A marketing dashboard is one of the best tools to bring your business strategies, history, goals, and aspirations all in one place. Synonymous to a car’s speedometer, dashboards are more or less a pictorial graph that sums up your company’s goals, performance, and credibility over the years onto a single platform.
Nurturing a business is all about keeping up with its growth and automating your systems to ensure your efforts are measured. Understanding the needs of the market, using the right metrics to evaluate yourself, and acting on the data that you gather through the dashboard is what that makes for a successful business.
Use Dashboards to Drive!
A dashboard can be used as a valuable resource to drive, motivate, and push yourself to bring a positive change within your marketing strategy. It can not only be used to set goals, but also be a helpful guide in using your abilities and resources to reach the benchmark that you have set for yourself. A dashboard can be a great way to keep your preferences and deliverables in check. It also helps you base your marketing strategies on the demands of the public.
Presentation of the data with the right insight and zeal can do wonders on its own and help you make the right decisions and moves for the benefit of your firm. Dashboards can be effectively used as a visual marker to highlight your strengths, weaknesses, and drive for achieving productivity at the right time.
Yahoo’s Free Dashboard
Last year Yahoo Small Business debuting a new marketing dashboard to give users additional insight into online reputation, web metrics and more. The free tool provides a dashboard for small businesses to analyze website metrics and maintain business listings. Dashboards also enables social media and online reputation monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, including local opportunities, Yelp, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and others. It also pulls from your Google Analytics reports if you allow access. It will be interesting to watch this product to see whether Yahoo continues to improve it, or it becomes another casualty in the changes Yahoo continues to go through.
Metrics Matter!
Metrics will be the sole criterion on your dashboard that will actually determine the quality of outcome that it produces. Choosing the right metrics is integral because it will help woo the customers and can also help you reach the goals you set for your organization in a more efficient way.
Metrics can be based on financial tactics like your budget or marketing impact on the payback; or on the product’s price, innovation, and demand. The time frame considerations are also of prime importance – the past performance, present value, and future aspirations are all key factors in setting up your dashboards and ultimately determining the success graph of your organization.
Make it Visually Relatable
Aesthetically appealing dashboards that show and depict your ideas and goals will bring a kick and life to your marketing criteria. Charts, graphs, and tracking goals can help you judge where you stand and where you intend to stand and can keep track of both your achievements and failures.
Alerts and reminders will keep the company performance steady and minimize any chances of small problems turning into serious issues. Also, try to avoid numerical values as much as you can on the dashboard as they tend to create more of a complicated and crowded approach to your marketing strategies. Keep it simple!
Creating effective marketing dashboards requires the right balance of performance evaluation graphs and future targeting resources. An effective dashboard can greatly uplift the entire feel, concept, and flow of your marketing needs and business strategies.
(image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timo_w2s/6807801309/)
Marketing Dashboards 101 is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com