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Dr. Andree K. Bates examines whether marketing dashboards are a boost to profitability or a waste of money

By Dr Andree Bates on May 25, 2012

Marketing dashboards are in use in many companies and have been reported by several authors to be able to accomplish one or more of the following:

Align marketing objectives to a company's financial objectives

·      Create organizational alignment within marketing

·      Establish a direct link between spending and profits

·      Create an organization that makes decisions based on hard facts

·      Create transparency

However, a dashboard will not do these things by itself!

Input from the marketing team needs to be included at the very beginning, and once the results are found and incorporated with current knowledge and data, the team must act upon the information. Just like other tools that have come before it, the dashboard can be a seductive solution that is unlikely to work out if it is not fully understood or used effectively. Too often the frustration is that there is no correlation between having a marketing dashboard and improved marketing results.

Marketing, Formula 1-style

A marketing dashboard is a system (usually online) that provides access to important data elements and offers a visualization of marketing performance data. This is to provide marketers with a faster and more frequent appraisal of marketing impact and what needs to be changed.

A marketing dashboard is a little like a Formula 1 team dashboard that analyzes performance as the race is taking place. It shows how to improve performance so you can tweak what you are doing in order to win the race. It alone does not win the race, but it provides vital information that assists the team in changing their activities and actions in order to do so.

It brings to mind a useful analogy: pharmaceutical companies and CRM implementation. CRM promised so much but too few companies found strong results. This was not the fault of the CRM software and data, but was more due to a lack of understanding and appropriate use of them within the companies concerned.

Marketing dashboards, like CRM tools, have on occasion become a hoped-for universal remedy for many who want to manage their marketing activities more effectively. However, if marketers get lazy and decide thinking is not required when designing and utilizing a marketing dashboard, they are gravely mistaken. One cannot afford to be lazy with a dashboard. Although the process of implementing and using a dashboard can result in the benefits mentioned above, it is naive to take those benefits for granted.

What makes a good marketing dashboard

A dashboard is just a tool, albeit a powerful tool. Like any tool, it can be misused or poorly understood. And even the right tool in the wrong hands can be ineffective or, at worst, dangerous. A dashboard is a tool to help you manage your marketing process and assist in the decision making process. When used correctly it should assist in facilitating faster and better decisions that result in sales and profit growth.

The purpose of the dashboard is to improve marketing process performance and is essentially a decision support system. The dashboard can assist marketers in knowing what actions to take and when. A well-constructed dashboard can help you measure, monitor, manage, and improve your marketing and sales processes.

As in all marketing, start with the objectives. Firstly, you need to know what corporate objectives the marketing department has to support and what outcomes marketing will need to create to support those objectives. In addition, you need to ensure that the right attributes have been chosen for monitoring and that they can be monitored, in order to identify whether the chosen strategy and tactics are working. Remember that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts!

There are several steps to ensuring an effective dashboard, including:

·      Connecting marketing activities to business outcomes

·      Deciding what to monitor on the dashboard

·      Identifying the data sources needed to get the data you are using for your monitoring

·      Developing an initial dashboard to pilot

·      Making sure all relevant teams understand what the data in the dashboard is saying and what it means in terms of the extent to which you are meeting your initial objectives

·      Ensuring that you act on the information and change your marketing tactics/strategy in line with what the data shows

·      Measuring the impact on the initial goal on an ongoing basis

They sound easy enough, but they are fraught with difficulty since often the objective is creating a dashboard rather than a business objective that the dashboard should be assisting with. The bottom line is: If you want a useful marketing dashboard, doing the hard work outlined above is critical. Until you get those right, the potential benefits of the dashboard will not be fully realized.

Dr. Andree K. Bates, a regular contributor to eyeforpharma, is CEO of Eularis, which applies analytics to determine the sales impact of marketing programs.

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