Stakeholder engagement doesn’t need to be stressful. Remember that you’re the marketer in the room, so not only do you hold the most experience and understanding of the field you’re asked to talk about, but you’re already equipped with the skills to tell a compelling story. It’s literally what you do every day with a different audience. Nevertheless, if a meeting invite with the CEO pops up in your calendar, it’s only natural to want to do everything you can to ensure it goes well. So, here’s how to do it.

Four tips to deliver a performance report that speaks to your stakeholders…

• Don’t overwhelm them with data. It’s great that you have access to data on every campaign touchpoint, every brand channel and every KPI, but non-marketing stakeholders don’t need to be concerned with all of that. To avoid overwhelming your audience, and maybe yourself too, choose five key metrics linked to your strategy and share the data in a clear and concise manner. Remember that not everyone loves data or is analytically minded, so if you can portray it in an engaging manner rather than just numbers, even better.

• Show change over an appropriate timeframe for your sector. Think about the period of time that your data reflects. Mostly likely it will be the duration of your campaign period and therefore you can compare it to the previous same amount of time. For some this might be quarterly, for others annually. If you’re looking at brand performance, you might even want to look at a longer period of time depending on what data you have available for each channel.

• Bring data to life with anecdotal evidence and stories. Numbers are great, but they don’t always tell the full story. Feedback from stakeholders, ideally your clients and prospects, can be invaluable to assess performance. Furthermore, some channels don’t even provide us with any numbers, so anecdotes from your sales team or client-facing colleagues on how they feel an exhibition, networking event or conference presentation ‘performed’ can be the best source of data.

• Keep it simple. Remember that you are not your audience, so language, data and visuals must be easy to understand and interpret. Once you have a draft report ready, it might be worthwhile having a test run with a non-marketing colleague to check that the content is understandable and engaging. If in doubt, simplify it.

In an ideal world, you’ll already know what your stakeholders are most interested in, so you can prepare a tailored report for them. But in reality, you can’t create something bespoke for each person, so there’s got to be a compromise. Sticking to these four quick tips will help you cut through the mass of marketing data to deliver a clear and compelling campaign report. You’ll not only show your marketing skills, but your communications prowess too.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by data, you’re not alone. Marketers worldwide are drowning in messy piles of data from many different sources (Ravn Research, 2022). Making choices is critical for marketing success. Don’t drown in data. Feel at home with marketing strategy and planning, with House of Comms.