The Role of Reporting in Managing Stakeholder Expectations: Insights from an Agency Owner

Have you ever felt like your stakeholders’ expectations for social media are a little bit misaligned? In some cases, perhaps more than a little bit. My agency, Creative Solutions, has been around for 10 years and we’ve experienced this plenty of times, especially in our earlier years.

So, we came up with a formula to help us close that gap and I’m going to share some of the insights we’ve learned over the years.

We’ve been able to streamline our process by focusing on the following items:

• Understanding stakeholder expectations and what matters to them
• The role of reporting
• Our impactful reporting framework (which includes when and how to deliver reports for the greatest impact)
• How to ensure alignment and address gaps

Understanding your stakeholders’ expectations and what matters to them

Back in the early days of social media, the approach was very different. There was little offered in the way of reporting and stakeholders didn’t care too much about it. Social media was just this cool thing that no one really knew what to do with.

We thought: “Wait, isn’t it the same as networking but just on a different platform?”

So we were able to jump in early side and test social media platforms to see what they could really do.

These days, there are new platforms popping up everywhere. Think about Threads, for example. Clubhouse also came out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast.

Nowadays stakeholders actually care about your social media efforts. They want to know if all the effort is worth it, but they often lump social media with all other marketing and business initiatives.

What happens all too often is that clients end up asking you to do marketing, sales, video editing, content writing, website updates, and so on.

Especially as a freelancer. Companies may hire you to do social media and while you’re focusing on that specific job, they say: “You’re my person now and you’re going to do all the things I don’t have time for”.

I feel your pain. Been there, done that. And I stopped doing it.

This is an example of how stakeholders’ expectations can be out to lunch.

They want everything done, but not all of it matters to your role as a social media manager and it makes reporting more difficult. You can’t measure how much admin you’ve done that directly relates to a lead. You don’t measure how many clients you brought in through your video editing and your website updates.

When it comes to reporting, what they want and what they’re expecting from you can be different from what you can actually provide. Or what you want to provide.

Are you an expert in social media? Then stay right there, it’s your lane.

If you consider yourself a Jack or Jane of all trades and you love doing everything, that’s great too! But make sure you’re getting paid for it and you’re not just lumping all sorts of things into the term ‘social media’.

Sometimes you might notice there’s a scope creep.

If you do organic social media, that means reactive and proactive community management. You are assisting in content or campaign creation, distribution, and online customer service.

But Google is not a social media platform. Running Google ads makes you more of a digital marketer.

Remember, you’re the expert and you should only measure and report on what has been agreed upon.

Setting goals

You’ll naturally want to set social media goals when you work with a client.

But what do you do if they respond with something like: “I want a thousand new clients?”

Do you casually remind them you’re not in sales? No.

However, you do need to guide them through a conversation that helps you to understand what they really want from the engagement. This, in turn, tells you what you should report on.

Understand the client’s business, sales, and marketing goals

The best approach is to discuss overall business goals first. It could be freeing up time in order to take on more clients, running five new campaigns this year, or just being more efficient.

Next is talking about sales goals. How many people do they need coming through all of the marketing efforts to reach their sales goals? What is the percentage of the close rate?

Maybe they want ten new clients every month. At this point, you can work with them to figure out how many more people need to be brought in through lead-generation activities to reach those sales goals.

Congrats! They now think you’re really smart. Which also means they’re excited to continue this conversation.

Ask them about their marketing goals. And never forget, setting those is actually not your job.

You’ll want to know what kind of campaigns they already run. What tactics do they use?

Social media falls under digital tactics. But there’s a lot more in the marketing space – SEO, blog content, webinars, joining associations, etc.

Your job is to report on social media tactics and make sure those are consistent with the campaign, then the overall marketing goals, as well as the sales and business goals.

Social media goals

There’s a lot of different opinions about social media goals. We might disagree on this one, but that’s alright.

Personally, I think the overall goals of organic social media are to:

• be seen
• be heard
• be found

When it comes to your content, you can be seen with your hashtags. Posting consistently helps too. Dive deep into your target market so that you understand their needs, wants, desires, and pain points. The more you know about the audience you’re trying to reach, the better your content will resonate with them.

Being heard is all about your point of view. You can have content that’s educational, engaging, inspiring, and promotional. There are a lot of types of content you can post to really showcase the business itself. It all depends on who you’re trying to target.

And finally, proactive community management helps you to be found.

Have you guys ever heard the statement: “Post it and they will come”? Yeah, that never happens.

Never post and ghost.

If someone comments on what you just posted, don’t ignore it. Reactive community management means spending time on social media platforms so that you can really engage. These are great opportunities.

The other side of ‘being found’ is going to networking events. Except it’s Instagram or TikTok.

