How To Create Client Marketing Reports To Maximize Retention For Your Agency | Seven Figure Agency

What's up, digital marketing agency owners? On today's video, I want to talk about one of the key strategies you want to focus on when trying to retain your clients, which is reporting. What do you actually report? What should you be showing the client to prove your value? That's we're going to cover on today's video, so stay tuned. Alright, so when it comes to client retention and the key strategies you want to put in place to keep your clients on board as long as possible, there's 3 things, right? We've got to have world-class onboarding, we've got to have effective communication, we've got to have success management, which is around building that team of account managers and holding them accountable. But really, when it comes to effective communication and the posting with the client and showing the value, one of the things that can make or break you is is what you choose to report and making sure you choose not to over-report, not to under-report, but to get it just right with the key information the client needs to understand to feel confident in what you're doing and the results that you're bringing to the table. And so when it comes to reporting, I just want you to kind of recognize there's a reason your client's hired you in the first place, right? There's something specific that they want. I just want you to think about this. You know, why did they hire you? What are their desired outcomes? And do they really care about the technical mumbo jumbo? And what I'm gonna suggest is they hired you to increase their sales, right? They hired you to increase their sales. Whether you're doing SEO or pay-per-click, social media, email marketing, funnels, bottom line, if you're a marketing agency worth your salt, you're showing them how to spend money with you and get an exponential return on investment by marketing, right? So they hired you for sales. What do they care about is, am I getting my money back with the return? Am I going to grow my business? And I don't think they do care about the technical mumbo jumbo. For the most part, you know, yes, they get analytics and, you know, Hotjar data and heat mapping and all this fun stuff. But really what they care about is, how much did I spend? How many leads did I generate? And what's my return on investment? Right? If you really talk to the owner of the businesses that you work with, That's what they want to know. How much did I spend? How many leads came in? And was there a return on investment? Is there a positive ROI? If so, let's keep going, right? Let's keep down that track. And I think a mistake that a lot of agencies make is because there's so much great technical data available in analytics, in, you know, the keyword ranking reports, in the heatmap tracking systems, that we, like, we want to show them all the technical minutia when all they really want to know is how much, how much is my return on investment. And so this is what we report, and I'll just kind of break it down for you and kind of show you exactly what it is and how we get it set up. But whether you replicate this or something like it, I want you to really just get clear with the thought process and the logic behind it, because this can be done in a variety of platforms. This can be done in AgencyAnalytics, it can be done in Looker Studio. We happen to do it in NinjaCat, But what we want to show them, and hopefully you can see this clearly, is how much did they spend this month, right? In the case of Nixco Plumbing, one of the clients we work with in Mason, Ohio, $5,671 that month. How many leads did we generate? And so we're tracking phone calls from SEO and Google Maps and other places. We're tracking inbound web forms, 503 inbound leads. And then where did those leads come from? Well, we had some organic, we have some pay-per-click, we had some Google Maps specific click-to-calls, we had some web forms. So that's where those 503 503 leads came from. And so he, the client, can very quickly see how much I spent, $5,000, how many leads did I get, 503, and what's my average cost per lead, $11.27. If your reporting were that simple on a monthly basis, and they can look back and see it, they're gonna feel really comfortable that you're generating value, right, that you're moving them forward. Now, the next page of our reporting gives them some analytical ROI projections, which is, okay, so 503 leads with an 85% close ratio means you would have had 428 qualified leads. 428 qualified leads with an 85% technician close ratio is 363 jobs booked. 363 leads times the 75% technician conversion is 273 jobs. 273 jobs times your average transaction value, is $450,000, that's $122,000 in revenue on a $5,000 spend. That's a 21x return on investment, right? So the client can really quickly see, all right, how much did I spend? How many leads did I get? What's my return on investment? And this has worked extremely well for us, retaining over, you know, 97% average on a monthly basis. I think one of the reasons is, yes, we create a great experience. Yes, we do a great job, you know, generating results. But we're also very good at showing them Where did that money go? What are the results? What are the outcomes? And so you want to try and boil your reporting down in this way. I've got another video where I walk through exactly how we set this up in NinjaCat. So a lot of people want to know technically, like, well, how did you pull in the total spend? You know, how are you dividing that out to figure the average cost per lead? How are you figuring out these averages and things? There's another video I can, I can send you. Type, you know, reporting video in the comments, and I'll pull that up for you. It's It's a separate video, but I can send it off to you. I don't have it publicly posted anywhere on YouTube. So hopefully that makes sense. Now, the other way to do this would be to incorporate this into HighLevel. Big fan of HighLevel. Drive your leads into HighLevel and then have them actually rate the outcomes of those jobs. That's a way to get very, very close to the revenue line, which is how much should we