Marketing reports are crucial in tracking the effectiveness of business strategies. Fortunately, there are automation solutions, including marketing dashboards, that assist brands in getting insights and relevant data about their activities. Keep reading as we delve into finding the right marketing dashboard. We will also share some tips to maximize its benefits.
What is a Marketing Dashboard?
A marketing dashboard visualizes significant information needed to monitor key marketing metrics, contributing to achieving marketing objectives. Top-level marketing reports are organized on a single page. This way, the data can be tracked at a glance. After all, these reports are crucial elements of more detailed marketing analytics.
A dashboard can provide end-to-end insights about various business objectives. That is why modern businesses use online marketing dashboards to track performance and make informed decisions.
Why is Implementing a Marketing Dashboard Important?
A tactical dashboard can benefit from soft metrics to improve engagement, awareness, and interactions. But, you need a dashboard that can display hard metrics like the internal rate of return and the present value of your current campaign. A dashboard can also include online marketing metrics such as total visits, bounce, and click-through rates. This is when a marketing dashboard becomes a necessity.
Here are more reasons why implementing a marketing dashboard is essential for your business:
- Customize your dashboard to your needs. A marketing dashboard lets you customize which metrics are displayed. You can then pull what you deem essential from your social media, email, and search metrics to represent them visually on a single page.
- Track the performance of your marketing campaigns. An optimized marketing dashboard will make it easy to know the results of your marketing efforts in real time. It can help you identify how individual metrics are faring vis-a-vis KPIs and metrics. Additionally, you will also understand how well your overall strategies are performing.
- Align team efforts. One of the challenges of business operations is that most employees aren’t always working harmoniously. If everyone is given access to your marketing dashboard, everyone can see what is effective and what is not.
- Empower data-driven decision-making. Seeing how your marketing campaign is performing in real-time allows you to adjust your strategies and tactics on the fly. Before, simple reporting would only tell you how you’ve performed. The purpose of marketing dashboards is to give you the chance to make more informed decisions. As a result, this can reduce marketing campaign costs and improve their impact on your revenue cycle.
While a marketing dashboard can provide a real-time report of your marketing efforts, it is much more than that. It is a decision-making tool. The success of your marketing campaigns depends on your ability to collect and analyze key metrics and KPIs. The best way to do this is by creating a marketing dashboard.
Key Areas to Consider When Choosing the Right Marketing Dashboard Software
A well-designed marketing dashboard can make the job of marketing teams easier. It can simplify data analysis and help improve the accuracy and speed of marketing optimization.
This section will discuss the key areas to consider for marketing dashboard software.
1. Determine the right audience and objectives.
One of the most crucial steps in developing an effective marketing dashboard is to determine the purpose and end-users of the dashboard. Different stakeholders within your business are likely to have different needs.
For example, the Chief Marketing Officer wants top-level information like sales volume. On the other hand, a Social Media Manager is likely to want to see more detailed metrics in the marketing dashboard.
It is essential to identify the stakeholders before jumping to the details of marketing dashboard creation. After all, the most effective dashboards are created after discussions and consultations with end users to determine their requirements.
2. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)
Modern marketers have a treasure trove of performance data at their fingertips. But with so much information, it's easy to get lost in the weeds and miss the bigger picture. They can be your secret weapon to cut through the clutter and focus on the metrics that truly matter.
Instead of cramming every data point you’ve thought of into your dashboards, prioritize the KPIs that align with your business goals. This strategy helps determine priorities and makes your dashboards more engaging and user-friendly.
3. Choose the right data dashboard tool.
When choosing a tool for creating dashboards, marketers have comprehensive options.
For example, Funnel stores your marketing data and visualizes it. If a problem occurs with one of your data points, you can still share your dashboards. You can even share data from Funnel with other tools, such as Looker and PowerBI.
Your choice of marketing dashboard software depends on your own specific needs. It’s also worth investigating each platform's ability to integrate with your business data sources (or data integration platform), the likely costs, and the flexibility to adapt to your evolving business data needs.
4. Integrate your data efficiently.
While many marketing dashboard tools boast direct connections to all your sources, actual effectiveness lies elsewhere. For accurate and insightful dashboards, all that disparate data needs a central hub where it's standardized before reaching your visuals. Imagine comparing apples and oranges – it's impossible to draw meaningful conclusions. By standardizing data, your dashboards become a reliable tool for comparing apples to apples across all marketing channels.
5. Keep it simple and user-friendly
One of the key objectives in designing your marketing dashboard should be to make it as user-friendly as possible to understand. Minimalistic design is a significant part of ensuring that your charts, tables, and visuals aren’t overcrowded. In addition, your dashboard itself should not include too much information that could cause a sense of overwhelm.
6. Enable customization
Allowing users to tailor the marketing dashboard to their needs can improve engagement and help unlock more valuable insights. Designing your marketing dashboard to enable comparisons of channels and date ranges and accommodating deep dives into top-level metrics can empower each stakeholder to explore the data from their unique perspective.
7. Cultivate a feedback loop for constant improvement
Regularly assessing the relevance and suitability of the information in your marketing dashboard is essential. Making small but consistent updates based on internal feedback can help to keep your dashboard aligned with current business needs.
Conclusion
We've equipped you to find the perfect marketing dashboard software. Remember, a well-designed one can be a game-changer for your marketing team, empowering them to make faster, data-driven decisions. However, a dashboard is only beneficial if the data are relevant and accurate. Without a foundation of accurate, timely, high-quality data, your marketing dashboard isn’t practical.
