If you don’t have the correct information, your decisions will be based more on intuition and instinct than facts. This risky approach must be avoided at all costs.
How can you get the information you need to make these critical decisions? It is crucial to success that you have the information in an easily accessible and understandable format. A dashboard is, therefore, invaluable.
What is a Dashboard?
Stephen Few, the author of Design Information Dashboard, defines a dashboard in this way: “a visual display that shows the most important data needed to accomplish one or more goals; it is consolidated and displayed on a single monitor so information can be viewed at a glance.”
A well-designed dashboard summarizes data in a graphic format and alerts the user to performance values that are significantly higher or lower than expected. You can create a multi-level dashboard for performance management and reporting once you have the metrics data and analytical. This article focuses on two of the three building blocks, namely data and analytics.
Many marketing organizations are aware of the importance of a marketing dashboard. Many marketing organizations have reporting features within their CRM, campaign management, and marketing automation systems. These reports provide transactional data, but they do not connect marketing activities to business impact. This is one of the main functions of a dashboard.
Continue reading if you would like to know how to communicate marketing’s value to the organization and make strategic changes.
How to Create an Actionable Dashboard
Accountability is the key to making better decisions. The performance of marketing must be tracked, measured, and reported over time. It should also be adjusted as needed. Accountability is about monitoring and reporting. Marketing reporting usually takes the form of a dashboard.
Dashboards are only effective if they’re tied to an organized action process. They need to do more than measure marketing. They should be used to encourage strategic decisions and allow course adjustments.
A good dashboard shows Marketing’s alignment with the business and its contribution to it. It also demonstrates Marketing’s ability to achieve performance targets in terms of time, cost, and results.
You will need the ability to perform appropriate analytics in order to create the dashboard. You need data to perform analytics.
Building block: Data
Many organizations today do not face the problem of acquiring data. Everyone is affected by information overload. It’s important to get the essential information without being overwhelmed by useless information.
It is best to align your marketing activities with business outcomes so that you can concentrate on the metrics that are important to you and to the rest of your leadership team. The dashboard is built around these outcomes and metrics. The dashboard should be based on these outcomes and metrics and demonstrate how Marketing has been able to move the needle.
To get the right answers, you must have the data to do the job. Data management and access is a major challenge for many companies when it comes to adopting metrics.
Data accuracy, consistency, and integrity are problems that many organizations face. The sheer volume and variety of data further complicate consistency and accuracy. You will need to solve this problem before you put your dashboard in production. You can use your data to create a dashboard and perform analytics.
Building block: Analytics
A Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services study on 930 companies in different industries around the world found that while businesses believe they use analytics to help make decisions, only one in four organizations thinks it has been very effective.
Although more than half the companies surveyed said that they heavily rely on data and metrics for making decisions, many acknowledged that intuition and experience in business still play a major role in decision-making.
Tom Davenport and Don Cohen presented their findings in 2005 on the use of analytics to gain a competitive edge. Their work was published in the well-known Competing On Analytics: The Science of Winning by Davenport and Harris (2007). The book discusses the ways in which high-performing companies use advanced quantitative and statistical analysis, as well as predictive modeling, to develop their competitive strategies.
Marketing professionals are still challenged by analytics. Marketers often ask us three questions about the topic.
- What does analytics mean?
- What are the requirements for success in analytics?
- What can Marketing do with analytics?
Answering the first question is as simple as using a definition that everyone knows. The term analytics refers to algorithms or advanced techniques (including mathematical ones) that are applied to large volumes of data in order to provide useful and actionable insights. Data analysis is a key component of business analytics. It helps to guide decisions and addresses issues and strategies. Businesses can use analytics insights to optimize their internal processes, reduce the time it takes to solve problems, and make decisions.
While analytics cannot replace experience or knowledge, it can provide valuable insights and nuance. Answering the first question also answers the third: Marketers use data analytics to transform it into actionable insights to drive customer strategies, optimize marketing efforts, and improve marketing.
You can create your dashboard once you have all your data, metrics, and analytics. We often use the test-and-learn approach to create a dashboard.
- Create an alpha version and start with a test. You’ll learn a great deal about your analytics, data, and metrics capabilities in this step.
- Fill in the gaps and create a Beta version. Share this version with key stakeholders and ask for their feedback.
- You should adjust and move into a formal pre-production phase. This is the time to start thinking about adopting processes, developing internal skills, automating data feeds, and evaluating dashboard and business intelligence software.