10 ways to make your marketing dashboard great

ENGAGE, PERSUADE AND DRIVE ACTION WITH

A POWERFUL STORY OF MARKETING PERFORMANCE

10 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR MARKETING DASHBOARD GREAT

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WWW.BECKON.COM [email protected]

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.

LEARN MORE

Contact us for a complimentary consultation to find out how Beckon can help

you better demonstrate the marketing contribution at your organization.

[email protected]




10 ways to make your marketing dashboard great

Marketing