Here is the second part of our look at the horrors of the marketing dashboard and how to drag it through the first years of its lives and afterlives. Part One is here.
Make your dashboard meaningful
You’re a marketer: life is at its crazy best when everyone is looking but nobody is really seeing. That’s why we like complex media schedules, stacks of sell sheets and pretty product boxes – it’s evidence of our incredible ability to get stuff done, whether or not it was difficult.
Problem is, the dashboard shouldn’t track effort, it should track results. So if your unparalleled genius in the industrial fastener sector has not actually produced a point of share or a cent of revenue, your dashboard will betray you and you will need to update your resume. Make sure what you stick on your dashboard is a result and not an effort. Showing how many radio stations your :30 is running on is effort. Showing GRPs, unaided awareness or inbound calls is result, which is meaningful.
The red bit of the speedometer in cars is fascinating: it’s way faster than I would ever want to go and a good deal faster than I believe my car could travel without dissolving; yet there it is, all dangerous-looking and just daring me to try it. Fortunately, we have 22-year-old men to challenge the red lines on speedometers and the rest of us can get on with the task of benchmarking our performance.
A lot of dashboards fling information into the universe without much context. Kind of like the volt dial on the rental car: it could mean anything. A good dashboard needs to show how a given metric compares to another thing. It can be the same thing last year or last quarter, it can be versus forecast or competitor performance. It can even be against accepted best practices, which is where the red line on the speedometer comes in. It’s there because that’s the point where most cars blow up and you should keep your little dial well below the red bit. Benchmarking adds meaning.
Make it accurate & objective
You know what’s even sadder than the fact that most dashboards are manually glued together about five minutes before they’re needed? The fact that half the data in them is questionable, unsubstantiated or just plain fiction. How many times have you sat in meetings where the sales dashboard and the marketing dashboard have very different numbers for the same metric? How long do you get away with the timing difference/currency conversion/net vs. gross excuses?
If your data is crap and you know it, why include it? I would think most Corporate Overlords would rather have a blank bit than someone’s best guesstimate, complete with a 200-word disclaimer of what it might or might not include. If you take the time to work with the scary guy in Finance (or wherever) to actually understand the data and its meaning, you should be able to be entirely transparent about it on the dashboard. Transparency means that your dashboard is likely to be more trusted and the people who are feeding it more accountable about data quality.
I think subjective things are best kept off your dashboard. This would include unsubstantiated reasons for missing a number, anything to do with creative deliverables from your agency, and why you paid someone to take your place on the holiday party committee. When cars start telling us we’re going fast-ish and we should touch up our roots, we can include subjective things on the marketing dashboard. Until then, keep it objective.
Design your dashboard
Not everybody has the same idea of a dashboard that you do. For a great many people, dashboards are multi-page spreadsheets jammed with numbers and pivot tables. Frankly, that sounds a lot like a report. Let’s agree that a marketing dashboard, like its automotive counterpart, should be able to tell you what you need to know in the first five seconds. It should offer up a little more detail over another 20 seconds. If you can’t get pretty much the whole story in 30 seconds then you have a report and not a dashboard.
Not all dashboards, however, make it that easy. Most are a terrible mess of cut and paste tables, squished up pie charts with no legend and way too many words. Let’s start with words. How many words are on the dashboard of your car? Maybe ten? Twenty? Not exactly great reading. If the numbers on your marketing dashboard are so obscure, ambiguous or suspicious that you need more than ten words to explain them, you have a report and not a dashboard. And you should update your resume.
Just because the dashboard is someone’s Frankenjob, doesn’t mean the end result should look like something the villagers are going to have to slay with pitchforks. And most do. Because it’s just easier to scrape the data out of the excel sheet and plop it, in six point type, onto the PowerPoint dashboard template. If you need to show data in a table (and you really should wonder why you would do that if your intent is a quick read), then you need to find a way to put it there so that it’s legible even to middle-aged people who are in denial about their eyesight.
Many dashboard makers have figured out that tables and text are bad and they are doing their very best to fill the page with bar charts, pie charts, trending graphs and other things they saw in Fast Company. They carefully craft their little chart in Excel and make the colours nice and make the labels line up and then, they quite take leave of their senses, and cut and paste that sucker into another document. This offends some minor deity which gets even by distorting your pretty little chart. Do your dashboard in Excel or PowerPoint or whatever you want and leave it there. Or learn how to move them from one to the other without making them look dumb.
If you seriously want a nice dashboard, go get someone who knows what they’re doing to design it for you. Right down to colours and fonts and types of charts. If they are really good, they can probably set up little macros that will go and get your data from Excel and create a lovely graphic without your help. There are also a number of third party apps out there that purport to do this. I’ve used only one and only briefly so would love your comments on how these perform.
Know when to walk away (and when to run)
Three signs you can safely assume your dashboard is now dead:
- When you can skip a week/month/quarter and nobody notices
- When you can make stuff up and nobody notices
- When it’s taking longer to create the dashboard than to do the stuff that you measure with it
Related Posts
Marketing Dashboards 7 You Part I
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
Hell Boy says
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