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It’s that dreaded time again – time to report on your marketing performance. Are you thinking about calling in sick in the hope that this tedious task will fall on the shoulders of an unlucky colleague? Sure, that’s one option – until next week at least.
Imagine though, strolling into the office without having to stress about losing time crunching numbers. Imagine having the ability to tap into automated reports on your mobile device, tablet, or browser at your own convenience. Having a PPT or PDF delivered directly to your inbox, and having the ability to make decisions around key marketing metrics as well as measure their impact in one single platform. Sounds like a dream right?
If you’re shaking your head in agreeance, you’re not the only one. Many organizations are making great strides towards becoming more data-driven and have applied effective practices and tools to optimize their reporting and decision making, thus freeing their marketers from the vicious cycle of manual reporting. Others, however, have not been as fortunate and are still losing valuable man hours to reporting, which could be put to much better use managing insights and taking action.
There are many marketers who have made this dream a reality by adopting a marketing dashboard solution. So, what is it about performance dashboards that marketers go crazy for?
If your idea of saving time on reporting is compiling screenshots taken of your Google Analytics and social media reports, you’ll be happy to hear that there are options to speeding things up that are less tedious and yield higher quality results. Automate the process. Don’t lose valuable hours compiling reports, or worse, days trapped in Excel building them. Integrate your data directly into a marketing dashboard and your reports will be ready without the need to lift a finger. See, no need to call in sick anymore. Furthermore, scalable dashboard solutions are major time savers for enterprises and large agencies who need to create reports for multiple brands, teams, or clients.
The time saved will allow marketers to strategize and plan actions around their data, thus encouraging them to think creatively and improve their efforts. Also, let’s not forget: as your marketing performance becomes more successful, you’ll find it easier to justify requesting a higher budget from your CMO for marketing actions next quarter.
Digital Marketers are great jugglers. They are constantly creating campaigns, mastering social channels, thinking up content, and most importantly; testing their results to find the most effective avenue to reach their target audience. Each of these initiatives produces data that is vital for the marketer to analyze in order to understand how their work has impacted on results.
However, digital data is sometimes left to be viewed in disparate sources. This only paints a partial picture of how effective their efforts have been. Other marketers may attempt to pull their data into spreadsheets to try to make sense of it, but once again they’re trapped in a manual cycle. Marketers dream about breaking free from this mundane routine with a performance dashboard where they can directly access the metrics they need to build comprehensive, multisource KPIs and data visualizations.
So, say you have multiple campaigns running on various ad servers and your objective is to drive conversions, however, you don’t want to go into each ad server individually to search for these. In a marketing dashboard you could very simply combine your data from these various tools into a comprehensive “Conversion Rate” KPI and then, to help understand performance at campaign level, break the campaigns into more detailed charts or tables to allow for comparison.
It is key that the information you are delivering arrives in a format that is clear and digestible for anyone attempting to take it in. Dashboards, not to be confused with data visualization tools, which are designed to allow analysts to slice and dice data, are built to allow marketers to focus on one thing: performance. Information is laid out in a manner that allows marketers to immediately see how they are performing with objective-based key performance indicators and supporting graphs and tables.
Rather than looking at a mile-long report, dashboards typically serve the information that is most pertinent to the executive viewing it. They are so flexible that information can be organized and shared in accordance with roles and responsibilities to allow individuals to use it in a more powerful way.
Many modern work schedules have marketers in and out of the office, which means they don’t always have time to sit down at their desk before every major decision is made. Rather than searching through spreadsheets for support or making decisions on a whim, they can feel much more confident in their actions if they have access to their data wherever they are.
Communication and collaboration are major contributing factors to turning your insights into actions. However, we speak to many organizations whose ideas and insights get lost within emails, meetings, and chat platforms. When actions don’t come to fruition, however, the value of reporting on marketing metrics is severely diminished. Who wants to work that hard for nothing? Not a truly data-driven marketer.
Fortunately, marketing dashboards with built-in Insight Management™ features allow marketers to have constructive conversations around their data. These platforms enable marketers and analysts alike to analyze, comment, and plan actions in one place. Rather than wondering what changed from one month to the next, actions and thought-processes can be recorded and measured.
Marketers, pinch yourself. This isn’t a dream. There are solutions that allow you to automate your reports, share them, construct comprehensive multisource indicators, access them at your convenience, and most importantly; use them to plan and measure actions!
Have you already made this dream a reality? What other benefits has your organization experienced from adopting a marketing dashboard solution?
Sweetspot Marketing Director. Wakeboarder & travel enthusiast. Communication Studies graduate of Texas State University, San Marcos.
Not Another Dashboard.
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