Posts Tagged ‘marketing dashboard’
Get Up to Speed by Utilizing a Marketing Dashboard
Monday, November 26th, 2007
When you get in your car and drive somewhere, you utilize a dashboard. It tells you important information such as how fast you are going, if there are any problems with your car, and even which direction you are headed, depending on the model of your car.
In Sales and Marketing, we utilize dashboards almost every day; but for the most part they are unsophisticated. Writing your weekly sales numbers versus quota on the dry erase board, sending around a monthly newsletter with results in big bold letters, these are simple dashboards.
In today’s information age, things are moving quicker than our outdated marketing dashboards of the past. We need newer, faster tools that offer real time intelligence to let us know if we need to shift our focus mid stream to be more competitive.
Managing marketing programs in real time
Which figures do you use to measure your marketing and sales progress and success? Leads? Pipeline? Deals? Orders? Revenue? The indicators you use to drive your actions should be available to you at a glance. You can’t make today’s tough decision with yesterday’s data. A Marketing dashboard displays results as they arrive and alerts you to milestone events. With marketing performance metrics on your desktop, you can monitor one marketing program while working on the next one.
Marketing dashboard benefits at a glance
* Unifying different data sources into a single display
* Knowing when and where prospects visit your site
* Monitoring your own progress against campaign goals
* Staying abreast of competitive threats and opportunities
* Identifying and shifting resources to top performing programs
* Tracking and comparing conversion rates for different programs
* Making better decisions based on real time data
* Seeing pipeline performance data in real time.
Marketing departments are often perceived as just a cost center. Most people don’t realize marketing makes some of the most important investments in any organization. Utilizing a Marketing Dashboard for your key metrics allows you to monitor, share, and prove the value of your business decisions - on demand, day after day. Empower yourself to increase your marketing ROI based on real-time marketing performance indicators.
Different types of Marketing Dashboards
From a simple Excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of business intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in marketing reporting and analysis. An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming “must-haves” for all businesses. Easy-to-use by non-technical business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.
You’ve decided to get a Marketing Dashboard, now what?
You have bought in to the concept of a dashboard - now what do you do? The most difficult piece of creating your company’s marketing dashboard may be the first step, which is deciding on the metrics for your board. They should provide you with data that is actionable.
Consider that many companies are trying to figure out the subcomponents of their brand value chain. They’re asking questions such as “If we invest money in doing some branding here, how will it impact consumers at various points of the process, and how will it ultimately translate into growing our sales and in turn our value as a company?”
Once you have determined the right metrics, data visualization can narrow down the information and track the key metrics and how they are progressing in a clear and compelling way. Identifying whether a given marketing campaign or tactic has an immediate or lagging effect-or no effect at all-on brand awareness means that the traditional semi-annual tracking wave is no longer enough. Instead, it means capturing a real time rolling sample on a continuous basis to ensure you have the necessary data.
There are a number of companies who specialize in dashboards and business metric managing. A few who provide information via the web are:
* http://www.marketingnpv.com/
* http://www.advizorsolutions.com/
* http://www.visualmining.com/
* http://www.tableausoftware.com/
Utilizing your Marketing Dashboard and making sure you are up to speed
You have the strategy, the goals and objectives. You are gathering the data, now take advantage of the information age and get it piped into a dashboard to let you know how your marketing efforts and dollars are working. Utilize a Marketing Dashboard and make sure you’re up to speed, headed in the right direction, and that there are no warning lights on, indicating a potential problem.
Tags: advice, larry Slusser, Marketing, marketing campaign, marketing dashboard, Marketing Your Business, tips
Posted in News & Articles | No Comments »