For the last few years, data has been one of the marketing industry’s go-to keywords. And one of the big reasons for that is that we now have more access to customer data than ever before – not to mention, customer data as a whole is more important than ever. But while we do have access to these huge amounts of customer data, the question is, how do you actually find, collect and easily analyse this data and create powerful marketing reports?

Because the more (actionable) customer data you have – and understand – the better you will be able to market your business, your products and your services in order to grow your sales and ultimately, your business as a whole.

In this blog post, discover an easier way to manage your marketing reports:

The importance of collecting and analysing customer data – and the challenges of doing so

Without access to data, you can’t take the right decisions: it’s that simple. Data helps you better understand your customers, your marketing strategies and why they worked or didn’t and ultimately, it helps you make informed decisions about your business and your marketing strategies so that you can keep growing and improving your results.

And luckily, we can all have access to incredible amounts of data; but, unfortunately, the challenge comes when it comes to finding and actually collating all of this data in a way that makes sense and is easy to interpret.

It comes when you find yourself using 10 different tools at a time to get all the data you need to put together your report.

And a lot of marketers still find themselves in this situation: as many as 52% of marketers still do their reporting manually.

Ideally, you need to find an easy, straightforward way to collect all of this data in one place. And that’s what Brandwatch’s new self-service (and free!) product, Vizia, does: it helps you put together powerful marketing reports by collecting all of your data in one place.

So if you want to make the most out of your analytics, read on to learn how you can leverage Vizia – and how it can not only save you time but help you generate better marketing reports for your business.

What exactly is Vizia?

In a nutshell, Vizia is a free tool (although they have some paid plans as well) that allows you to bring together all of your key data sources in one place by integrating all of your different reporting sources – both external and internal, such as data from your Google Sheets.

It’s an amazing time-saver for businesses and marketers; but it’s not just about saving time, it’s also about making all of your data highly accessible so that you know where to start, make better strategies, take better decisions and turn your data into actionable insights.

Seeing all of your data in one place can also help you better see the relationships between different data sources and understand them; which, in turn, helps you better understand your data and your customers.

Not to mention – and this is a big one – all of your reports are “live”: in other words, anytime you access your reports (or when someone else does), they will be updated automatically with the latest data.

Here’s how it works:

Vizia is very straightforward and quick to set up; the first thing you should do, is start organizing your data; first, create folders where you’ll keep your reports organized – you can use this feature however you want so it makes things easier for you and your team; although, you can also create these folders as needed, when creating a new report.

Reports are simply called Decks which makes perfect sense as they do look a lot like presentations, which was the first thing I noticed as I started using it.

It felt familiar from the start – which is a great thing in my book as I need some simple and straightforward to help collect my data:

Now, it’s time to put together my report; this is super easy to do by clicking on “add component”:

As you can see above, you have a list of all the available tools on the left-hand-side (if you can’t find the integration you need, rest assured the Vizia team have a roadmap of integrations to come), and once you click on one, you’ll be able to see the specific components that are available (on the right-hand side) – select the one you want to add to your report:

If you haven’t connected the specific account already, you can easily configure it within the report, as you can see in the above screenshot, along with the specific data you want the report to display.

As you add what data you want to be tracked, the tool will automatically update the information displayed in your slide:

You can also add other components to your deck, as needed; then, just click on “add slide” to add more slides to your deck, along with different components.

So as you can see, it’s very straightforward, the entire report-building process:

• Create folders to organize your marketing reports
• Create different decks (the reports) and organize them in your folders
• Add components to your decks to put together your reports

And that is pretty much the entire process – it’s simple, yes, but the results look great. It looks good, it’s super accessible and it’s as uncomplicated as it comes so that your team (or clients, partners, shareholders and so on) will be able to easily understand all of this data.

Now, as for sharing the reports, there are some really interesting features worth mentioning here; first off, you can share marketing reports with anyone, no password required, by email, which will look something like this:

As you can see above, the user can easily access the document but that doesn’t mean they can share it left and right: they can’t forward it to others and once the link is clicked, it will only be valid on the initial device it was opened on.

I love this feature as it both makes it easy to share data with those you need to, but it also does everything possible to avoid having any outside parties looking into your marketing reports.

Another very cool thing is that when you share a report, it will remain live for one year – and so will the data in it. In other words, every time you open the report, the data will be automatically updated to show the latest numbers; I know I mentioned this earlier in passing, but it’s definitely worth saying it twice. Alternatively, if you only want to see data from a specific period, you can also set a fixed date range and focus the insights on a specific time period – particularly useful if you want to report on a specific campaign you held or if you want to generate a quarterly report.

Plus, the reports are all mobile-ready and work across devices; all of these features essentially help give the people the power to serve themselves, to get the information they needed.

Once you’ve sent someone a report, you’ll even be able to track your analytics for that deck:

• How many people viewed your report/deck in total
• Who exactly saw your deck
• See slide metrics to see exactly which slides got the most (or the least) eyeballs

It can help you understand where you’re going wrong with your reports – and how you can improve them.

For example, if you send a deck to one of your clients and they spend a considerably longer amount of time on a specific slide, perhaps it’s worth looking into how you can improve that data in the future, as well as showcase more relevant numbers in your deck.

Or, if you send a deck to your sales team and they’re all completely avoiding a certain slide, then perhaps that slide is a bit difficult to understand or simply not that relevant.

Oh, and you can share your reports with up to 1000 people.

Building and customizing your decks/marketing reports

Although I’ve already pretty much covered this, I do want to talk about what kinds of components you can add to your decks, as I’m sure that’s likely your most burning question to find out if it’s the right tool for you – can it get the data you’re interested?

And the answer, you have a lot of great options – and there are plenty more coming, I’m sure, as the platform is still very new to the market.

But here’s a rundown of some of things you can track in your Vizia reports:

• Web analytics from Google – pretty much any data you need, including all of your goal conversions
• Pull internal data from your Google Sheets or Google Slides
• See trending articles from 12 industries, updated in real time from Buzzsumo

• Track market share of voice, as well as site and search positions and trended search volumes for certain keywords; plus, you can even track the performance of multiple websites at the same time, to create comparisons

• Track any custom URLs you might have
• Add bullet points, images, text and other annotations to your deck + you can even add a weather component to show the local weather!
• See insights for your Instagram and/or Facebook, not just for your Pages/business profiles, but also for your advertising campaigns

As you can see, there are quite a few options for customizing your decks with social media insights, web insights, as well as industry insights – even tracking rankings on Google.

Conclusion

Reporting is a time-consuming and often thankless task – or at least, if you don’t have the right tools to help. You need to use numerous tools to collect your data and find a way to not only showcase the most relevant data, but do so in a way that makes sense and is easy to understand.

And well, that is a truly difficult and highly time-consuming task. But I have to say, using Vizia truly makes it very easy and as straightforward as it comes. And the fact that it’s free to use is just the icing on the cake.

Not only is it super quick to build reports, but once you’ve created all the reports you need, they will automatically update themselves with the latest data, for an entire year (so you won’t need to recreate them every few weeks or months!).

Plus, it’s super easy for others to access and understand your marketing reports; so if you’re on the lookout for an easier way to monitor and report your results, you should definitely check out Vizia.