Here's a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company?

One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team's impact.

For as long as there’s been marketing, marketers have struggled to show their impact. But today, there's no need to struggle. Today, it's simple to collect the data you need to show how your marketing investments are generating revenue for your business. You just have to pull together the right reports.

At HubSpot, our marketing team creates a deck of over 200 slides each month to cover every last marketing detail. That's extreme, and it might not be necessary for all companies. But what is important for all marketers is a core set of slides that reports on  inbound marketing  results. (Note the word "results." We’re not showing what we did . We’re showing what we achieved .)

So here are some of the core slides we use to report on our results. What do you think we’re missing? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

1. Visits by Source

This is your measure of the top of your funnel. It tells you, month-over-month, how many people are coming to your site, and how they got there. You can look at this slide quickly to see which marketing channels are driving your changes in overall traffic. (HubSpot customers can find this report in Sources .)

2. Leads by Source

This is your measure of your middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) activity. This slide answers the questions, "How many leads did we generate, and which channels did they come from?" You can use this report to track month-over-month changes in lead volume and to figure out ways to improve the results. For example, if you're generating a lot of traffic to your blog articles , but you aren't converting any leads there, you should experiment with different ways to improve blog page conversions. Maybe you need better calls-to-action (CTAs). Or maybe you need better blog offers. Whatever the root of the problem, this report can help identify its location and help you understand where to dive into the details and diagnose. (HubSpot customers can get this report in Sources .)

3. Funnel Summary

This is an overall view of your marketing funnel that shows you the five most important metrics —visits over time, leads over time, customers over time, visit-to-customer conversion over time, and lead-to-customer conversion over time. This data gives you a great overall sense of your marketing team's performance. (HubSpot customers can get this data from  Sources .)

4. Paid vs. Organic Leads

This view helps you show how much of your lead flow is coming from paid campaigns and how much is coming from organic inbound marketing. If you're trying to build an inbound marketing machine and keep your paid spend down, this slide can help you track your progress.   (HubSpot customers can get this data from  Sources  by exporting and aggregating all their organic campaigns, then comparing that to their paid campaigns.)

5. Top Blog Posts by Page View

This slide helps you keep track of the content that's engaging your community. This knowledge should help you refine your blog articles to generate even more traffic, and to refine your overall marketing strategy to better reach your target personas. ( HubSpot customers can find this data in their monthly report or Blog Analytics .)

6. Top Landing Pages by Leads

This slide shows you which offers and landing pages are generating the most leads. You should know this information and constantly be testing new offers and landing pages in order to create new leaders generating even more leads. (HubSpot customers can see this in their Landing Page Dashboard .)

7. Lead Speed to Your Event

This is a way to measure lead quality. In other words, how good are the leads that you're sending to your sales team? If there isn't much time before your leads convert into an event, the marketing team is doing a good job. If your leads take a while to convert, you need to do a better job nurturing your leads . (HubSpot customers can get this data from a CRM like Salesforce.com when it's integrated with HubSpot.)

Bonus for HubSpot customers! Most of these slides are already being created for you. Keep an eye out for a personalized monthly report that gets sent to you at the beginning of each month. The report contains a link to download a PowerPoint version of your own monthly report. Make sure you're using it!

What other marketing data do you report on for the rest of your company?

Image Credit: SqueakyMarmot