Drive Your Business with Marketing Dashboards [13]

[You can drive your business or be driven out of business.  B.C. Forbes]

                               Reprinted with permission of InetSoft Technology, Piscataway, NJ, www.inetsoft.com

The late Ed Koch, a former New York City mayor, always asked, “How am I doing?” Marketers — as well as government leaders — need to know if their “customers” are happy.

Perhaps you head the marketing operations for your company and want to get a better handle on customer metrics. You heard about the idea of a marketing dashboard at a recent trade association meeting and think that may solve your problem. How should you proceed? What should be on your dashboard? 

Progressing beyond a single item to monitor the effectiveness of business performance, leading organizations often use a set of key metrics called marketing dashboards to understand their key performance indicators.

Just as an automobile dashboard captures critical driving information such as speed, distance, fuel levels, vehicle and engine temperature, navigation and so on, a marketing dashboard summarizes pertinent information on branding, channels, customer contact, promotion, sales performance, service profitability, the web, and customer value. 

Consider the Benefits

Some specific benefits of using dashboards include the following: business intelligence, trend tracking, measuring efficiencies or inefficiencies, real-time updates, visuals (charts, graphs, maps and tables), customized reporting of performance and aligning goals and strategies with results. Major downside considerations include the cost, time and the talent needed to administer marketing dashboards.

The main value of the dashboard framework is that it consists of a multitude of practical information that is current, accessible and easy-to-understand. Dashboards can be designed for top C-level executives as well as the managers working in the trenches.

The above graphic illustrates an example of an executive marketing dashboard. It features the following metrics: revenues and returns, monthly sales trends, 5-year order history, geographic sales (by cities and states), and employee sales performance. 

Decide What to Measure

What should you measure? The spectrum of opinion varies widely from a single metric such as the Net Promoter Score to 50 or more performance indicators. Just as we don’t want to be overwhelmed with our automotive dashboard, keeping the marketing dashboard simple helps measure what matters and aligns with business objectives. That said, here’s a good starting point to consider in choosing 5 to 10 key performance indicators that may include the following measures:

• Financial: revenues, contribution margins, turnover ratios, profitability
• Competitive: market share, share of advertising/promotional budget 
• Consumer behavior: market penetration, customer engagement, customer loyalty
• Consumer intermediate: brand recognition, customer satisfaction, purchase intention
• Channel: distribution level, intermediary profits, service quality
• Innovativeness: new products launched, the percentage of annual revenue from new products
• Customer value: process metrics, customer retention, customer lifetime value (CLV), RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) 

Realize that doing business today requires a new level of accountability for performance. Superior customer value means knowing customers’ behaviors and buying patterns.

Metrics are an important part of the strategic marketing process to understand: (1) How successful the organization is now; (2) What it needs to accomplish to become even more successful in the years ahead.

Smart marketing managers will embrace this challenge and use metrics as a planning tool to improve business strategies. How about you?

This blog post is the 8th in a series extracted from Superior Customer Value – Finding and Keeping Customers in the Now Economy, 4^th Ed. (2019, Routledge Publishing/ Taylor & Francis). For further information contact Art Weinstein at artweinstein9@gmail.com, 954-309-0901, www.artweinstein.com