How to use client reporting to create recurring business

When we asked Dave Ashworth, head of Web performance at The digital agency Return on Digital, what he thought of DashThis, he promptly replied:

« The platform has saved 150+ hours of manual reporting creation each month and produces reports that our clients find easy to understand, allowing us to concentrate on providing insights in the numbers. »

150+ hours. That’s a lot of time to practice your favorite hula hoop tricks.

That’s also a lot of time for a digital agency to work on its business (which, let’s face it, means it can spend this time making its clients more successful).

And as we all know, the more successful your clients are, the more successful you are by extension.

We can all agree that the Holy Grail of any business is to have a lot of recurring revenue. Despite the fact that digital marketing agencies don’t exist in a naturally recurring business model, it’s still possible to convert a big part their revenue into the recurring kind.

Recurring business for digital agencies… it’s possible

And how can great client reporting actually help achieve this goal?

First off, the main idea is to bring more value to your client, right? The more value they get, the more relevant you are to them; this, in turn increases that chances that you’ll get more work from them and contract renewals.

As such, a report has tons of value for your client. This is how they can actually touch and feel what you’ve done for them. A nice, engaging, simple-to-understand report that brings real and honest data about THEIR business is a must-have, because it helps strengthen your relationship with your client.

In an intangible world like digital marketing, a monthly sales report is an actual tangible good you can produce for a client.

A great client report is proof of your results and expertise, which isn’t to say that this is the piece of work upon which they will base their decision to renew their trust in your agency.

You don’t want to overlook that, do you?

Create the report without wasting time

Remember, creating the report itself has no value. Just try to explain your client that you took 5 hours copy-pasting data from Adwords or Facebook into an Excel sheet and why (s)he should pay for that. That’s a nonsense. It’s more or less like manually copying contracts instead of using a printer right?

That’s why there are great client reporting tools out there such as DashThis. DashThis let’s you focus on what you do best: creating digital strategies for your clients.

DashThis frees up your time, so that you can spend it thinking about how you can better serve your clients: time to think about how you can bring your clients amazing results.

And, obviously, time to think about generating new business from your existing clients.

Let’s say Dave, from earlier, uses his newly freed time to concentrate on providing insights based on data, instead of creating more copy-pasted reports. This is how he provides value for his clients. The more time he has to actually dig into the data and strategize based on it, the more chance he has to renew the business with his clients.

Rinse and repeat.

That’s recurring business.