10 Ways to Make Your Marketing Dashboard Great · campaign hashtag in your dashboard to show a live...

ENGAGE, PERSUADE AND DRIVE ACTION WITH A POWERFUL STORY OF MARKETING PERFORMANCE

10 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR MARKETING DASHBOARD GREAT

2

WWW.BECKON.COM [email protected]

WE MARKETERS ARE MASTERFUL STORYTELLERS 3

TAKE CONTROL OF THE MARKETING STORY 4

PLAN YOUR STORY IN ADVANCE VIA STORYBOARDING 6

MAKE SURE EVERY CHART ANSWERS A BUSINESS QUESTION 8

ADD CONTEXT VIA COMPARISONS AND BENCHMARKS 10

BRING YOUR DATA TO LIFE WITH IMAGES AND VIDEO 12

USE A VARIETY OF CHART TYPES 14

WEAVE IN THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER 14

SHOWCASE YOUR MARKETING EXPERTISE 16

INCLUDE AN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 16

SHARE YOUR STORY 18

CONTENTS

3


WE MARKETERS ARE MASTERFUL STORYTELLERS.

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.

4


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.

1

5


6


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).

2

7


Aggregate Impressions

Aggregate Engagement

RateUnits Sold

Retention Rate

NPS

Exec Summary

Key takeaway

#3

Key takeaway

#2

Key takeaway

#1

Awareness

Impressions x channel

Impression x channel + campaign

Spend per impression

Paid vs. earned

impressions

Campaign creative

Area chart

Doughnut chart

Stacked bar chart

Creative v1

Creative v2

Engagement

Engagement rate (target vs. actual)

Online display

efficiency

Spend per engagement

Twitter stream

Line over bar chart

Line chart

Scatter plot

Revenue

Sales by market

Revenue x channel

Revenue (planned vs.

actual)

DMA map Clustered column chart

Pie chart100% stacked column chart

Stacked bar chart

Stacked column chart

100% stacked column chart Line over bar

chart

Stacked column chart

8


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.

3

9


10


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:

4

11


Compare your $2 cost per engagement to last

quarter’s number, or to the same period last year.

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.

12


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.

5

13


14


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.

6

7

15


16


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.

8

9

17


18


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.

10

ABOUT BECKON

To grow your brand, you need integrated, unbiased data and insights you

can trust. You need Beckon, The Source of Truth for Marketing™. Beckon’s

rock-solid data management and real-time marketing intelligence power

better, faster decisions that let you do more with every marketing dollar.

LET’S TALK

Want to learn more? Get in touch at [email protected]—we’d love

to connect.

10 Ways to Make Your Marketing Dashboard Great · campaign hashtag in your dashboard to show a live...

Documents

Transcript of 10 Ways to Make Your Marketing Dashboard Great · campaign hashtag in your dashboard to show a live...