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Just as your team strategy requires ongoing fine tuning, maintenance, and care, your marketing dashboard should also be checked regularly for potential improvements. Skipping regular revisions could adversely impact your team when you least expect it.
Maintenance is a continuous process that is sometimes underestimated. In this post, we’ll discuss a few simple steps to ensure your marketing data is up-to-date and relevant for all stakeholders.
To get started, we recommend collecting feedback from your audience. They will be your best counselors. Their familiarity with both their dashboards, as well as company objectives, will help them to spot errors or areas for improvements that will boost overall understanding of reports.
Take the opportunity to consider individual and team needs in order to ensure the dashboards are delivering relevant information to each role that specifically answers their performance questions. The more relevant and tailored the solution is, the easier it will be for stakeholders to find value in the solution and use it to make wiser decisions.
Are labels, dates, headlines, KPIs, and charts all clearly distinguished? Take the necessary time to evaluate your dashboard and ensure it is properly formatted and readable. After all, sometimes the details make all the difference. Use the following tips to ensure your presentation is in order:
Go the extra mile to make sure your dashboard is as aesthetically pleasing as it is insightful. Personalize it to include corporate logos and colors. Branded backgrounds and colors can help provide familiarity, however, be careful not to overpower your data by applying distracting background images or bold color choices.
Don’t stop there, including logos in place of KPI names for easily recognizable platforms/products/brands/etc. can help bring your dashboard to life. For example, metrics showing performance across specific social networks can easily be spotted by applying the network’s icon.
Labeling
Make sure you’ve abbreviated or simplified metrics and dimensions appropriately to save space and improve readability. For example, shorten or properly describe: long dates, campaign names, URLs, etc. E.g. switch ‘September 2018’ to ‘2018 Sep’ for quicker understanding. Just be sure the abbreviations are easily recognized or clearly explained in the dashboard glossary. Insufficient labels can make it tricky to interpret charts and make visual associations.
Quality assuranceWe might be stating the obvious, but an important element of regular reporting audits is confirming that data is properly updated and accurate. Be especially aware of potential lapses in data refreshes where manually uploaded files are required. While automated data sources shouldn’t pose too much of a threat, human involvement may lead to errors or delays. In all cases, it is useful to set up automated alerts for when data is not received as expected or is not properly processed by your reporting solution.
If you’re dependent on the input of third parties or your team, you might need some extra time to gather all the required information. In these scenarios, building delays into your dashboard updates for known postponements, and sharing annotations about the expected time of arrival of updated data, can help manage user expectations.
Be sure to work regular check-ups into your schedule in order to ensure your marketing dashboard is quickly and efficiently providing useful information to all who view it. The more tuned it is, the more likely users are to adopt it and have it at hand to make wiser, data-backed decisions.
Is your marketing dashboard in-tune? Let us know your tools and tips for maintaining an insightful dashboard solution.
Product Marketing, graduated with Marketing and Advertising degree at Budapest Business School, Hungary. Interested in product adoption, social media, UX design and interpersonal communication.
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