Friday, 30 September 2016

Why do efficient dashboards become essential for marketing directors to monitor marketing performance ?

In today’s industries, companies along with consumers, are getting digitalized. Companies’ managers and top management will soon or late have to learn how to make decisions over digital data only. Technological infrastructures, software and analytical tools have made it possible for companies in order to have information about their own performances. At the forefronts of the digital monitoring of perfomance, dashboards have become an essential tool for managers and top management. Today, companies have to deal with more and more data, a lot of content at a high frequency, dashboards are a perfect solution to this evolution issue. Indeed, you have to focus both on the content and the form to make it a reliable decision making tool.

Example of a dashboard

Dashboards can be used on a daily basis as well as monthly or weekly, depending on whom it is destined to. The thing is, efficient dashboards are monitoring tools to those who actually using them. Dashboarding is different than reporting in the sense that reporting is about checking data whereas the aim of dashboarding is to monitor activity. It usually shows numerical data, trends, curves, diagrams, histograms, or tabs about companies’ activity and are visually well organized in a small layout in order to offer a synthetical vision of performance to the readers. This is why a good dashboard is nothing else than one that is adopted by companies’ internal teams. This synthetic vision must be provided in order to facilitate decision making at any hierarchical scale. Those tools enable internal teams to report, analyse and optimize. It is all about communicating in the right way to management, in other words, sending the relevant data at the right person. The reader will have to identify the source of an under/over performance on the dashboard and therefore, will be able to provide active recommandations/actions about marketing optimisation. Dashboards are becoming common in important companies that already deal with data. Indeed, they enable companies to consider their performance compared to a given goal to achieve and also to measure the impact of diverse actions in the quest of that same goal.


ð Here are a few tips to make your digital dashboards become useful tools for the monitoring of your performance.

The content:

Your dashboard must contain clearly defined KPIs, which stands for Key Performance Indicators and are closely related to your global strategic objectives. According to business, you will want to analyse your profit, your costs, your sales by region, employee satisfaction or even the number of clicks on your advertising banner for example. In this sense, dashboards show only the combination of the KPIs you want to look after in a visual way.
KPIs must be the combination between the frequency of the data you are analyzing (weekly, monthly…), its temporality and the point of comparison for your data (what are you comparing your data with?).

The form:

Your dashboard must be presented in a very synthetical way, in order for the reader to see the maximum of relevant content in less time possible. It is the key for an efficient dashboard. Indeed, you have to feel free to use colors and eye-friendly design to make your dashboard easily communicable and operative.
It has to contain useful numbers (percentage, ratio…), visual representation (heat-maps, flows, graphs…) and comments if necessary to analyse and to give sense to your data.


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