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ENGAGE, PERSUADE AND DRIVE ACTION WITH A POWERFUL STORY OF MARKETING PERFORMANCE
10 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR MARKETING DASHBOARD GREAT
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WWW.BECKON.COM [email protected]
WE MARKETERS ARE MASTERFUL STORYTELLERS 3
TAKE CONTROL OF THE MARKETING STORY 4
PLAN YOUR STORY IN ADVANCE VIA STORYBOARDING 6
MAKE SURE EVERY CHART ANSWERS A BUSINESS QUESTION 8
ADD CONTEXT VIA COMPARISONS AND BENCHMARKS 10
BRING YOUR DATA TO LIFE WITH IMAGES AND VIDEO 12
USE A VARIETY OF CHART TYPES 14
WEAVE IN THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER 14
SHOWCASE YOUR MARKETING EXPERTISE 16
INCLUDE AN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 16
SHARE YOUR STORY 18
CONTENTS
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WE MARKETERS ARE MASTERFUL STORYTELLERS.
We spend countless hours obsessing over the stories we tell our customers.
We create elaborate briefs planning out what we want our target audience
to think, feel and believe after they see our work. We hone and perfect the
message across every touchpoint.
Yet when it’s time to show an internal audience (like the CEO or CFO) how
marketing is performing, our Shakespearian storytelling skills evaporate.
We pile on the charts, spreadsheets and data points with little context and few
takeaways. “As you can see ….” Stop. No one can see.
Yes, marketing is becoming more data-driven. And presenting clean, accurate
data is essential—but it’s not sufficient. Data on its own doesn’t tell the story
of marketing performance. Marketers need to tell the story of marketing
performance. And here’s how to do it.
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TAKE CONTROL OF THE MARKETING STORY
Traditionally, marketing has handed off responsibility for marketing analytics
and reporting to IT. The assumption being that if the marketing data was good,
whatever story was buried in that data would tell itself.
But here’s the thing:
• The story doesn’t tell itself.
• IT doesn’t really understand marketing.
• Marketers these days are under more pressure than ever to tie marketing
activities to business impact.
• The emergence of generic data visualization tools and purpose-built
marketing performance management platforms make it easy for marketers
to be the storytellers of their own success.
Given these realities, why continue to entrust IT with the crucial task of telling
the true story of marketing performance and its impact on the business?
If it all sounds a little daunting, take heart: The more familiar you get with data
and data analysis, the more you realize that in the end, performance reporting
is storytelling. And storytelling is something marketers were born to do.
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PLAN YOUR STORY IN ADVANCE VIA STORYBOARDING
A good marketing dashboard inspires not just understanding, but action.
And not just any action, but the right action. (Think how poorly explained
data typically leaves an audience in a glazed muddle—or worse, they come to
the wrong conclusion and then act based on that!) Achieving this goal starts
by figuring out in advance the story we want our dashboard to tell. And that
means storyboarding.
Write down all the messages you want to convey as single panels in the
storyboard. Post-Its on a wall is a handy choice—you’re going to want to move
the panels around to find an organizing principle, the right sequence of data
points, and perhaps even a story arc (a beginning, middle and end).
Thinking about your dashboard’s “main characters” can help. Is your chief
character the performance of a product line? A particular campaign? The new
creative direction you took in the second quarter?
Use section breaks to create structure, and, whenever possible, map your
story to familiar marketing frameworks like the buyer’s journey—show how a
particular marketing effort is driving awareness, engagement and sales (bonus:
your dashboard automatically takes on an omnichannel point of view).
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Aggregate Impressions
Aggregate Engagement
RateUnits Sold
Retention Rate
NPS
Exec Summary
Key takeaway
#3
Key takeaway
#2
Key takeaway
#1
Awareness
Impressions x channel
Impression x channel + campaign
Spend per impression
Paid vs. earned
impressions
Campaign creative
Area chart
Doughnut chart
Stacked bar chart
Creative v1
Creative v2
Engagement
Engagement rate (target vs. actual)
Online display
efficiency
Spend per engagement
Twitter stream
Line over bar chart
Line chart
Scatter plot
Revenue
Sales by market
Revenue x channel
Revenue (planned vs.
actual)
DMA map Clustered column chart
Pie chart100% stacked column chart
Stacked bar chart
Stacked column chart
100% stacked column chart Line over bar
chart
Stacked column chart
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MAKE SURE EVERY CHART ANSWERS A BUSINESS QUESTION
Impressions, likes, clicks, TRPs … such is the life of a marketer down in the data
weeds. But none of these is a strategic metric. None of these matters to a CEO,
CFO or even a CMO. They want to know how marketing is performing against
the strategic objectives of the brand and the business.
