Do you know if your online advertising is efficient and profitable? Do you measure each of your digital tactics by subjects, platforms and date? Are you making 100% profit from all the reporting data that advertising platforms give you? Do you have an up-to-date, accessible and useful marketing dashboard?
If you can’t answer “Yes” to all of these questions, keep reading!
Why A Dahboard?
A dashboard is the essential tool to understand, measure and increase the profitability of your marketing campaigns! Large companies have made it their [not so] secret weapon, in order to be constantly up to date with their decisions and to see live results. A myth in our society is that only the big guys need it or can afford it. Yet, this is one of the first tools that exploding startups put in place, and we’re not even talking about artificial intelligence startups.
What Are the Concrete Advantages of a Marketing Dashboard?
Profitability
Internet advertising can be expensive and can sometimes take a long time to set up: you have to choose the audience, the format, the content, the objective, the budget, etc. It is therefore essential to be able to measure the efforts put into each platform and each campaign. This helps keep the campaigns working their best, saves costs and therefore increases profitability.
Time
Today, with all the platforms out there – Facebook Business Manager, YouTube Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads, Mail Chimp, etc. – and the number of reports available in each of these tools, it becomes difficult to navigate and to know which data is the most important to monitor. When creating a dashboard, all the data is gathered in one place. You have to make a choice upstream on the KPIs to keep in order to make the tool concise and useful.
Certainty
Having all available data up to date and in one place also makes it possible to make decisions quickly and with more confidence. For some, marketing was the act of detecting the needs of consumers, and thus, facilitating the sale of a product [definition n3 by Eric Vernette]. Today, it is a science that relies on an infinite amount of data: you must be able to understand it to make the most of it and make the right marketing choices for the company.
Aand what Do I Say to Convince My Company?
The list of benefits of a marketing dashboard is very long. Here are some of the arguments you should [not] tell your employer to convince them to invest in the project!
Make the CMO and CFO friends.
To say that we are a company that does BI.
Have beautiful visuals, which move and which are easily exported.
Add a skill to your LinkedIn profile.
Prove to the world that marketers are the lifeblood of war.
Talk about numbers with the confidence of a scientist [and stop making them up because you don’t know where to find them].
Because the best-performing companies do it, why not us?
Steps to Setup a Marketing Dashboard
Ideation Phase
In order to be sure that the implementation of a dashboard will be profitable for the company, it is mandatory to:
- Determine the different data sources and the price for exporting the data. It depends on the costs associated with using the API.
- Define SMART objectives and the resulting KPIs.
- Choose the data, dimensions and measures necessary to monitor the evolution of these KPIs.
- Plan the data architecture: the organization and links between the various tables of multiple data sources.
- Know who will have access, with what settings and for what reason. This will make it possible from the start to know who each page of the dashboard is for and build it accordingly. A chart is chosen based on the metric it presents – a sale, a percentage, etc. – and depending on whom it is presented to.
Launch Phase
The second step is to choose the tool you are going to use. It depends on the data sources, the specialists available in your region and your attachment to one brand or another. In our case, we have a preference for the most popular tools that accept the maximum number of data sources: Google Data Studio and Power BI.
Integration Phase
Either you have employees who will be trained and be able to build the dashboard, or you will need to find an external resource (independent consultant or agency). If in your case, the second solution is the easiest and fastest, do not forget to select an agency in parallel with the tool. Many agencies will also be able to train you to update it on your own.
Test Phase
As with any new technology integration project, be aware that a testing phase is mandatory during or after data integration.
Learning Phase
To be sure that the dashboard will be useful to the maximum number of employees and decision makers, train your team to use the tool and know its advantages. Enter it into your procedures and set up a system of comments in order to improve it. A technological tool must be modifiable over time, so that it follows the growth and needs of the business.
We Can Do It!
Obviously, if we’re telling you about it, it’s because we do it! Contact us to learn more about marketing dashboards, or even just to chat!
