You know that scene in New Girl when Nick Miller says

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I used to think that way about math.

I wasn’t confident about what I was doing, I had just memorized which operation to do with which problems.

My entire life, despite year-round tutoring, I couldn’t get higher than a C+. Then I went to college…

I took “The Nature of Math” — it was billed as “the math class for kids who aren’t good at math with a great professor”, and for the first time, I finally got it.

The class didn’t focus on crunching numbers or showing your work. It taught the philosophy behind the mathematical concepts. It felt like this math was designed for my brain.

Now, 29-year-old Raven would love to tell 15-year-old Raven:

So what does my pre-Calc grade have to do with marketing?

Most people approach reporting the way I approached math:

They focus too much on the numbers and not enough on what those numbers mean.

AKA what numbers reveal about your marketing strategy’s success.

To make reports useful, you need to go beyond the data and understand what insights you can take from them.

Your marketing reporting maturity level based on the questions you ask (with answer key).

As you become a more seasoned marketer, you'll ask a lot of questions about what your numbers mean.

You might even find yourself asking the same questions over and over again.

Here's how you know which stage you're in depending on which questions you ask— 

What Metrics Should I Use? > You're a marketing student.

Answers:

Social: Engagement Rate > Higher rate means people resonate with your content.

Email: Open Rate > Higher rate means people want to consume your content.

Web: Bounce Rate or Time on Page (once you have enough traffic to analyze trends) > Lower bounce rates mean your audience is more engaged. Longer time on page means people stay to consume your content.

What Reports Should I Pull? > You're a new marketer

Answers: This one's easy. Pull the same reports monthly, quarterly, and annually for all channels.

Sure, you could pull new reports like a marketing funnel report. But no matter the report pulled, the biggest concern is that you pull these metrics regularly to establish your brand's normal (getting benchmarks).

Tip: Benchmarks should be made with a MINIMUM OF 3 MONTHS of data. Preferably more.

What Insights Should I Present? > Now, you're thinking like a marketing analyst.

Answers: These questions often lead you to more questions. Those next questions go like this:

Social: Where is there a gap in performance?

Email: What content delivers the highest return?

Web: What % of the ideal audience is completing the goal?

Is this the outcome we want? If so, what does this tell us? > Bingo, you're thinking like a marketing strategist.

Answers: These questions steer you toward big, all-consuming questions. They usually are open-ended and require collaboration to come to a conclusion.

Social: How can we serve our audience better?

Email: What experience should contacts have when reading our emails?

Web: Is this the user journey we want?

Good reports inspire us to be better, not just regurgitate info.

But data can only help if you know how to use it.

My friend Drew is a whiz with data. One time, with an evil glint in his eye, he told me:

What he meant was:

Next time you look at a report, challenge yourself to think like a strategist and go beyond the numbers.

Ask yourself:

• Why are the metrics behaving this way?
• What might be causing the spikes and dips?
• Do these insights support or contradict your current strategy?

This is how you set yourself apart.

Most marketers share reports on what happened, but can't share why or how — an AI can do more than that...

Marketers who analyze success (or failures) and connect it to strategic choices are the ones who drive value.

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🔦 Throwback Project Spotlight 🔦

• 💼 Services: Website Migration to Squarespace
• 👤 Client: Southeastern Writers Association
• 📱Channel: Squarespace Website
• 📦 What We Did + Why: Members and board had a difficult time making updates to the website. They needed something that was more user-friendly, easily editable, and had a member portal. The project included:
  • 😱 Learning the domain name was owned by a deceased member of the board... So instead of migrating the domain name, we had to completely change it and set up a redirect.
  • 📚 Downloading the YEARS WORTH of the newsletter archive, then converting to PDFs so they could maintain historic documents.
  • ✈️ My web designer, who was working while traveling to see her family in Dubai, got flagged as fraudulent activity and got locked out of all our systems... 😫
  • 👩🏽‍💻 A full off-boarding session walking the client through the training documents and videos we made to make using their new site EASY.

What I'm consuming

Professional Growth Reading: The Marketing Agency Blueprint As a newbie, sometimes you get this all-consuming interest in the thing you've just discovered. I'm currently in that phase with understanding how other agencies work. I don't remember how I found this book (probably a Reddit thread), but this book has taught me the formulas for how other agencies operate. It contains formulas for determining if a product/service offering is profitable. It contains the strategic thinking behind why some agencies leverage loss-leader products, and why others forego those tactics. It's taught me how other agency models work, why they work well (or not so well), and how I can set mine up for the long haul. It's not light reading by any stretch, but it's helping me understand how I can build something that works for me based on how others run their agencies.

Podcast: Bossy with Tara & Katie This podcast was recommended to me by a new friend at a networking event a year ago. It has been an excellent podcast when I need a little camaraderie in the entrepreneur space. Katie is known as "Money with Katie". Tara Reed is the founder of Apps without Code, a tech entrepreneur I'm shocked I hadn't heard of before now. These two are genuinely friends helping each other with mindset, entrepreneurial pursuits, and how to be better bosses. Tara talks through how she coaches her team to be the best version of themselves at work. Katie talks about how she gets disillusioned with the how a lot of entrepreneurship is "pay to play". The two of them together feels like eavesdropping into a conversation with friends over coffee. Tara has recently stepped in as the sole host, which those episodes are good — but my favorite are these two together.

This is my longest email to date.

If you made it this far, I owe you a deep, genuine THANK YOU!

As a token of my appreciation, I'd love to help you out.

If there are any marketing questions you have and want to talk them through, reply to this email with the topic and I'll give you a FREE 30-min consultation in the next 2 weeks.

But you must reply by 11:59pm Monday, March 10, 2025.

Hope to see you in the inbox!