The Importance of Marketing Dashboards

The Root of Marketing Effectiveness

What separates Best-in-Class Performing companies from the competition is a strong commitment to the marketing and sales process as it correlates to marketing dashboards. Companies that emphasize reporting are able to gain deeper insight into key performance areas and ROI, and are able to better align their marketing processes while accelerating the performance of Sales.

In order to uncover the data and insights on customers, the marketing and sales process has to be measured. This is where marketing dashboards come in. They allow for a timeline to be built through visually displayed dashboards that track performance in real-time and stage-by-stage.

Sophisticated marketers understand that key metrics aren’t a factor of the net total of new leads accumulated through various campaign executions, but instead they are a product of conversion rates as gained from insights into the marketing process as a whole.

The Conversion Rate

Marketing campaign effectiveness is measured by the single most important metric – the conversion rate. The conversion rate itself is measured by the percentage of total leads that convert at each stage of the marketing funnel and sales pipeline. The conversion rate is a key metric because it allows marketing to understand the overall effectiveness of specific campaign efforts while allowing marketing to gather key insights in an effort to pinpoint which sales pipeline stages aren’t yielding the kind of results we really want to see.

By focusing on the conversion rate in their marketing dashboards, marketers are able to define the buying process for consumers by creating a roadmap that works to get buyers from one sales pipeline stage to another until they have reached Won business. While prospects are shopping around to select the perfect vendor, marketers, in turn, are focusing on improving performance by measuring conversion rates at each stage through their marketing dashboards.

Marketing dashboards also hold key metrics as they pertain to various branding efforts and the direct alignment of these efforts to company goals. Best-in-Class Performing companies manage the effectiveness of their brand initiatives from funnel-based insights as they are gathered from various brand awareness campaigns that have somehow impacted consumer behavior at each sales pipeline stage.

By using the sales funnel to assess and understand what perceptions and behaviors are derived at each stage for specifically targeted consumers, we are better able to learn what kind of needs consumers are looking to meet. It is important to break away from traditional thinking on how to manage the performance of our campaigns as they pertain to specific metrics that we’ve gained from various testing efforts and as a result, appear on our marketing dashboards. By putting the right metrics in place, we are able to be more effective at measuring and managing performance.

Are you using marketing dashboards to improve your campaign efforts?