Deploying marketing campaigns over multiple channels boosts visibility and increases brand awareness amongst your target audience. What follows is a wealth of customer data based on their interactions with your campaigns.
Most marketers falter at the crucial next step: using this customer data to drive marketing efforts. They measure the performance of campaigns over different channels separately and miss out on insights that would boost their marketing efforts across channels. Using a sales and marketing dashboard to visualize marketing data from multiple channels in one place can solve this issue.
Table of Contents:
- Dashboards for Marketing: What are they?
- Five Reasons to use Dashboards for Marketing
- To Gain Customer Insights from Marketing Data
- To Reduce the Time Spent on Reporting
- To Make Data-backed Sales and Revenue Predictions
- To Assist With Pipeline Planning
- To Democratize Data Visibility
Dashboards for Marketing: What are they?
A marketing dashboard integrates data from different MarTech tools and presents a comprehensive view of marketing efforts in an easy-to-understand format. It also helps you recognize trends from the data and generate detailed reports.
Marketers use sales and marketing dashboards to generate custom reports for various campaigns and share the progress of their marketing efforts with sales teams and C-suite executives. And while these alone are good reasons to use sales and marketing dashboards, here are five more reasons to start using them.
Five Reasons to use Dashboards for Marketing
1. To Gain Customer Insights from Marketing Data
Personalized marketing efforts are known to improve sales conversions. So, you’re likely already peering through marketing data, looking to gain customer insights from it.
A marketing dashboard centralizes customer data from various channels and integrates it with CRM data. It helps you recognize customer behavior patterns based on campaign interactions more accurately than manual methods. The best part? The customer data gets updated automatically. So, you do not have to return to customer records and update them to ensure accuracy.
2. To Reduce the Time Spent on Reporting
How much time are you spending on gathering and analyzing marketing metrics? According to a study by PHD and WARC, probably more than you think. The study revealed that marketing reporting was the most carried out function by marketers, and about 88% of those surveyed were doing it regularly. Add to it metrics from multiple channels and campaigns, and you’re most likely spending hundreds of hours sifting information monthly.
A marketing campaign dashboard sorts through campaign data and filters relevant information. It then analyzes this data to generate reports and actionable insights. In simple terms, it automates reporting for you.
Today, you can use different marketing dashboards based on the data you want to visualize or create custom dashboards. Here are a few dashboards typically used by marketing and sales teams.
- Marketing Campaign Dashboard
- Marketing Analytics Dashboard
- Social Media Dashboard
3. To Make Data-backed Sales and Revenue Predictions
If you’re a marketing or sales professional, you’re also spending the bulk of your time planning campaigns, forecasting ROIs on campaigns, and communicating budgets with stakeholders. Unfortunately, a lot of this is wasted time, given over 50% of sales leaders did not have high confidence in forecasting accuracy at all.
Campaign performance dashboards for marketing reduce the time you spend performing these activities and help with accurate forecasting. They recognize patterns in historical data and generate trend reports you can use to make data-backed predictions in real-time. They also display metrics one would miss out on while sifting through data manually. This makes prediction quick and accurate and saves valuable time.
4. To Assist With Pipeline Planning
The two main components to efficient pipeline planning are knowing the estimated sales targets and the total pipeline volume you will need to achieve those sales. As a seasoned professional, you’d know that arriving at an accurate estimate of the latter is easier said than done.
Marketing dashboards not only show you campaign KPIs, trends, and customer information, but they also show you campaign details like the number of leads and opportunities at every sales cycle stage and their conversion rate. With these details, you can estimate the total number of leads you’d need at every stage of the sales funnel accurately. This makes pipeline planning a breeze and sales targets tangible.
5. To Democratize Data Visibility
Converting leads to paying customers is a joint effort of the sales and marketing teams. And in the B2B space, it requires targeted marketing and timely sales. Sure, both teams need to be in sync. But they must also have visibility into the efforts of the other team.
A marketing cloud dashboard helps marketing and sales teams share data from the entire customer journey. It pulls data from all tools and platforms included in the marketing cloud to offer a holistic view of every buyer’s journey.
Besides, teams can customize dashboard views and show relevant information to different parties. For instance, if a marketing team were to share a dashboard with a sales team, they would only view key metrics, relevant customer information, and behavioral insights needed to convert a sale.
Whereas, if a sales team presented their dashboard for campaign performance over a quarter, they would customize the view to show a high-level summary.
Marketing dashboards not only make data accessible to parties, but they are customizable to ensure that the parties only view the relevant information.
Over to You
Once you’ve decided to use marketing dashboards, the next step is to choose the right one. Remember that the ‘right’ marketing dashboard will change depending on the data you’re trying to showcase and the stakeholder you share it with. You can ask the following three questions to ensure you get it right.
- What is the purpose of sharing the marketing dashboard?
- What kind of data should the dashboard contain?
- What are the business goals the dashboard will help with?
