The success of your marketing campaigns depends on your ability to measure performance and make changes. When you know how well your campaigns are running, you can leverage what works and discard what doesn't.
Having a way to track your KPIs in a way that's fast and effective will power your marketing efforts. You need to set up a marketing dashboard to help you get a clear picture of the state of your marketing efforts. A marketing dashboard is a tool that gives you a visual representation of key metrics and performance in a single place.
Using a marketing dashboard offers several clear benefits to your business, it's especially useful for a marketing team to get pertinent information.
Customization: You can create a marketing dashboard to track virtually anything: email marketing, SEO, e-commerce campaigns and more. You can customize it to track any KPI that's important and using appropriate charts.
Knowledge sharing: A dashboard will allow your team or teams to get timely information that will affect their performance. Tracking key metrics will keep teams on the same page and support knowledge sharing.
Informed decision making: Being able to get data easily and processing it fast will make a difference in how you make decisions. A visual dashboard makes it easier to make sense of data which then enables better decision-making.
Instant Visibility: You can set up marketing dashboards that present real-time data on marketing campaigns. This creates instant visibility that can help you make timely decisions.
Time-Saving: A marketing dashboard is a visual tool that uses graphical representations to showcase data. It's especially useful for executives and other decision-makers to get relevant information at a glance and save time.
Motivational Tool: An added benefit of using a marketing dashboard is that it can help motivate employees. Visual representations of progress can make people feel more satisfied and compel them to keep going.
Being able to measure and track campaigns will help you become more productive. You'll also get powerful insights that can boost your business success.
A marketing dashboard offers an appealing visual format that makes decision making faster - which is why every brand should use one. Let’s look at how you can build a marketing dashboard that gives you the right insights.
Setting up a marketing dashboard requires careful planning. Building one without a purpose will not serve your business and can even detract from your campaigns. Here are some of the most important steps to take when building your marketing dashboard.
Choose the right platform
There are several online tools available that will help you create an effective dashboard. You can use a free tool like Google Marketing Platform. The advantage of using it is that it already integrates with many of Google’s products.
For businesses that use Google Analytics and Ads, using its marketing platform makes sense. There are many other platforms that also offer free use of their software. A significant advantage is that you can use pre-made templates that make it easy to set up a dashboard quickly.
Understand your audience
You can set up your marketing dashboard to monitor and track any activity. When setting one up, you need to consider who the audience is. A decision-maker may want a dashboard that measures the performance of key campaigns. Whereas a social media marketer will need analytics that tracks social activities.
One of the first steps you need to take is to understand who your primary audience is for a marketing dashboard. Whether it's the sales team, the customer support staff, or an executive, the dashboard needs to reflect what matters. If you're heading a cross-functional team, then sit down with your team members and prioritize the KPIs that are important. In short, let the audience and their preferences act as guidelines to set up a marketing dashboard.
Determine your goals
When you know who your audience is, you'll have clarity on the goals that matter. If your team or department has several goals, then you may need to prioritize the most important ones.
Trying to manage KPIs for several divergent goals can make your dashboard cluttered. Instead, decide which goals are your priority. You can also set up multiple dashboards for different goals.
Having your goals clearly charted out will help you with the next step: choosing the KPIs to visualize on your dashboard.
Choose the right metrics
When you’ve determined who your audience is and what your goals are, choosing the KPIs to become easier.
The KPIs that you select can reflect the particular marketing strategy you’re following. For example, if you're tracking your SEO performance, some metrics you can track are bounce rates, traffic, backlinks, and other.
For email marketers, open rates, and clicks will be important metrics. Research shows that 60% of marketers use conversion rates as a way to measure the progress of their email marketing campaigns.
When choosing your KPIs, you also need to take the time frame and data sources into consideration. You may want to gather real-time data or get a visual representation of changes taking place over months.
The type of campaign and your goals will help you decide what time frames to use. You also need the best source of your data when setting up your dashboard.
Pick your data source
The main benefit of a marketing dashboard is that it’s a single unified place to track data from different sources. Businesses often have to work with different platforms that offer their own business intelligence tools.
Social media platforms, email marketing service providers, and others have their own marketing analytics platforms. You need a marketing dashboard that brings all these data sources together.
When building your marketing dashboard, compile the key sources of data that you want to include. A dashboard can be especially helpful when you want to track the performance and returns from paid sources.
Design
Marketing dashboards offer you the freedom to create charts and use designs that appeal to you. You'll have color and style options that will allow you to create the best visual board for your needs.
However, businesses often make the mistake of adding too much information and using too many widgets. When setting up your marketing dashboard, remember to focus on simple and effective designs.
A marketing dashboard should provide information that you can understand at a glance. Consider using premade templates that are available on many dashboard tools. There are several ways to display your data.
Comparisons: Depending on your needs, you can compare the performance of different strategies and products. You can also compare changes over time.
Relationships: A marketing dashboard can help you see the relationship between different data points.
Distribution: Use charts to showcase ranges or groupings within specific data
Composition: Understanding the finer data compositions within a larger data group will help you get insights at a granular level
Your final design matters when it comes to conveying relevant information. For example, by comparing different content types, you'll figure out the best content format for your audience. You'll learn that articles with images get 94% more views than one without any visuals. You may notice that videos do better on social media than any other type of content.
Designing your dashboard is essential because it needs to be easy to understand. It should also convey relevant information. A complex and cluttered dashboard will only lead to misinformation and confusion.
Monitor and scale
Once you’ve set up your marketing dashboard, it's important to make changes whenever needed. Over time, you'll be able to understand whether your set-up serves your business or whether you need to add or subtract information.
You may need to redesign your marketing dashboard to reflect more realistic goals. Making changes to time frames, data sources, and design will also help. Building your marketing dashboard is not a one-time activity. You need to keep monitoring whether it’s useful and make changes so that it provides you with timely and accurate information.
Information is power, and this is true in marketing as in any other area. Using a marketing dashboard can simplify your ability to gather and monitor pertinent data.
You'll save time and get clarity from a visual format that conveys substantial information at a glance. We've looked at the reasons why a marketing dashboard is important, and how building one will help you. Use the information provided and create your own visual data dashboard to power your business.