spend, how many leads do we get? We can show that in HighLevel. Bridging the gap between how much revenue they actually generated, it requires them to update things in the pipeline, right? And so there's some, some ways we can do that, but that's an option. Um, there's a famous quote, and I'm sure you've heard this, is, "Half my advertising spend is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half," right? And as digital marketing agency owners, that's what we're trying to solve for. If we can solve that for the client and show them Hey, look, actually all your money is being utilized effectively, and we know exactly which of the money you spent from SEO or pay-per-click or social media generated the best return, you will be head and shoulders ahead of the competition. So working this through, thinking this through, you know, elevating your reporting from projections to actuals is huge. And so one thing we're hyper-focused on at Plumbing and HVAC SEO is bridging the gap between the dispatch platforms they use, ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and the actual leads that we generated. So this way, and we actually have the ability to plug into this, this way we can sync up the data. Hey, we know we sent you 500 leads, and no longer are we projecting a 21-time ROI, we match those leads to the actual jobs booked inside your dispatch platform, And we know that it generated a 32x return on investment. And really, when you can bridge the gap to that level, you become bulletproof, right? Assuming, assuming you're generating results and a return on investment for your clients. And so this is where you should be innovating as an agency owner. Not over-reporting, but getting down to the specifics where the client can see what they spent, what the return on investment is, and innovating how to grow those numbers over time. So the way I suggest you report to the client, like ideally you've got an account management team that's showing up live for the client every month. Don't just set this up on auto email and expect that to do the trick, right? Don't make that mistake. The number one reason the client will leave is perceived indifference. And so if you've just got an automatic email that's giving them that great data, they're gonna check out. They're gonna be like, okay, I'm ready to go somewhere else. These guys aren't paying attention. They don't know what's going on. So you need to have a proactive approach where you meet with the client every month and you go through this information, or at least you attempt to go through this information live. And so the way I've trained our account management team to do this is they lead with the key performance data. Hey, thanks so much for meeting today, client. We really appreciate your business. We're gonna talk about kind of the key report, the key data for the month. We'll talk about what we got done last month and where we're headed into the future. We're seeding the vision. And so we start with the key performance data, which is that how much do we spend, how many leads we generate, what's our return on investment. And we keep the other technical data like, yes, you should have a ranking report. Yes, you should have analytics. Yes, you should have your Google Ads specific spend data, click-through rates, all of that stuff. But only go into it if the client needs to. I will say there are different modalities, right? There are some type A business personalities that could care less about this. But there are more technical business owners that do want this information. And a lot of times when you start to deal with bigger companies, $10, $20, $30 million companies, they've got a marketing director in place, and that marketing director's job is to make sure the money's being spent well, that everything's being optimized, and they're gonna wanna know this data. So be prepared that not everybody just wants the high-level information, so have that information ready when it comes to reporting. Some of the recommended tools for this— question we get all the time, it's like, what tools should I use in order to set up the tracking? We use NinjaCat. You can do the same thing in Looker Studio. A lot of our members use AgencyAnalytics. It's got lots of availability to pull in data, not quite as customizable, right? And there's some massive customization you can do with Looker Studio and NinjaCat that you can't in AgencyAnalytics. And so those are the options I think look— work best to really present that information in a streamlined way. For some of the deep dive tools that we, we suggest and that we recommend, Google Analytics, BrightLocal for like local rankings, also Leadsnap for Google Maps specifically, it's a wonderful tool to report that information back to clients. For SEO specific, one of my favorite tools now is Search Atlas. It combines Ahrefs and Surfer SEO and a bunch of these different pools, so you have all of the information you need for a client. In one central hub. That's Search Atlas, amazing platform. And then PPC-specific, we use Optimizer, really helps us optimize when the clicks are happening, what the average click-through rate is, and make some adjustments on an ongoing basis. So just some of the recommended deep-dive tools there. What you report is really part of your overall client retention strategy, right? Which is your onboarding, which is your ongoing communication, and then ultimately your client success management process. I've got a checklist that walks you through what you should be doing in each of those areas within your agency. So, if you wanna check that out, you can go to 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. It's completely free, it has a checklist, it has some additional training on how to set this up and how to track this stuff. So, if you'd like more details on how to elevate your client retention game, you go to 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. Thanks so much for watching, I hope you got value. If you got follow-up questions, Let me know in the comments. Be sure to hit the like button if you got value. Subscribe for future videos. I look forward to talking with you again soon.