Reporting week is often the most stressful and monotonous time of the month. Your employees dread the mindless data entry and you probably wish to waste less time and money.
What’s the best way to reduce these inconveniences and run a successful business? Automated reporting. It may be a surprisingly simple answer, but it offers the most relevant solution.
Automated reporting has vast potential, from monitoring campaign effectiveness and tracking various metrics to saving you time, money, and stress.
But before we delve in, let's clear the air. In this article and at Datylon, we'll focus on automated reporting that generates static, downloadable reports on-demand or as batch-generation. While interactive dashboards can also be included under this umbrella, we'll be diving deep into the world of instant, downloadable reports you can access whenever you need them.
Understanding automated reporting
Automated reporting helps you track data to make it easier to focus on running your business. It automatically collects and generates reports on-demand, granting regular access to whoever needs it.
Report automation gives you access to accurate and up-to-date information, helping your business run smoothly. It lets you create reports at the scheduled times you set, allowing you to monitor operations throughout the day.
There are many advantages to using marketing automation software. Being able to keep your finger on your business' pulse and understand its various operations are the most significant.
Benefits of automated reporting
Automated reporting in marketing and digital advertising offers a variety of benefits to your marketing strategies. Here are the key advantages to consider:
Snapshots for comparison
Unlike interactive dashboards, the focus of this article is on automated reporting that generates static reports for marketing and media. These reports can be scheduled, produced on-demand, or even batched with multiple versions. This format makes it incredibly simple to obtain snapshots, like the state of your data from last month. Automated reporting streamlines the process, putting these valuable insights at your fingertips with minimal effort.
Increased consistency
Report automation allows for consistent reporting. It lets you set scheduled intervals for updates using the same parameters each time.
Manual reporting becomes inconsistent when multiple team members are involved in creating the same reports. Automation makes monitoring every aspect of your business much easier when it presents the data uniformly.
It reduces the potential for errors and maintains consistency thanks to its repeated formula, ensuring accurate and diverse information.
Helps decision-making
The best method for staying well-informed is through automated reporting. It generates up-to-date reports whenever you want it, showing valuable metrics to help with decision-making.
Using the most current data helps you make informed decisions and limit the room for error. It also provides you with accurate representations of business operations and how they’re affected.
Automated reporting helps you find the most relevant, up-to-date information, so your decision-making is fast and efficient.
Saves money
Automated reporting in marketing and digital advertising saves you time and money. Creating reports manually requires hours of intensive processes, taking employees away from more valuable tasks.
Simply connect to the datasource and set a schedule to generate recurring reports. Automating reports becomes a breeze, taking exponentially less time to generate in the future.
Automated reporting also helps you save money on ink and paper-related costs. Datylon’s Report Server saves all your reports on its cloud storage. Employees can print only the sections relevant to their department or view them digitally without making a hard copy.
Boosted efficiency and productivity
Generating reports manually is time-consuming. Saving this time with automated reporting allows your employees to focus on more important tasks that require critical thinking and creativity.
Team members can drive innovation during their free time when not wasting it on mundane tasks.
Automated reporting also improves communication and transparency among team members. Clear communication and easy access to data boost productivity and efficiency within teams and across the entire company.
Broader accessibility
Automated reporting tools grant you access to large data sets without delay. You gain the information you need quickly with no additional file surfing from various sources.
An automated reporting system collects and associates data into a single report for easy access.
These reports are accessible to all relevant personnel, helping them do their jobs efficiently.
Automated reporting in marketing and digital advertising
Crafting a successful marketing strategy requires targeting multiple channels simultaneously. Expertly crafted and in-depth reports are necessary for identifying its strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance. They help you make key improvements you might otherwise overlook.
As you target more channels for promoting your product, you’ll gather more data. Manually collecting metrics like web analytics and social media poses unnecessary risks like human error.
Automated reporting in marketing and digital advertising helps you collect data from all your channels automatically. It does this quickly, without risking human error or productivity reduction.
With report automation, reports are generated on-demand by triggering the source’s application programming interface (API) to extract insights into performance.
Taking manual labor out of the reporting equation lets marketers and analysts focus their time on researching insights and making decisions.
Datylon provides automated reporting solutions that speed up implementation with minimal effort and intricacy.
KPIs you should track
Key performance indicators (KPIs) play a significant role in marketing reporting. They highlight how successful and effective your marketing or advertising campaigns are.
Tracking certain KPIs provides you with insights into various features of your campaigns. Measuring them helps you improve your strategies by making data-driven decisions.
Here are the most common KPIs that can be included in reports:
- Click-through rate (CTR): This metric details how many people click on your ads. Tracking CTR helps you improve your campaign results and identify challenges and opportunities by evaluating ad performance.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA): This KPI calculates the cost of gaining a new customer. With automated reporting you gain insights on this KPI quickly, allowing you to reduce it by efficiently allocating budgets.
- Return on investment (ROI): This metric measures your marketing strategy’s profitability. By adding this KPI in your automated report, the generated revenue can be tracked and compared to the initial investment. It provides insights and helps you identify the most effective channels and campaigns to allocate resources.
- Conversion rate: This KPI provides insights into your website or landing page's ability to convert visitors into customers. These include lead generation and sales conversion. Monitoring them helps you quickly identify areas for improvement and carry out conversion-boosting strategies.
- Customer engagement: Automated reporting lets you monitor metrics that measure customer engagement like time spent on-site, bounce rates, and CTR. It enables you to examine how effective your user experience (UX), content, and engagement are with your audience.
