Your Many Marketing Dashboards

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to know what data your company was collecting on marketing efforts you’d have to search for it. You’d likely be making your way downstairs to an interior office in the basement. There you would have found an analyst who would be happy to tell you all about the numbers. The problem? You probably wouldn’t have understood a word of it.

For any small business, something like a marketing dashboard would have been incredibly difficult. Before the wave of accessible dashboards hit the internet, to have a marketing dashboard you had to create one – from scratch. This required teams, developers, and knowledge of both analytics and psychology. Without these things, most small businesses were stuck with some numbers that they knew were important and very little idea how to use them.

Then came the cloud, and suddenly data existed in real time for the rest of us. With this development came the wave of accessible marketing dashboards. That leaves us with only one truly difficult question remaining: which one is the right one? Even though our budgets for marketing analytics keep rising, marketing leaders continue to report that these analytics are only used to make business decisions about one third of the time. The challenge lies in connecting the world between management and analytics to translate the data produced. This, of course, means it’s even more important to find the right marketing dashboard for you and your company.

Most marketing dashboards fall into two categories:

• Marketing Automation Platforms: Many of the marketing tools we already use have a marketing dashboard feature. These tend to have very specific data and require some translation, but many marketers find it easier to maintain fewer platforms.  Some of the top examples of marketing automation platforms with build in marketing dashboards include Marketo, Hubspot, and Infusionsoft.

• Standalone Business Intelligence Dashboard: These standalone dashboards are typically purchased separately as a part of a business intelligence application. These dashboards pull information from your CRM, website, or anywhere you tell them to.  Examples for standalone dashboards include Cyfe, GoodData, and Sisense.

Interested in solving key business questions?  Talk to us about your vision for a marketing dashboard.  At Hansel Group Marketing, we love to play with data and look for patterns.  We can help you translate your data into an action plan, and help you maintain it. Contact us today to get started.