10 ways to make your marketing dashboard great
TRANSCRIPT
ENGAGE, PERSUADE AND DRIVE ACTION WITH
A POWERFUL STORY OF MARKETING PERFORMANCE
10 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR MARKETING DASHBOARD GREAT
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We spend countless hours obsessing over the stories we tell our
customers. We create elaborate briefs planning out what we want our
target audience to think, feel and believe after they see our work. We
hone and perfect the message across every touchpoint.
Yet when it’s time to show an internal audience (like the CEO or CFO)
how marketing is performing, our Shakespearian storytelling skills
evaporate. We pile on the charts, spreadsheets and data points with little
context and few takeaways. “As you can see….” Stop. No one can see.
Yes, marketing is becoming more data-driven. And presenting clean,
accurate data is essential—but it’s not sufficient. Data on its own doesn’t
tell the story of marketing performance. Marketers need to tell the story
of marketing performance. And here’s how to do it.
WE MARKETERS ARE MASTERFUL STORYTELLERS
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1 TAKE CONTROL OF THE MARKETING STORY
Traditionally, marketing has handed off responsibility for marketing
analytics and reporting to IT. The assumption being that if the
marketing data was good, whatever story was buried in that data would
tell itself.
But here’s the thing:
The story doesn’t tell itself.
IT doesn’t really understand marketing.
Marketers these days are under more pressure than ever to tie
marketing activities to business impact.
The emergence of generic data visualization tools and purpose-built
marketing performance management platforms make it easy for
marketers to be the storytellers of their own success.
Given these realities, why continue to entrust IT with the crucial task
of telling the true story of marketing performance and its impact on
the business?
If it all sounds a little daunting, take heart: The more familiar you get with
data and data analysis, the more you realize that in the end, performance
reporting is storytelling. And storytelling is something marketers were
born to do.
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2 PLAN YOUR STORY IN ADVANCE VIA STORYBOARDING
A good marketing dashboard inspires not just understanding, but action.
And not just any action, but the right action. (Think how poorly
explained data typically leaves an audience in a glazed muddle—or
worse, they come to the wrong conclusion and then act based on that!)
Achieving this goal starts by figuring out in advance the story we want
our dashboard to tell. And that means storyboarding.
Write down all the messages you want to convey as single panels in the
storyboard. Post-Its on a wall is a handy choice—you’re going to want
to move the panels around to find an organizing principle, the right
sequence of data points, and perhaps even a story arc (a beginning,
middle and end).
Thinking about your dashboard’s “main characters” can help. Is
your chief character the performance of a product line? A particular
campaign? The new creative direction you took in the second quarter?
Use section breaks to create structure, and, whenever possible,
map your story to familiar marketing frameworks like the buyer’s
journey—show how a particular marketing effort is driving awareness,
engagement and sales (bonus: your dashboard automatically takes on an
omnichannel point of view).
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3 MAKE SURE EVERY CHART ANSWERS A BUSINESS QUESTION
Impressions, likes, clicks, TRPs … such is the life of a marketer down
in the data weeds. But none of these is a strategic metric. None of
these matters to a CEO, CFO or even a CMO. They want to know how
marketing is performing against the strategic objectives of the brand
and the business.
The simple act of making sure every chart in your marketing dashboard
answers a business question goes a long way toward delivering against
this big-picture point of view. It might be accurate to title a chart
Earned-to-Paid Media Ratio, but that same data in a chart titled “Which
campaigns generate the most buzz among consumers?” instantly
conveys a meaningful story.
You can even include whole sections, each devoted to a single business
question and showing a variety of charts to answer it.
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4 ADD CONTEXT VIA COMPARISONS AND BENCHMARKS
Another essential piece of the marketing story (and another one that
leadership loves) is context. How does this result compare to the
previous campaign? To last year as a whole? To industry benchmarks?
Here are some typical comparisons you’ll want to make:
Metric vs. prior period (quarter, month, week)
Metric vs. same time last year (year over year)
Metric vs. target
Metric vs. comparable (something you know to be good and consistent)
Metric vs. industry benchmark
So for example, say the average cost per engagement
for your current campaign is tracking at $2. You might
do some or all of the following:
Compare your $2 cost per engagement to last
quarter’s number, or to the same period last year.
