What a Marketing Dashboard Does

There are five key benefits to employing a marketing dashboard:

1. A marketing dashboard aligns marketing objectives to the company's financial objectives and corporate strategy through the selection of critical metrics and sharing of results.

2. The marketing dashboard not only creates organizational alignment within marketing by linking all expenditures back to a smaller set of focused objectives, it clarifies the relationships between marketing and other corporate functional areas. It crystallizes roles and responsibilities to ensure everyone understands the interdependencies between departments or functions. The result of all this alignment makes it easy to see, if not directly measure, greater job satisfaction in a culture of performance and success.

3. The marketing dashboard establishes direct links between spending and profits. It uses graphical representations of crucial metrics in ways that begin to show, often for the first time, the causal relationships between marketing initiatives and financial results. It portrays historical data in a fashion that makes it easier for any corporate brain to grasp and understand the implications. The result? A better ability to make smart resource allocations and increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing spending.

4. It creates a learning organization that makes decisions on hard facts supplemented with experiential intuition, rather than battles of intuition punctuated by a few dangerous facts. The real benefit of this evolution is a dramatic reduction in time spent in highly politicized arguments. That speeds decision making.

5. It creates transparency in marketing's goals, operations, and performance, creating stronger alliances outside the department. This elevates marketing's perceived accountability to earn the trust and confidence of the CEO, the CFO, the board, and other key decision makers throughout the company.

Regardless of how sophisticated you are at measuring your current marketing efforts, the dashboard can make you better. It's a very accommodating tool. It benefits from, but does not require, a high degree of sophistication of analytics. It doesn't require that there be a robust IT infrastructure. It doesn't require any special skill set at all -- other than the ability to determine what's important to measure.

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