7 Strategies For a Stellar Executive Marketing Dashboard

Next to your marketing strategy, plan and team, your marketing dashboard should be near the top of your list of critical items to really nail. It's the real-time measure of the impact of your marketing. What could be more critical?

Your primary marketing dashboard is typically presented weekly to executives, and viewed daily by your marketing team. Done right, it has the amazing ability to keep executives calm and your marketing team focused. Done wrong and you're slogging through the weeds every week with your CEO, and every executive in the room is suddenly donning a bright orange "today I'm a marketer" cap. Nightmare.

Here are 7 strategies to help you craft an elegant, effective marketing dashboard:

1. Map To Your Marketing Strategy

Every executive in the room should immediately recognize that the metrics on your marketing dashboard map directly back to your marketing strategy. If your marketing team has committed to support a specific share of sales, then focus on that, or a metric that's a good near-term proxy for a sale, such as SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).

2. Save the Strategic Reports for Later

Make it clear that longer-term metrics will be covered on a quarterly basis. For example, total marketing spend per sale is a critical metric, but is best discussed on a quarterly basis.

3. Tell Your Story, Backwards

CEOs and VPs of Sales have notoriously short attention spans, so cut to the chase. Tell them the conclusion of your story first, and then back it out and paint the broader "why" picture. This may mean presenting your marketing-supported sales (or SQL) chart first, then registrations, and then website visitors. Basically, just flip the classic marketing funnel upside down.

4. Keep It Simple

Suppress the marketer's urge to show everything. By keeping your marketing dashboard simple you'll not only focus the conversation, but executives will quickly become familiar with the metrics, so you'll spend less time explaining the charts and more time discussing trends, tactics and strategies.

5. Forecasting Calms Mental Calculators

Rather than force everyone in the room to do the mental math to project numbers out to the end of the month, do it for them! Use a simple straight-line projection for the month and explain away any aberrations caused by holidays or blizzards. You can also use a more sophisticated forecast if, for example, you know inside sales won't be done calling all leads generated in May until one week into June.

6. Keep Tactical Metrics in the Back

You'll definitely want to build a series of robust tactical marketing dashboards, but make sure these only make an occasional appearance. If you're wheeling these out then something especially good or bad is happening.

7. Have Your Story Ready

We're all marketers so we think in stories. The same should be true for your marketing dashboard. Before you head into your executive briefing map out the path you're going to lead them down, particularly if it's clear you'll have to jump off the weekly dashboard and into your tactical metrics. If you lead the way everyone will better enjoy the ride.