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1. How To Guide
Implementing Effective Marketing Dashboards
Executive Summary:
Measuring marketing performance has become a top priority for almost
every organization, yet most do not have a comprehensive system in
place.
Marketing Dashboards provide a high-level snapshot of the most critical
metrics that relate to business performance.
Benefits of implementing a Marketing Dashboard include:
 Ability to Measure Marketing Effectiveness/ROI
 Improved Visibility for Senior Management
 Better Allocation of Resources
This report will define Marketing Dashboards, highlight their benefits,
and provide high-level Best Practices for establishing an integrated
performance measurement system.
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2. 2
Table of Contents Page
Introduction 3
What are Marketing Dashboards? 4
Benefits of Marketing Dashboards 4
Implementation Best Practices 5
Conclusion 12
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3. 3
Introduction
Over the past 10 years there has been a distinctive shift in Marketing
activities; budgets are only being allocated to investments that can
produce measurable returns, such as sales support and lead generation.
In a time of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, repeatable controls, processes,
and policy & procedures, have been implemented to ensure
accountability.
This cultural shift is spreading into Marketing as senior executives have
witnessed increased efficiency & effectiveness by standardizing,
measuring, and benchmarking, key metrics in functions like Finance,
I/T, Sales, and Operations.
Structured processes and analytics are new for most Marketing
departments, so it is no wonder that in a recent CMO Council Survey,
Marketing Performance Measurement was highlighted as a significant
priority by over 90% of the companies. Strikingly, less than 14% of
these companies reported having any type of comprehensive system to
measure Marketing. Those who did have systems in place significantly
outperformed their competitors in revenue growth, market share, and
profitability.
Clearly, it is essential that Marketing professionals learn the Marketing
Performance Measurement discipline if they are to survive. No longer is
it acceptable to provide gut-feel estimates of the impact of marketing
programs. Results must be measured.
A simple approach to measuring performance is implementing a
“Marketing Dashboard.” This report will define Marketing Dashboards,
highlight their benefits, and provide high-level Best Practices for
implementing an integrated performance measurement system. Before
implementing any MPM solution, be sure to read our summary, “Get
Ready to Measure Marketing Performance” and complete the
Dashboard Readiness Assessment. If you are already measuring
your marketing performance, use our Marketing Measurement
Maturity Assessment to benchmark your strengths & weaknesses and
to identify areas for improvement.
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4. 4
What are Marketing Dashboards?
Marketing Dashboards are comprised of the most vital diagnostic and
predictive marketing metrics, structured so that executives can quickly
identify trends in performance.
Typically, Marketing Dashboards have 3-5 key metrics in each of the
following categories:
 Customer
 Product
 Brand
 Channels
 Efficiency
 Organizational Development
 Environment (macro-economic)
Once the key metrics have been established to highlight performance for
that aspect of marketing, data can be sorted by: geography, business
unit, markets, or any other relevant perspective.
Benefits of Marketing Dashboards
There are numerous reasons why you should consider improving your
performance measurement system for marketing.
Some of the key benefits are:
 Development of a Performance-Driven Culture
 Increased Visibility for Senior Executives & Board
 Ability to Demonstrate Effectiveness & ROI
 Justification of Marketing Budget & Spending
 Improved Sales & Demand Generation
 Better Allocation of Department Resources
 Financial Risk Mitigation of Future Investments
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5. 5
Implementation Best Practices
Following are the 7 key stages of implementing a Marketing Dashboard:
1. Discuss Project with Steering Committee
2. Assemble a Project Team & Complete Project Plan
3. Review Data Sources & Identify Gaps
4. Select Critical Performance Metrics
5. Build a Framework for Measuring Results
6. Develop a Brand Scorecard
7. Select a Marketing Dashboard Solution
Next, we will examine these stages and provide practical advice to help
you with each step of the implementation.
1. Discuss Project with Steering Committee
Marketing Dashboards are not for every organization. If your senior
leadership does not buy-in to the concept, your project will never get off
the ground. Achieving cross-functional alignment on the role of
marketing in your organization is a key success factor for a successful
implementation of a performance measurement system. Use our
Dashboard Readiness Assessment to determine how prepared your
organization is for a Marketing Performance Measurement or
Dashboarding initiative.
Influence the key stakeholders in your organization by communicating
the benefits of your business case, from their perspective. If it is a VP
Sales, speak in terms of increased Sales Support, Lead Generation,
and better Customer Relationship Management. For a CFO, focus on
the ability to track financial returns from Marketing investments, and
better allocation of resources & budgets. Use Demand Metric’s
Stakeholder Analysis Matrix to identify key stakeholders and
evaluate their interest, power, support level, and buy-in.
Once you have achieved approval to implement a Marketing
performance measurement program, and obtained a solid commitment
from your peers to help you with the process, you are ready to assemble
your project team.
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6. 6
2. Assemble a Project Team & Complete Project Plan
First, determine the goals & objectives of your project plan. Ensure you
have alignment with the general business strategy, and create high-level
goals that will resonate with your sponsors at the executive level.