Automated reporting platforms like Datylon make tracking, examining, and visualizing KPIs easier. They enable fast and informed decision-making so your digital marketing and advertising strategies produce better results.
Automated reporting in media and entertainment
Automated reporting has many uses in the media and entertainment industry. Companies use it to keep customers happy and boost growth. They reduce costs, build better reputations, improve customer service, and increase personalization.
Media companies need data to determine what their customers want. Automated reporting enables them to gather it and draw insights from it to drive progress.
Here are the key methods entertainment and media companies use to entice and keep customers:
Providing self-service and improving customer service
Automated reporting does more than just free up your sales team from tedious report generation. By automatically connecting to data sources and generating static reports on demand, it provides valuable insights into customer needs and challenges. This empowers you to understand customer expectations and solve their problems faster, ultimately enhancing customer service and brand reputation.
In the media and entertainment industry, automated reporting can be a powerful tool for promoting customer self-service. By analyzing data from support interactions, these reports reveal common customer issues. Armed with this knowledge, companies can create targeted self-service resources, like data visualization reports highlighting frequent problems and their solutions. This empowers customers to find answers independently, improving overall support experience and consistency.
While automated reporting offers these advantages, a Salesforce survey highlights a crucial point: only 35% of media companies utilize it to promote self-service, with even fewer (27%) fully implementing the strategy. This suggests there's significant potential to leverage automated reporting for a more efficient and customer-centric approach to support.
Reducing manual tasks to lower costs
A major cost involved in creating manual reports is billable employee hours. With automation, this cost is reduced significantly.
Your employees may spend several hours a week compiling reports when they could focus their attention on more valuable work.
Automated reporting in the media and entertainment industry helps minimize repetitive tasks, saving time and money and boosting productivity.
Delivering relevant ads and content using personalization
McKinsey & Company revealed that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions from every business.
Automated reporting helps you uncover your viewers’ unique preferences, whether it’s K-dramas or true crime. It makes it easier to find out where, when, and on what device consumers are watching. Or even how they prefer paying for it.
Automated reporting in the media and entertainment industry allows companies to connect consumer interactions online and in the real world. By tracking their data, with their permission, businesses can provide consumers with more personal experiences.
Serving relevant ads and content sparks consumer interest and keeps them watching. Media and entertainment companies provide this personalization to retain customers and boost their lifetime value.
Datylon’s Report Studio helps you produce periodic reports quickly, making it easy to determine what your customers enjoy regularly.
What are the limitations of automated reporting?
Despite the benefits of automated reporting in marketing and digital advertising and media and entertainment, there are some drawbacks:
- To produce reliable reports, ensure you test data accurately. Mixing up minor details with multiple versions of the same document could cause discrepancies in values.
- Some employees may need time to adjust to new programs. Use reliable automation software like Datylon’s Illustrator plugin to craft on-brand reports without coding. We also provide training to assist with adapting to it.
- Automated reporting software often involves monthly fees and set-up costs. The long-term savings are worth the investment. Consider using an automated reporting service provider like Datylon to ensure you get the best results.
Implementing automated reporting tools correctly makes a significant difference. For example, you may see a higher ROI thanks to the insights you gain from accurately tracking KPIs. Nucleus Research shows that for every dollar spent, marketing automation returns $5.44.
How to automate marketing reports?
Automated reporting in marketing digital advertising and media and entertainment offers you many benefits. Getting started as soon as possible is likely to award them to you. Follow these steps to begin your automation journey:
- Create reports for the areas you need.
- Create a step-by-step process to generate an efficient workflow.
- Choose a reliable tool like Datylon’s Illustrator plug-in.
- Choose from over 130 of our convenient chart templates or start from scratch.
- Add relevant data to your reports, schedule their release dates and times, and start automating their production.
- Generate a stream of data-driven charts, data stories, or infographics using the templates. Deliver the reports straight to your audience, or publish them online, as PNG, PDF, or SVG.
The future of automated reporting
The automated reporting field will probably see many beneficial effects from technological advancements. They may boost its efficiency and effectiveness.
Key trends to pay attention to in the future include:
- Predictive analytics: Using machine learning and historical data to predict outcomes and trends in the future. These could help you analyze patterns and make data-driven forecasts to optimize marketing campaigns and get the highest ROI possible.
- Artificial intelligence (AI): Using AI algorithms to examine large data sets in real time and receive valuable insights. It may help businesses make informed decisions more efficiently by identifying overlooked patterns, trends, challenges, and opportunities.
Create and automate your reports with Datylon
A streamlined reporting process is pivotal to optimizing your marketing campaigns and media and entertainment operations. It saves you valuable time and uncovers helpful insights that inform and speed up decision-making.
Automated reporting opens up opportunities for client retention, company growth, and lead generation. It has the potential to boost profits with higher ROIs and clearer insights into marketing performance.
Book a live demo of Datylon’s Report Server today and discover the potential of automated reporting.
Additional Resources
What is automated data reporting? A complete guide
Climbing the Ladder of Automated Reporting Solutions with Datylon
The Great Report Debate: Manual, Automated, or Interactive?
Automated reports: Defining Data Resources, Data Extraction and Transformation Options
Mastering Versioned Stand-Alone Reports
Building an automated reporting solution with Datylon Report Server
Automated Data Visualization Trends: What to Look for in Report Server Tools
Automated reporting for various industries:
Automated Reporting in Asset and Wealth Management: Trends and Best Practices
Boosting Efficiency: How Automated Reporting Transforms Associations
The Power of Automated Reporting in the Pharmaceutical Industry
