Three-Point Checklist Before You Embark on CMO Dashboards

As a marketing leader, you need access to marketing performance results expressed the way that you measure your business – across brands, regions, and channels. Which is why, dashboards are especially important to marketing executives, such as CMOs and executive marketers, who have to deep dive into channels, campaigns, KPIs, metrics.

According to the 2017 CMO Survey, only 31.6% CMOs use marketing analytics to make decisions. As analytics technologies continue to improve for business users, the need to have robust marketing dashboards has increased. However, before you build your own dashboards, it is important to remember that your marketing dashboards must serve your business needs and facilitate strategic business decisions.

To simplify your journey before you venture into marketing dashboards, here are three tips you must follow:

1) Align marketing metrics

Before you build your marketing dashboards, it’s important to define metrics and KPIs that are important to you. Having access to actionable data can help you uncover key metrics and enable you to answer business questions that matter most to you. A good metric is one which is actionable, recognizable, transparent, and accessible.

Key takeaway: A marketing dashboard should at a glance show an overall situation report and prepare the viewer for what might be expected. By identifying marketing metrics that indicate the brands ability to generate future cash flow, you can add significant value to your business.

2) Dive deeper

It is highly likely for consumers of your dashboards to have varied reporting needs. Therefore, your dashboards should be developed with the ability to delve deeper within channels, campaigns, product lines, regions etc.

Key takeaway: Besides being customized for specific users and context, a marketing dashboard should be able to answer questions. It should also present essential data, and must allow a smooth navigation throughout.

3) Track time

Your company needs more than just a snapshot of the past, it needs to see what is happening in real-time as well as foresee the future. Marketing dashboards should help you streamline your historical data with the present and the future to make your business more efficient and quick.

Key takeaway: Your marketing dashboard must combine descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analysis into one. In other words, it should describe where you have come from, where you are, and where you have to go.While a good CMO dashboard empowers marketing executives to answer key business questions, a great dashboard gives them the knowledge to make smarter business decisions .

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