Originally posted on hurree.co
The martech industry is booming; despite pleas in the business community that many companies have failed to keep up with digital transformation, studies show that the average large enterprise has up to 120 tools in its martech stack.
Martech tools are great, of course; it’s possibly never been easier to create, automate and deliver personalised and valuable marketing campaigns to your audience, and gather data on those interactions. But having so many tools, all collecting and storing data in different ways, using different metrics, can mean manually collating and mining this data becomes almost impossible. Especially for those operating omnichannel marketing strategies, wherein deriving insights from the deluge of available data requires a data analyst’s expertise.
78% of marketers strongly or somewhat agree that it is difficult to assess how well brands perform across channels. But marketing dashboards offer a solution to the modern-day problem of data overload; cutting through the mountain and delivering only the metrics that matter to you.
Let’s learn more, shall we?
What is a Marketing Dashboard?
A marketing dashboard is a business intelligence tool used to bring all of your organisation’s most valuable marketing metrics together into a single display.
Marketing dashboards use highly visual information sharing techniques, known as data visualisation, to provide at-a-glance overviews of departmental performance. Visual data, such as bar charts, graphs, colour keys, maps, etc., reduces the time between reading a metric to deriving insight and deploying actions from it.
The key metrics visualised within a marketing dashboard are identified in advance based on their importance to the company’s growth and decision-making process. A company’s chosen metrics are commonly displayed on dashboards in near real-time, however, the lag-time of some systems may vary.
Dashboard metrics are commonly referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs) and can cover both high-level and granular areas of marketing performance. Metrics are understood and visualised within predetermined time-frames such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
A well-designed marketing dashboard has several benefits:
- Align the entire department around the most valuable metrics, with clearly visualised progress tracking and growth possibilities.
- Enable at-a-glance understanding of performance across the department, saving management valuable time by replacing manual report creation.
- Facilitate a framework for the easy identification of successes and fast diagnosis of poor performance.
- Integrated visualisations make forecasting for future marketing strategies more efficient and accurate.
Why are Marketing Dashboards Important?
There’s actually no direct link between focusing on metrics and analytics and improving your marketing performance. That sentence may have you thinking: so, why would I bother? Well, there is, however, a direct link between focusing on marketing metrics and learning more about what’s working, what your audience needs, what your customers are thinking, etc., and that, in turn, improves your marketing performance. But another important thing that it does is improve your customer experience, which in today’s markets is the aim of the game.
Customer experience is the sum of all the parts of your marketing strategy and culminates in how your customer perceives your brand, how you treated them during their customer journey and how you worked to build their loyalty. Being a data-driven marketing department can ensure that you are constantly optimising your output and interactions for the best possible customer experience.
So, how can a marketing dashboard help improve your customer experience?
- Use behavioural data to identify trends in user preferences and tailor future campaigns to cater to these.
- Use customer churn data to identify areas to improve loyalty and retention.
- Use SEO data to identify and create content that your customers are searching for.
- Use website analytics to identify points on your website when customers drop off and optimise these pages for a better user experience.
These are just a few examples of how data may be used to optimise your marketing output to improve your relationship with your customers. There are countless ways to use data to inform your marketing strategy and, with a marketing dashboard, you can do it all faster and avoid the human error that is inevitable with manual reporting.
How to Create a Marketing Dashboard
The purpose and design of your marketing dashboards are determined by the goals which you have set for your business and department. Your dashboard exists to help you keep your team on track; steering them towards success and away from any potential casualties.
Let’s take a look at three types of marketing dashboards that you can design:
1) KPIs dashboards — used to monitor day-to-day operations, KPIs and metrics.
Marketing KPIs are something that drives a marketing team toward their goals, they’re usually monitored on a daily basis and their status is reported upon weekly. Having a dashboard that houses all of these metrics in one place can save a marketing manager or executive with reporting responsibility hours a week. Dashboards remove the need to manually check each platform and collate metrics across channels to report the results of these KPIs.
Additionally, team members can easily use an operational dashboard to check their progress toward a KPI target. The easy to digest, at-a-glance nature of dashboards means that any team member can quickly update themselves and make adjustments to their efforts to ensure they meet their goals.
Some examples of KPIs:
- Website traffic
- Leads generated
- Marketing qualified leads
- Sales qualified leads
- Conversion rate
- Revenue
- ROI (Return on Investment)
2) Channel-based dashboards — forecast long-term strategies based on high-level overviews of channel performance
Understanding how a particular marketing tactic, for example, email marketing, has been performing overall allows you to confidently forecast future performance and informs the allocation of time and budgets.
Many email tools give granular, email-by-email reports that can be overwhelming and difficult to distil into high-level insight. With a strategic email marketing dashboard, you can focus on only the most important metrics that you need to make forecasting decisions. For example, if your team had set a goal of increasing email open rate across all campaigns by 10% over the last quarter, you could use your strategic dashboard to quickly visualise whether this goal had been met, exceeded or missed, and translate those results into revenue. All without leaving the dashboard or opening a calculator, which I know most of us dread.
Some examples of channel-based dashboards:
- Email marketing metrics
- Facebook metrics
- Display advertising metrics
- Push notification metrics
3) Multi-channel comparison dashboards — explore large data sets from multiple channels to identify trends and predict outcomes
Creating a space where you can see all of the analytics from one place, across multiple channels and tools gives you a comprehensive view of your performance. Not only do you save time on reporting by removing the need to move between tabs and format reports, but being able to view all of your conversion metrics in one place enables you to quickly optimise underperforming channels or reallocate money to high-performing campaigns.
There are multiple ways in which you can create cross-channel marketing dashboards to monitor tactic performance. For example, you can create a dashboard that monitors all of your digital advertising tools, reporting on the key metrics for ad campaigns. Within one dashboard you could compare: impressions, CTR, conversion rate and CPC for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and TikTok Ads. Having all of this information in one place would reduce the time it takes to compare platforms and reallocate budgets to those that are performing best.
Examples may include:
- SEO dashboard
- Content marketing dashboard
- Ecommerce dashboard
- Digital advertising dashboard
Best practice for marketing dashboard design:
- Clearly define the goal of your dashboard and which metrics will be most important to that goal.
- Don’t over-clutter your dashboard, remember marketing dashboards are meant to give at-a-glance insight.
- Use various different visualisations to help metrics stand out from one another.
- Integrate all of your marketing tools to avoid data silos.
Summing up
Data-driven marketing is essential in today’s competitive marketing environments where customer experience is a key differentiator. GlobalDMA found that 49% of marketers use data to enhance customer experience.
Knowing your target audience inside out is vital, without this knowledge you’ll be left making assumptions about your audience that might be way off base, or even worse, offensive. By using the marketing data that is being generated by your martech tools in a smarter way, with dashboards, you can gain insights about your audience that you may never have discovered on your own.
Marketing dashboards cut through the clutter of marketing data and pull out only the information that you have defined to be important. These dashboards simplify data so that you can make faster, more accurate decisions and engaging visualisations take the fear out of working with complex data sets, empowering every member of your team to embrace data-driven practice.
Book a free demo of Hurree today and discover how to truely harness the power of analytics and transform your company reporting using cross-platform dashboards. If you have any questions then feel free to reach out to contact@hurree.co, we’d be happy to answer them!
