Is your marketing dashboard on the blink?

We’ve all been there. The Monday morning weekly leadership team meeting or a quarterly board meeting. And we get to review our dashboard to report how sales and marketing are performing.

So we run through a series of dashboard metrics to demonstrate how our sales funnels are shaping up. How is web traffic? How are conversions? Which campaigns are performing well? We review CPCs, CPLs, ROAS. We do our best to encapsulate everything into a quick-view dashboard to help an audience of non-marketers evaluate marketing performance.

But do these dashboards truly help? Or are they giving us a fuzzy view?

The over-rationalization of marketing, as I define it, describes how leaders are increasingly focusing on tactical performance without investing in or fully grasping the overarching strategic framework that should be driving the tactics.

Let’s face it, how important are CPCs when your creative is indistinguishable from that of your competitors? Who cares about driving down CPLs when your ad copy doesn’t pique your prospective customers’ desires?

Your dashboard may be telling your leadership that all is good. Numbers are tracking well. But you may well have underlying problems that aren’t being highlighted.

This happens all the time. We curate the data we wish to share. We highlight what we want the board to see. And, as expected, board members typically seem pleased to see a dashboard covered in green lights. When the bottom line starts to suffer, though, there is a sudden realization that it may be time to shake things up or perhaps hire a new agency.

The root issue here is that our dashboards aren’t telling us all that we really need to know.

The dashboard in daily life

In my opinion, we have become pathologically reliant upon the KPIs our dashboards (PowerBI, Tableau, mobile apps, etc.) provide – even in our day-to-day lives.

Many people (me, for example) pore over the wealth of health data from our smart watches when we exercise. Now that we have access to the data, we are driven to improve our VO2 max. We want to lower our resting heart rates. We want to get more steps in. And in doing so, we begin to lose touch with “why” we are exercising at all: which is to be healthy, to live a longer and less troubling life, to have less pain, or maybe to win some competitions. These end goals are more important than the various metrics on the dashboard.

This newly tapped wealth of health data was once available only to elite coaches and athletes. But now it is available to amateurs who lack the deep knowledge required to interpret and apply what the dashboard tells us.

Likewise, when we are reporting marketing performance in our leadership meetings, our audience does not have such a depth of expertise, so we simply share the data and use some green, yellow and red lights to indicate health.

Marketing dashboards need to be personalized

Our businesses/organizations don’t exist simply to generate leads and sales. They (should) have deep purpose. And this deep purpose needs to be highlighted alongside our more visible health indicators.

Think of it this way: are we telling customers that they will move through our sales funnel quickly? Is our customer promise that “we will get your business for as little ad budget as we can”? No. We are telling our customers that they will receive relief for a problem they need us to help them solve.

Our dashboards should be able to tell us how well are we achieving that.

If your university, as an example, says in its messaging that it’s the best at getting recent graduates hired, then this is the thing you want to be measuring and reporting on in every aspect of your organization. How are you ensuring post-grad hiring? How are you measuring it? What leading indicators exist? What are they telling you? What’s your financial aid department doing to help ensure post-grad hiring? What is your faculty doing to support hiring? Everyone needs to be engaged. And every department should have at least one dashboard metric tied to the organization’s promise.

This brand-tailored approach provides a more meaningful health check while putting everyone on the same page with respect to success. Marketing success is no longer exclusively the job of the marketing team. It belongs to everyone.

How can I help you?

If you’d like to learn more about how to improve your organization’s marketing reporting, Iceberg can help. See my pages on coaching or on internal marketing evangelism. Or contact me directly. I’m always happy to help.