Published December 2004

Marketing dashboard
keeps business on track

Just as the dashboard of your automobile gives you information about your engine, a marketing dashboard keeps you apprised of how your marketing machine is performing.

You wouldn’t hit the road without first checking to see if you had enough fuel, or navigate from the freeway to side streets without monitoring your speed — right? Yet many businesses drive their marketing vehicles without the same critical information.

A marketing dashboard customarily refers to a software program that allows you to manage lead and sales data. I’m referring to the concept of establishing, monitoring and managing key marketing and sales metrics as a means of improving your marketing results.

William Moult, former president of the Marketing Science Institute, preaches, “There is a need to draw the connections between finance, marketing, customer attitudes and behavior. A dashboard translates complex measures into a simple and coherent set of information that allows marketers to assess the current situation and act quickly.”

Essentially, you want to view, in a graphic format, key marketing and sales outcomes relative to resources expended.

If you’ve ever viewed a Web stats page (graphical account of site visitors, page views, keywords, browser referrals, etc.), they are usually presented in a “dashboard” format.

So how do you set up your company’s marketing dashboard? You can either buy a software program (Google “marketing dashboard”) or build your own using a spreadsheet. Here are three steps to building your own:

• Step 1: Metrics — Determine the key marketing and sales metrics and their time frames for measurement. Metrics include: sales revenue, customer distribution, market share, gross profit, response to advertising, benchmarking your performance against competitors or industry trends, cost of customer acquisition and retention rates. I suggest including both short- and long-range indicators.
• Step 2: Format — Create a spreadsheet to enter metric data (on an ongoing and real-time basis). Use a separate tab (or worksheet) for each metric measured — but keep all of the data within a single file, making it easier to review and compare. Using MS Excel, go to “Help” and type “chart” if you don’t know how to enter data in a chartable format.
• Step 3: Report — On a regular basis, chart the data and analyze results and trends. This information will help you make better-informed marketing decisions. Your dashboard will gauge what’s working and what’s not, guide budget reallocations based on results and define which products and customers contribute most to the bottom line.

Dashboards hold marketing accountable. Some companies are using dashboards to assess test-market experiments and simulations before making major marketing investments.

Just as with an automobile dashboard, you want all of the information right in front of you — in a simple, explicit format — so you can keep your eyes on the road ahead.

Setting up and monitoring your marketing and sales dashboard may very well keep you from running out of gas or blowing a gasket in the middle of a campaign.

Andrew Ballard, president of Marketing Solutions Inc. in Edmonds, develops brand leadership strategies for businesses and teaches strategic marketing through Edmonds Community College. He can be reached at 425-672-7218 or by e-mail to andrew@mktg-solutions.com.

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