As measuring performance and developing a Marketing Dashboard is an
integrated exercise, build a cross-functional team including leaders from
the Sales, Information Technology, Finance, and Customer Service
departments. You will require insights from each of these areas if you
are serious about keeping a pulse on your department and its
effectiveness. Distribute a project plan, which includes the following:
goal & objectives, scope of work, deliverables, costs & scheduling, and
acceptance criteria.
Having a detailed roadmap of your project will ensure that you stay on
track, gain momentum as you achieve milestones, and manage
expectations accordingly. Many performance measurement initiatives
have failed as a result of improper planning up-front. To minimize risk,
be sure you invest the time to document what you are trying to
accomplish.
3. Review Data Sources & Identify Gaps
Every organization contains huge volumes of information that can be
converted into insightful, decision-making data, if properly extracted.
Information can come in many forms: staff industry knowledge,
operational transaction data, and stored information on shared drives, or
filing cabinets.
Following are a few areas to check first:
 Historical Transaction Data - every company should have a
record of past results. Examine the impact your previous
Marketing efforts had on the business. Get a grip on future by
analyzing the results of your past.
 Marketing Research - perhaps you have some raw survey
results from customers that can provide some insight into the
dynamics of your markets.
 Intuition & Experience - if you have access to executives who
have been in the industry long enough to know that if you do
this, that will happen, leverage their experience to provide at
least a base level of understanding.
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7. 7
While you are mapping your knowledge base and gaps, you will develop
hypotheses about the relationships between key data and predictive
insights. For example, you may draw parallels between client
satisfaction and customer retention rates which influences profitability.
The whole goal of a Marketing Dashboard is to help you understand the
casual links between marketing performance and business results.
4. Select Critical Performance Metrics
Reconsider the agreed-upon role for marketing in your organization to
determine what information you need to be able to effectively measure
your performance. Determining the questions that you will inevitably
need to answer is a precursor when establishing an effective dashboard.
Work backwards from the business objectives to identify what marketing
needs to do to support these goals. If market share is the key
performance indicator, attempt to find that kind of information, so you
can put a stake in the ground. Alternatively, if you are in a mature
market, your key benchmarks might be focused on client retention, or
superb customer service.
After you have documented what you need to know, assess the value &
cost to obtain that information. Pluck the low-hanging fruit that is high
value & low cost; disregard completely what is low value, high cost;
ignore the low value, low cost; and work slowly towards the information
that is high value, high cost.
Following is an example of a matrix that you can map your knowledge
needs into:
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8. 8
This mapping exercise leads to the identification of your opportunities
(what you know), risks (what you don’t know), and key success factors,
which in turn, limit the scope of what could be measured, to what needs
to be measured. Your goal is to eliminate any potential metrics that
don’t correlate to business results in a straightforward manner.
In the initial stages of your dashboard, you may have an alarming
number of “key performance indicators” that have been highlighted.
A typical company will have anywhere from 25-40 of these measures,
based on the 7 key categories of metrics.
Over time, you will test & refine your hypotheses regarding the causal
chains, eliminate redundant measures, sort, prioritize, and learn which
are truly the most effective indicators of performance. Keep structure in
mind, as it will be easier to glean insight and identify patterns if your
metrics are organized in a sensible way. In the end, you will likely focus
on 10-20 key metrics that help you operate more efficiently &
effectively.
Most companies are able to effectively measure direct mail,
telemarketing, and internet marketing, as many software tools have
these capabilities. While these areas are certainly important, don’t forget
that branding, channel marketing, sales & marketing collateral,
advertising, and market research, represent a significant portion of
marketing budgets, and therefore need to be analyzed and measured.
Build momentum with the easier areas to measure, but don’t omit the
other aspects.
5. Build a Framework for Measuring Results
The cultural shift to approve corporate initiatives that have immediate
quantifiable impact is a dangerous dynamic for marketing professionals.
On the one hand, it is critical that a business invests in areas that have
short-term benefits and returns, but on the other, it can leave out key
areas such as Brand Equity. Overcoming this near-sightedness depends
on your ability to develop a measurement framework that incorporates
both short-term and long-term financial results.
Instead of focusing on return on investment for each marketing program
individually, establish a Customer-Base Value (CBV) benchmark that you
can monitor to track results. Work with Finance & Accounting to agree
on the calculation for Customer-Base Value. Take the total number of
customers and multiply that by the net present value of these customers
(gross profit contribution) over their average lifetime. Be conservative
with your estimates and only take into account the products that your
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9. 9
customers are currently purchasing or expected to continue purchasing.
It may take a few passes to have everyone agree on the formula, but
once you have this benchmark you can start measuring performance
over various periods of time.
Using a standard benchmark like Customer-Base Value will make it
easier to present business cases for investments, and track results. For
short-term investments like tradeshows, you can demonstrate the
impact over a few months. When measuring long-term programs like
Branding, you can take a snap shot of your CBV before and 12-24
months after. Having a common denominator like CBV is also good for
measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing spend.