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Show that $2 as a percentage of target—was the goal
to bring cost per engagement down to $3 (big win!) or
$1.50 (a miss)?
Provide comparable metrics—what was the average
cost per engagement over the last three campaigns?
Show how a $2 cost per engagement stacks up to a
relevant industry benchmark.
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5 BRING YOUR DATA TO LIFE WITH IMAGES AND VIDEO
Images and video make your dashboard resonant, engaging and
memorable. You can use whatever you like, but in many cases you’ve
already got just the thing—the creative you used on the campaign. In
fact, the choice of creative is often what drove the very results you’re
reporting—including both in a single, elegant presentation really makes
your marketing story pop.
Some ways to feature images and video in your marketing dashboards:
Rolling out a new campaign. Anchor the story with key imagery and
video atop the campaign dashboard.
Communicating results. Put the campaign creative alongside the
charts and tables.
Comparing the performance of different videos, or overall video
performance across channels. Embed the videos in question next to
the performance data.
Conducting a brand audit. Present images of the many manifestations
of your brand on a single page.
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6 USE A VARIETY OF CHART TYPES
When every chart in your marketing dashboard is the exact … same
… chart … your audience starts to tune out. Change it up. Tell your
marketing story using an appealing variety of data visualizations—line
charts, pie charts, bar charts, scatter plots, even a simple table every
once in a while.
WEAVE IN THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
A great way of saying “don’t just take marketing’s word for it” is to
include quotes from customers across social media. For instance,
embed the campaign hashtag in your dashboard to show a live
streaming view of customer responses to the campaign. Bringing in the
voice of the customer grounds your marketing story in the real world,
which lends weight to your analysis, paints a more complete picture,
and elicits proof points that you couldn’t get any other way.
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8 SHOWCASE YOUR MARKETING EXPERTISE
Your audience not only wants to know what the data says, but what
conclusions you’ve drawn. Use editorial comments, annotations and
callouts to highlight the insights you’ve uncovered and why they
matter. Declare your key takeaways right alongside the data you’re
presenting. Deliver the vital marketing perspective that other groups
lack (we’re looking at you, IT). Don’t just tell the story of marketing
success, own the story of marketing success.
INCLUDE AN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Add an executive summary—a super-condensed version of your
marketing story in a few quick-hitting bullet points. You’ll most likely
generate your summary last, but it should come first in your dashboard.
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10 SHARE YOUR STORY
This is really a two-parter. First, be sure to share your dashboard
with your extended marketing team in order to solicit comments and
inspire collaboration. (Any dashboard platform worth its salt will have
comments functionality.) The most valuable improvements, insights and
ideas for action often spring from this sort of team-wide sharing.
Then, when you’re ready, share your marketing story with the wider
business. Digital is great, because then your audience can easily interact
with the dashboard (you can set permissions to prevent them from
permanently changing anything or messing anything up).
But don’t ignore the power of paper. Make it easy to hit print from the
dashboard, and distribute it as PowerPoint slides or high-resolution
PDFs as well. The more powerful your story of marketing’s impact on
the business, the farther it will tend to travel throughout the marketing
org and beyond, and you want to make that as easy as possible.
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CHECKLIST FOR A GREAT MARKETING DASHBOARDEngage, persuade and drive action with a powerful story of
marketing performance
Storyboard your dashboard in advance.
Make sure every chart answers a business question.
Show how performance compares to previous results and industry benchmarks.
Include images and video.
Use a variety of chart types.
Weave in the voice of the customer.
Add perspective and highlight conclusions with editorial comments, annotations and callouts.
Start the dashboard with an executive summary.
Solicit comments from the marketing team.
Share your dashboard with the wider business.
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ABOUT BECKON
Beckon is omnichannel analytics software for marketing in all its modern
complexity. Our software-as-a-service platform integrates messy marketing
data and delivers rich dashboards and scorecards for cross-channel marketing
intelligence. Built by marketers for marketers, Beckon is the dashboard to the
CMO—best-practice analytics and marketing-impact metrics right out of the box
for ultra-fast time to marketing value. Beckon serves marketers who want to bring
order to chaos, make data-informed optimization decisions, and tell the marketing
story in terms of business impact. Find your strength in numbers with Beckon.
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