The simple act of making sure every chart in your marketing dashboard
answers a business question goes a long way toward delivering against this
big-picture point of view. It might be accurate to title a chart Earned-to-Paid
Media Ratio, but that same data in a chart titled “Which campaigns generate
the most buzz among consumers?” instantly conveys a meaningful story.
You can even include whole sections, each devoted to a single business
question and showing a variety of charts to answer it.
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ADD CONTEXT VIA COMPARISONS AND BENCHMARKS
Another essential piece of the marketing story (and another one that leadership
loves) is context. How does this result compare to the previous campaign? To
last year as a whole? To industry benchmarks?
Here are some typical comparisons you’ll want to make:
• Metric vs. prior period (quarter, month, week)
• Metric vs. same time last year (year over year)
• Metric vs. target
• Metric vs. comparable (something you know to be good and consistent)
• Metric vs. industry benchmark
So for example, say the average cost per engagement for your current
campaign is tracking at $2. You might do some or all of the following:
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Compare your $2 cost per engagement to last
quarter’s number, or to the same period last year.
Show that $2 as a percentage of target—was the
goal to bring cost per engagement down to $3
(big win!) or $1.50 (a miss)?
Provide comparable metrics—what was the
average cost per engagement over the last
three campaigns?
Show how a $2 cost per engagement stacks
up to a relevant industry benchmark.
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BRING YOUR DATA TO LIFE WITH IMAGES AND VIDEO
Images and video make your dashboard resonant, engaging and memorable.
You can use whatever you like, but in many cases you’ve already got just the
thing—the creative you used on the campaign. In fact, the choice of creative is
often what drove the very results you’re reporting—including both in a single,
elegant presentation really makes your marketing story pop.
Some ways to feature images and video in your marketing dashboards:
• Rolling out a new campaign. Anchor the story with key imagery and
video atop the campaign dashboard.
• Communicating results. Put the campaign creative alongside the
charts and tables.
• Comparing the performance of different videos, or overall video
performance across channels. Embed the videos in question next to
the performance data.
• Conducting a brand audit. Present images of the many manifestations
of your brand on a single page.
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USE A VARIETY OF CHART TYPES
When every chart in your marketing dashboard is the exact … same … chart …
your audience starts to tune out. Change it up. Tell your marketing story using
an appealing variety of data visualizations—line charts, pie charts, bar charts,
scatter plots, even a simple table every once in a while.
WEAVE IN THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
A great way of saying “don’t just take marketing’s word for it” is to include
quotes from customers across social media. For instance, embed the
campaign hashtag in your dashboard to show a live streaming view of
customer responses to the campaign. Bringing in the voice of the customer
grounds your marketing story in the real world, which lends weight to your
analysis, paints a more complete picture, and elicits proof points that you
couldn’t get any other way.
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SHOWCASE YOUR MARKETING EXPERTISE
Your audience not only wants to know what the data says, but what
conclusions you’ve drawn. Use editorial comments, annotations and callouts
to highlight the insights you’ve uncovered and why they matter. Declare your
key takeaways right alongside the data you’re presenting. Deliver the vital
marketing perspective that other groups lack (we’re looking at you, IT). Don’t
just tell the story of marketing success, own the story of marketing success.
INCLUDE AN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Add an executive summary—a super-condensed version of your marketing
story in a few quick-hitting bullet points. You’ll most likely generate your
summary last, but it should come first in your dashboard.
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SHARE YOUR STORY
This is really a two-parter. First, be sure to share your dashboard with
your extended marketing team in order to solicit comments and inspire
collaboration. (Any dashboard platform worth its salt will have comments
functionality.) The most valuable improvements, insights and ideas for action
often spring from this sort of team-wide sharing.
Then, when you’re ready, share your marketing story with the wider business.
Digital is great, because then your audience can easily interact with the
dashboard (you can set permissions to prevent them from permanently
changing anything or messing anything up).
But don’t ignore the power of paper. Make it easy to hit print from the
dashboard, and distribute it as PowerPoint slides or high-resolution PDFs
as well. The more powerful your story of marketing’s impact on the business,
the farther it will tend to travel throughout the marketing org and beyond, and
you want to make that as easy as possible.
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ABOUT BECKON
To grow your brand, you need integrated, unbiased data and insights you
can trust. You need Beckon, The Source of Truth for Marketing™. Beckon’s
rock-solid data management and real-time marketing intelligence power
better, faster decisions that let you do more with every marketing dollar.
LET’S TALK
Want to learn more? Get in touch at [email protected]—we’d love
to connect.