Name: It’s Not the Size of the Data
Rating: 3.7 (12 reviews)
Author: Koen Pauwels

What’s in it for me? Learn how to use big data to make better marketing decisions.

Marketing has traditionally been seen as a “soft science,” something that’s best performed using one’s gut rather than one’s head. But in many cases, this intuition-based marketing has lacked direction, or has failed to resonate with the wider goals and desires of companies as a whole. As a result, many marketing departments have become outsiders within their own companies, separated from other departments entirely.

But with new and readily available technologies, all this can change.

These blinks show you how to build a marketing dashboard, enabling you to collect and utilize data that will offer actionable insights on how to make better marketing decisions.

You’ll also learn

how a marketing dashboard differs from a regular dashboard;
how to design one; and
how you can motivate your employees to use it.

Use a dashboard to link marketing to performance.

Imagine you’re driving on the highway. A quick glimpse at your car’s dashboard tells you that you’re driving too fast, and that you’re almost out of fuel. Without having to consider all the complex processes going on underneath the hood of your car, you’re able to make the right decision: slow down and refuel.

To do the same for their business, marketers also need their own dashboard. A marketing dashboard helps link marketing to performance by making data understandable and actionable.

Any company with huge amounts of data about their sales, for instance, would only be able to glean insights from those raw numbers by spending quite a long time examining them. This is rather like taking a stalled car and staring at the parts under the hood, hoping that the problem jumps out at you.

In much the same way that a car dashboard shows a driver the performance indicators she needs to know to get from point A to point B safely and efficiently, with a marketing dashboard, raw information can be summarized clearly using visuals that help you comprehend and make use of the patterns your data reveals.

An informative and visually pleasing dashboard will also help you use your data to keep your marketing decisions accountable and within budget. Studies have shown a long-standing disconnect between marketing operations and a company’s executive agenda; this is likely tied to the way we tend to make marketing decisions instinctively, sticking to what feels right without questioning why.

This lack of reflection often leads to lavish spending, as controlling costs isn’t usually a top priority for marketing departments. It’s here that your marketing dashboard can really make a difference, connecting marketing spending to a company’s financial and strategic plan, helping you monitor campaigns and stay on top of expenses.

If you’re starting to think that a marketing dashboard is rather distinct from a car’s dashboard in its potential and capabilities, well, you’re right! Find out why in the next blink.

Marketing dashboards allow you to monitor performance in the long term.

Dashboards have long been a part of interfaces on our tech devices and services; just think of your Macbook or Tumblr homepage! A dashboard is there to give you a clear overview of what’s going on. In business, your dashboard includes key stats and performance indicators, and the same goes for marketing dashboards.

However, there are two key factors that set marketing dashboards apart.

Design your marketing dashboard to suit your employees and stakeholders.

When you start designing your marketing dashboard, keep in mind who you’re designing it for: your employees!

Get talking to your team members and find out what information they’d like to know to do their jobs better. These are needs that you can translate into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – that is, the metrics that’ll help you measure how effectively your business is progressing toward its goals.

Use colors, timestamps and symbols to make your dashboard legible at a glance.

Imagine if your car dashboard only featured numbers illuminated in red. It’d be pretty hard to discern your fuel status from your indicators while driving! Car dashboards are designed to be easy to read at a glance, and the same should be true for great marketing dashboards. So how can you visualize KPIs with clarity?

For starters, colors are key. By allocating each KPI category its own distinctive color, you can seek out and separate different kinds of information much faster. It helps to use colors in a logical way, too. Dark green might, for instance, be used to display your monetary values; dark red might also be assigned to monetary values, but only those that are negative.

Motivate your employees by communicating and leveraging the benefits of a dashboard.

We all know how tough it can be to get teams to adopt a newly introduced tool. Unfortunately, marketing dashboards, for all their benefits, aren’t immune to this. If you want your employees to really make use of them, you’ve got to motivate them!

With this in mind, the way you introduce them to the dashboard is crucial. Explain to your team why the dashboard is a necessary part of their work, and make clear that the dashboard will help them both monitor the performance of their choices and help them improve their choices later on.

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