Your metric for effectiveness can now be the actual change in CBV for
each period compared to the expected change in CBV. If a particular
initiative, like CRM, is expected to increase CBV by a certain amount,
you can now measure the effect of that program based on a real
increase in CBV. Similarly, marketing efficiency can be defined as
change in CBV/dollar spent.
Both efficiency and effectiveness measures are best analyzed from a
historical perspective and compared to targeted goals. Setting and
refining goals and expectations will help your organization continuously
improve and advocate performance measurement. Once you have
developed your CBV benchmark, you are in a position to analyze the
return on short & long-term marketing investments from a financial
perspective.
6. Develop a Brand Scorecard
One of the most difficult elements to measure is the impact of your
brand on future economic value. Marketers tend to convince their peers
that a solid brand is the foundation for retaining customers, attracting
new customers, and maintaining prices in a competitive environment.
In reality, measuring the long-term value of marketing investments that
create “preference” and “loyalty” for your brand is critical. In many
industries, over half of the annual marketing budget is spent on
programs that do not clearly relate to incremental profits, but do
improve the vitality of the brand in the marketplace. Since this type of
investment doesn’t provide a means of generating increased revenue in
the short-term, it needs to be treated as a separate asset.
Given that strong brands produce returns over a longer period of time,
you need to develop a method of calculating brand equity and track its
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10. 10
improvement. This is where a Brand Scorecard can help you; it
measures your brand strength in the perceptions of your customers and
prospects. Diverging from the marketing Dashboard, which evaluates
marketing investments from a corporate perspective, the Brand
Scorecard asks “what do our customers, prospects, and employees,
believe about our brand?” and “how do these perceptions translate into
opportunities for economic development, or risks that need to be
mitigated?”
Use a Brand Scorecard in conjunction with your Marketing Dashboard
to track the accumulating goodwill that has yet to transform into
revenue for your business. Avoid the common mistake of thinking that
achieving “brand awareness” is an end in itself. We all know many
brands that we don’t buy from on a regular basis. Instead, focus on how
your brand creates value for your business, by leveraging its equity to
generate profits.
Following is a simple brand value chain that outlines how marketing
activities convert unaware prospects into loyal customers:
The successful link between your Activities and Brand Image depends on
how clear, differentiated, and consistent your messages are. Gaining a
positive Brand Equity relies on having competitive advantages that are
relevant to your market, and ensuring that you are correctly positioned
in the mind of your customers & prospects. Understanding why
customers buy from you, or from your competitors, will help you adjust
your activities to maximize economic value.
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11. 11
Your Brand Scorecard should track how effective your activities are at
developing brand imagery; how your imagery creates the right attitudes
and beliefs; and how these equities are creating tangible returns in the
form of Customer-Base Value (CBV). It is essential that you define, test,
and demonstrate clear links between each of these stages, if you are to
continue to obtain funding for long-term Branding programs.
Use customer satisfaction surveys, customer relationship
management tools, and internal/external branding exercises to gather
the metrics & knowledge you need to add a Brand Scorecard to your
Marketing Dashboard.
7. Select a Marketing Performance Measurement Solution
There are many software tools in the market that can assist you with
collecting & organizing data, building reports, and establishing your
Marketing Dashboard. Some companies will find it suitable to build an
internal Marketing Dashboard solution with help from the I/T
department; most will find it easier to implement a standardized, proven
solution, in the form of an on premise or on-demand platform. Click
here to request more information on how to select the right MPM
solution for your business.
If you don’t want to invest in a software solution, try using our Sales
and Marketing Performance Dashboard to collect, analyze, and
communicate key performance indicators and metrics for sales &
marketing.
Key areas in our dashboard include:
 Customers
 Branding
 Advertising & Public Relations
 Events & Tradeshows
 Direct Marketing
 Website & Online Marketing
 Sales
 Marketing Collateral
 Channel Sales
 Pricing & Discounts.
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12. 12
Conclusion
The requirements for marketing departments in mid-sized enterprises
are changing. It is more essential than ever to be able to measure
results and demonstrate your effectiveness. Fortunately, there are many
skilled experts who have helped companies transform under-performing
marketing departments into strategic, aligned, and accountable profit-
centers.
Now that you know what Marketing Dashboards are, what benefits they
bring, and have an understanding of the high-level implementation Best
Practices, discuss this initiative with Senior Management.
By being up-front and honest about your inability to measure the
performance of your department, you will build credibility, trust, and
buy-in, to implement a solution. It will be absolutely critical that your
Senior Management team is committed to this initiative.
Invest some time to learn if a Marketing Dashboard is right for your
organization. Among other things, it can help you drive measurable
increases to the top-line, and justify your existence. If you decide that
monitoring the performance of your department is not a top priority, at
least you will be aware of how many other market-leading companies
are operating.
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