Reporting can get pretty tedious, right? In this example, we will look at how Henry, the Director...
Marketing agencies do daring, creative work on behalf of your brand clients. But routine reporting can be tedious and eats up valuable time for your agency team. Today, we will take a look at how smart agencies use Slideform to automate client reporting.
Take for example, a fictional digital marketing agency called Alpha Services. Alpha's account managers provide a monthly social media report in Google Slides format to each brand client. The deck includes Twitter analytics, Facebook performance KPIs and charts of their followers on multiple social platforms. Alpha tracks advertising and post performance, brand mentions, competitive brands, and other KPIs for their clients.
Reporting Pain Points
Preparing routine reports is low value work. Many agencies outsource it or try to automate it away with dashboards, only to find that clients never use them.
Bringing all of the data together in the report each month takes a lot of time and manual work. Often the account managers end up taking screenshots of charts and copy/pasting metrics into the slide deck. This is a slow and often error-prone process.
Reports lack consistency from one month to the next and each account manager has a different format. Worst of all, there is little opportunity for Q/A of the reports before they are sent out to clients.
The Slideform Solution
Working with Slideform, agencies can automate their recurring client reports. Take a look at our example from Alpha and their customer Green Mountain Coffee.
1. Make a template for your report
The Slideform team created a template for the social media report. We replaced client-specific information and data fields, images, data tables, and charts with placeholder fields. Placeholders will be filled in automatically by Slideform's software. All the colors, fonts, branding, and styles will be carried through to the final report. Here's are a few slides in the report template:
2. Connect data to Slideform
Slideform's data team connects the agency's data system to Slideform. Agencies can leverage our integrations with Power BI, Tableau, RedShift, and other platforms, to import their Twitter analytics dashboard, Facebook Ad metrics, and other standard KPIs and metrics. Or they can import data and charts directly from Google Sheets or Excel.
3. Google Slides Automation
Now with a single click, Alpha's team can automate Google Slides and create a customized and up-to-date client report in a matter of minutes. Here are some examples from the report. Notice that all the placeholders are filled in with the appropriate metrics, logos, and charts.
Reaping the Benefits of Google Slide Automation
Now, each month the Alpha team can generate a new report deck for each client quickly in Slideform. They are able to download the deck in PowerPoint, Google Slides, or pdf format, and they can always edit the final slides to add key takeaways and insights.
Now, instead of wasting time copy/pasting, the account team can create a report draft in minutes and spend their time on higher-value creative work.
