📈 Steal our reporting template

Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #9 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

I hope you’ve had a good week.

We’ve been at Lambeth Palace, taking over production on the Re-Enchanting podcast for Season 3, which comes out next year. Have a listen to seasons one and two wherever you get your podcasts.

Anyway, on with today’s newsletter - how do you make the most of reporting?

👉 By the way, if you’ve missed previous newsletters you’ll find them here.

📩 And if you’ve been forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

📈 Our tried-and-tested reporting framework

We’ve set a lot of targets over the years.

When it comes to established brands, it’s often assumed social media growth is linear.

But setting month-by-month incremental targets is often unhelpful, because the reality is that so much changes on a monthly basis, and therefore so do your results.

There will be internal factors specific to you that mean your data peaks at certain points, and there will be external factors that you can’t control.

To counter the fluctuating results we have two key reporting philosophies:

1. We’re comfortable that every month won’t always be better than the last, instead we focus on long term growth.

2. We set two monthly targets, a goal and a stretch goal, which accounts for fluctuating factors.

Setting your goal and stretch goal are important.

Goal - set at a level that is ambitious, but realistically achievable.

Stretch Goal - top end target only realistic in certain peak months

We then colour code the results:

Which gives us an idea of how we’re performing across a period of time, resulting in colour coded templates:

The ultimate goal is technically have as much pink as possible, but too much pink actually shows we’ve been too cautious with the goals we’ve set. 

If we get too much pink, we raise the goal and the stretch goal.

So the aim is to have the majority of results bright green. 

Too much dark green helps us identify the areas we need to improve.

But, and this is key, don’t be afraid of a bit of dark green. No dark green means your targets are too easy.

You should be expecting to fall short on occasion.

What’s the point of setting targets that you hit every month?

You can use this approach for any metrics across your digital channels.

Choose as few metrics as possible. Don’t try and measure everything.

If you set targets for 15 different things, I bet you £100 you won’t be measuring anything in 5 weeks.

Choose 3 or 4 key areas and laser your focus on them.

That’s how you improve performance.

Then report monthly, using the colour coded grid above to track performance over time.

Hope that’s helpful.

See you next week. ✌️

What we’re looking at 👀 and listening to 👂

🎧 Rosie has been delving deep into Foals back catalogue - which is arguable better than their recent offerings. Hummer, Spanish Sahara and What Went Down being the highlights.

📺 Dan is watching Foundation on Apple TV+, a Sci-fi thriller centred around AI (or a documentary about the future of the human race? You decide…)

Before you go - we’ll never use these newsletters to directly sell you our services, but we’re always here if you need any expertise or support 👍