Building a Successful Marketing Dashboard

The marketing mix is getting more and more complicated. It was hard enough to track the results of advertising campaigns, tradeshows and direct mail programs. Now you’ve got search engine marketing, banner ads, pay per click advertising, social networking, mobile marketing and a plethora of other tools at your disposal. One thing that hasn’t changed though is the need to track your results, monitor the performance of your campaigns and measure the return on investment.

Marketing dashboards are a great way of measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing programs. Simply put, a marketing dashboard pulls all the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you are tracking for each marketing initiative and displays this information in a graphical format. It allows you to easily identify those KPIs that are not meeting expectations so that you can move quickly to adjust a poorly performing campaign. Conversely, you can also quickly identify the campaigns that are kicking butt – and put more time, money and effort into expanding the successful programs. In addition to providing both recognition and accountability for the marketing function, it creates a stronger argument for budget dollars and larger campaigns when programs are working successfully.

Done well, a marketing dashboard is a simple to use, easy to understand system. But the simplicity of a good dashboard belies the complexity of the process required to create it. A considerable amount of strategic planning needs to take place before launching anything. The marketing department touches many different parts of an organization – finance, sales, operations, customer service, and IT all play an important part in a successful marketing program. Therefore, consensus needs to be built between all the organization’s stakeholders on what information will be tracked and reported upon. Collectively, this team can define marketing expectations and success.

To begin selecting the appropriate metrics, your organization’s stakeholders must identify what information they need to know, or what questions they need to answer, in order to measure marketing effectiveness. They then prioritize the questions based upon their importance and the ease with which they could be answered. In selecting questions, it is critically important to align marketing activities with business objectives. Your metrics should include leading AND lagging indicators. Some of the questions that your marketing dashboard should be answering include:

• • What % of our revenues come from existing customers versus new customers?
• • What % of our targeted market have we penetrated? How does that compare to last year?
• • Do we have the right marketing mix?
• • For each campaign, how much have we spent, how many leads did it generate, and how does that compare to other campaigns?
• How are each of our product lines and/or business units performing?
• What is our performance by territory/geography?
• How many leads do we have in the pipeline?
• How many proposals are being generated?
• What is the average sale and how long is it taking to close? How does that compare to last year?
• What is our customer satisfaction rating?
• What is the life time value of our customer base? How does that compare to last year?
• What are our conversion rates (click through to close)?
• What sales tools are being used?
• How does the marketing budget compare to actuals?

Finally, when you decide to build your marketing dashboard don’t fall in love with the technology. Focus on your business needs first. Identify the questions you need to have answered. Then start looking at what tools are available to help you develop the simplest solution possible to meet those needs. There are many off-the-shelf solutions available today. One great place to start learning more about dashboards is www.dashboardspy.com. This site provides many different snapshots of both good and bad dashboards.

Just remember – marketing measurement always requires a significant number of assumptions, especially in the beginning of a campaign. Anyone in marketing will tell you that sometimes you simply have to SWAG it (Simple Wild Ass Guess) until hard data is made available to prove (or disprove) your assumptions. Make sure your dashboard is designed for flexibility. As your company becomes more familiar with tracking data, your needs will change. You’ll want to have a dashboard solution that grows with you as you become a more sophisticated user.