Using a marketing dashboard has became very trendy, but everyone imagines it’s expensive, complicated to develop, and one is missing resources to manage the project. We hear a lot about big data, predicitve data, and scary data. But,

A marketing dashboard does not need to be complicated, time consuming to implement and costly to be effective !

Every marketing team generates data, but is it necessary to use it all at once ? Nonsense! Let’s push back the pressure to analyze everything together and NOW.  And rather wonder: which questions should I answer first? Where do we have doubts, where are we in trouble ?

And if you have not yet put a dashboard in place,  it’s a good time to think about it. 2016 is ending and analysing some of your past activities will give you the visibility needed to improve your marketing contribution in 2017:

Which of the below topics is challenging you more ? Which creates doubt among your salespeople ? Do you think there is room for improvement, and if yes, where?

• Website (dynamic example at the end of the article)
• Lead gen
• Customer references
• Content marketing
• Events / Conferences
• …

… So many programs to analyse, by product, region, country, customer … the scope of the possibilities is immense and will depend on your organization.

To begin with, as always, simplicity and efficiency will be the keywords: Do the right thing, and do the things right !

Think about your audience.

Unless they are extremely simple to understand, too many indicators will prove counterproductive and will create an impression of complexity. If you have multiple objectives, use multiple pages. And do not use indicators that no one understands except you 🙂

If the data does not speak for itself, a dashboard should.

Use actionable indicators.

When you are driving your car and a light comes on, you have to make a decision. This is also the goal of your marketing dashboard: alert you. Should we continue? Change direction?

Share and collaborate

A dashboard must live to gain credibility and become unavoidable. Be transparent, share, share and share. It will become the reference, the source of truth .

An attractive look

“Design is not just for designers.” A few basic principles of design will improve attractiveness and visibility.

Piloting your marketing activity has never been so easy, so why not try a “simple” marketing dashboard ?

Try the 2016 website dashboard example below. Please note the integration of dynamism is not always optimal on the blog, and  the visual rendering is sometimes different. More dashboards here