For example, you can use relevant hashtags and geotags to find people. When you interact with them, it’s just like in-person networking, but you’re doing it online.

You’re building visibility. No one knew you existed until you said ‘hello’ and walked into this networking event, which is Instagram.

You’re saying ‘hi’ and shaking hands when you like someone’s content. Maybe you ask a question, which could be a comment. And you can also send them a DM as a “here’s my business card – holler at me”.

Be seen, be heard, be found is how I like to measure organic social media efforts.

Five examples of specific social media goals

Here are just five examples of social media goals you can start to measure right now:

Beyond these, you can actually get much more granular when it comes to connecting your social media goals to the marketing and sales goals of the company you’re working with.

SMART goal example

I’m sure you’ve all heard about SMART goals before.

But as a reminder, you want your goals to be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Timely (or Time-bound)

Let me give you an example of how to turn a general goal into a SMART goal.

Now that you have these SMART goals, you can start to run campaigns around reaching these goals specifically for social media.

Measuring efforts ROI vs KPI

When we talk about measuring efforts, you often hear: “What’s the ROI of my organic social?”

ROI stands for return on investment.

In my opinion, you want a return on investment when you’re paying for something with a specific campaign outcome in mind. It could be social media ads, targeting /retargeting ads, direct mailers, TV spots, or sponsorships.

Then you can say: “I paid for this. I’m going to send it and hope that I get a return on my investment”.

But I don’t think you can really measure the ROI of organic social media.

When you hire us to do organic social media, we’re doing a service. You’re paying us to do a job for you, like an administrator or a video editor. And with organic tactics, there are too many variables that prevent us from being able to measure the ROI.

However, something we can measure is key performance indicators or KPIs.

The role of reporting

The overall role of reporting is to have objective data that allows for alignment, improvement, and an opportunity to close any communication gaps.

When you’re doing social media reporting, you should:

• Show progress in relation to KPIs
• Show how they measure up to the goals
• Keep stakeholders’ expectations aligned

This is between you and the client. You’re doing all of these things to prove to them that you’re awesome and have them keep you around.

Impactful reporting framework

It’s taken around 9 years to really nail our impactful reporting framework. Including when and how we deliver reports for the greatest impact.

We make our reports in Canva.

The cover page is just a little template with our client’s name and the date.

Next, there’s an outline of the goals, along with a reminder to be seen, be heard, and be found. And of course, we have our specific SMART goals.

Another slide shows key insights and takeaways. Here we tackle what went well, what we’d like to see more of, improvement opportunities, and next steps.

Then we get into community-building opportunities. We share screenshots of community management to make sure they see what we’re doing. There are receipts of customer service opportunities, as well as all the proactive conversations we started.

One other important thing we do is link to a spreadsheet showing month-over-month comparison stats.

We once again have all our screenshots ready for top content per platform and a summary of what this shows us. Based on testing and measurements, we talk about what we know works and at what specific time. So we encourage the client to do more of that.

The next stop is community growth. Which means followers or connections.

And finally, a thank you page.

At the bottom, we like to emphasize what we actually do by including ‘this report aims to elevate the effectiveness of the marketing campaign, assess the marketing response, and identify key opportunities for improvement’.

What we used to do

Okay, I have an embarrassing confession to make. We used to just send an email with the report. There you go, thank you!

You can imagine how well that went.

If you’re doing the same, please stop. You’re going to notice a big change when you switch to a process more like ours.

Sometimes you might be dealing with an alignment issue. Worse yet, you could have no idea there’s a problem at all.

You might think you’re doing fine, but suddenly, the client just leaves. And when you go to the handover meeting, you realize they didn’t even look at the reports.

This is a clear sign that your approach should be different. That’s how we realized we needed to change.

What we do now

We book a monthly meeting with the client and the stakeholders (especially in the first three months). Next, we walk them through the report. We discuss the key insights and the takeaways – what went well, what can be improved on, and proposed next steps.

After the meeting, we stick around for a little bit to basically say: “Hey, are you okay?”

We ask about new ideas, what’s coming up that month, and if they need any support. It’s a touch point that solidifies your position so much more.

Then we email them the report.

How to ensure alignment and address any gaps

As obvious as it might seem, it all comes down to communication.

It starts at the sales level.

When you are making your sales pitch to a potential client, you need to set strong expectations right from the beginning.

There are also ongoing communication opportunities:

• setting your SMART goals and KPIs and always reviewing
• being open to feedback
• creating a space where stakeholders feel heard
• encouraging collaboration
• managing expectations
• learning from your insights and your reports
• adjusting as needed

The more open the communication, the fewer gaps there are.

Reporting just gives you receipts. It closes up any gaps and there really is no room for miscommunication at all.