Explain The Importance Of Marketing

As a marketer, you may sometimes feel that your CEO and CFO do not understand the fundamentals of your department. Instead of disagreeing, explain your side and the role marketing plays in overall business success. That’s why it’s pivotal to explain marketing results in business terms, not marketing terms. You don’t need to elaborate on all your marketing tactics and reasoning. Highlight the final results and the revenue generated. Even if you struggled and missed a few marks, explain how you can improve your performance in the next quarter.

8. Identify Long-Term Trends

If you want to be a successful marketer, you need to be aware of relevant trends. First, you need to analyze data and identify hidden trends you can utilize in future campaigns. Also, high-performing metrics may indicate a new path that’s worth following in the future. Additionally, you should create a connection between campaign KPIs with long-term trends. Adding all this information to your marketing metrics report template allows you to make predictions and forecast the success of marketing campaigns. You may not be a fortune teller, but based on past metrics, you are able to craft your future path. However, do not base your entire B2B strategy on trends, and focus more on what has already worked for your company. For example, maybe one of your long-term goals is to learn more about how to become an influencer in the marketing industry. Or maybe you need to team up with other industry experts to help promote your business and reach new audiences. Either way, keeping up with the future of marketing trends is key to your success.

The Metrics And KPIs To Measure

1. Marketing Sourced Revenue

As mentioned above, boards want to see the revenue your strategic marketing plan generated. Sure, you can talk about signups, leads, and marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). However, marketing-sourced revenue refers directly to the capital gained through marketing efforts. You highlight how your marketing results align with overall company objectives and magnify the importance of marketing. Therefore, your CEO and CFO clearly see how marketing expenses are not in vain but help your organization achieve its goals. How do you set your goals, though? Well, your objectives should be SMART, meaning specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Consequently, you create targeted campaigns and can easily measure their success rates.

2. Customer Lifetime Value

Some of the best content marketing agencies focus more on finding the right customers rather than selling their products to one-time buyers. When presenting to the board of directors, include metrics showing how long customers have stayed with you and how much revenue each has generated. Thus, you underline your efforts in fostering long-lasting and trusting relationships with customers and how fruitful your cross-selling and upselling endeavors have been. Retaining even 5% of your customer base can have a 25% increase in sales. These are the numbers your board wants to see.

3. Qualified Leads

Your marketing KPI report should include both marketing and sales-qualified leads to show board members how your promotional efforts attract the right type of customers. As a marketing leader, you know that MQLs don’t necessarily mean revenue, as people may show interest in a free offering without making a purchase. However, it’s crucial to show how your digital marketing engages B2B and B2C audiences and brings them back to your website. Maybe they downloaded a free eBook, subscribed to your newsletter, added a product to their cart, or clicked on an ad.

4. Customer Acquisition Cost

All B2B marketing strategies should measure their CAC, which refers to how much money you spend to acquire new buyers. In combination with customer lifetime value, you get a good understanding of whether you operate efficiently or not. When your acquisition costs are higher than your clients’ lifetime, your tactics need altering. As a rule of thumb, you should aim for 33% or less of your customers’ lifetime value. When you succeed in your efforts, you must include the marketing results in your board meeting presentation. Leading figures need to see that marketing expenses are worth it as they generate respectable revenue.

5. Return On Investment

Any marketing plan template includes measuring ROI to show board members whether they are getting their money’s worth. You can measure the ROI of your entire marketing efforts and that of specific campaigns that generated unexpected success. This way, you show that your marketing results are worth the allocated budget and have the leverage to ask for more funds if your team needs them. You can also create a competitive analysis and highlight how your content marketing ideas perform better than those of your competitors.

Why You Should Explain Marketing’s Uncertainties

You may think that presenting KPIs is enough for executives to understand marketing results and potentially successful future strategies. However, if you want to be 100% honest with your company’s board, you must communicate the market’s uncertainties. Marketing is influenced by many unpredictable factors, including customer behavior and economic inflation. These factors make it difficult for you to predict the future accurately, not to mention that marketing is usually impacted by sales and other departments. Therefore, it’s crucial to locate and underline all the uncertainties and create a sensitivity analysis, where you hypothesize how one or more uncertain factors may impact your marketing outcomes. Similarly to iterative testing, you create different scenarios and predict which will drive success and improve your services. Presenting all this to your board keeps them updated and informed regarding not only your past performance but also your future endeavors.

The 3 Types Of Information All CEOs Require With Marketing Results

1. Normalized Information

When you measure content marketing performance and gather valuable insights, you may be tempted to create complex charts to add to your marketing KPI report. However, don’t take it for granted that CEOs and CFOs can understand functional data. Many of them come from operations and finance, meaning marketing may not be their strong suit. Simplify your presented data and include the number of booked orders, marketing contribution to sales, conversion ratios, and converted pipeline reports for the coming months. This way, board members can easily check the marketing department’s performance.

2. Predictive Information

Most CEOs and leaders want to know how to get more people to buy your product. But your marketing results refer to the past and highlight how effective your promotional efforts were. This is not enough since CEOs must plan for the future and set a clear direction for the company. So, their main question is whether you’ll meet your marketing goals in the next few months or quarters. Based on your past outcomes, you may be able to prove that the future will be just as successful. Mention any trends you’ve noticed in the market to ensure your B2B strategy is updated.

3. Information About Trends

Let’s expand on the subject of trends. What have you seen spreading widely in the marketing field lately, and has it benefited your competitors? Analyze whether some of these trends can be implemented in your SaaS B2B marketing guide and predict how they might perform. Don’t suggest them to your board just because they are hot at the moment. Examine why and how you can utilize them to foster growth and increase sales. It’s pivotal to make sound decisions and not let yourself get carried away by the waves.

How Can AI Improve Marketing Analytics?

Even if you have the best marketing team at your disposal, it doesn’t mean they don’t need some help with content production and streamlining mundane tasks. Many marketers have indeed used AI for business and for creating content for their digital marketing. However, no matter how great AI may be, providing analytics on the effectiveness of the content is a completely different story. Common analytics challenges include the complexity of large quantities of data that humans have a hard time understanding and simplifying. In some cases, companies hire experts whose only job is to analyze data and draw valid conclusions.

This is where AI steps in to save the day. The best AI marketing tools help you gather, analyze, and filter your data and improve the quality of your material. You may even use AI to forecast sales so you don’t overstock or understock your products. Based on this data, the algorithm can personalize your messaging by segmenting and grouping buyers who share the same requirements and needs. Therefore, it can create buyer personas that fit your varying customers. Finally, AI can analyze vast amounts of data and identify marketing trends to include in your strategy. When it’s time to present your quarterly or monthly marketing KPI report, AI can be an invaluable assistant.

Key Takeaway

Many content marketing experts feel like their CEOs, CFOs, and the rest of the board members don’t understand marketing and get frustrated when their message falls through the cracks. It’s your job to fill those gaps with tangible and comprehensible information everyone in the room can understand. Communicate your marketing results in a language that they speak and highlight why marketing costs are worth spending so the organization can reach its objectives. Even if you are not achieving your goals, you should be able to devise an updated plan and instill a sense of trust in your board. You can suggest consequences in case you are unable to improve your performance, like adjusting your marketing budget.