Business data visualisation and analysis expert Stephen Few, stated in his 2006 book ‘Information Dashboard Design’, that:
“A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.”
Dashboards have caught on and are becoming more and more popular, especially for those in Marketing. A report from early 2008 found that nearly 47% of marketers surveyed indicated their organisations were launching a marketing dashboard project or had plans to do so. The reasons were mainly to simply help marketers get a better grasp of their data; one of the marketer’s most important and often overlooked marketing tools.
Dashboards help businesses work together, speed up decision-making and improve ROI. They help create organizational alignment because everyone is looking at the same thing. However, they’re not about large business intelligence projects or massive technology implementations. They are readily available to everyone.
So, many marketers have been successfully using dashboards for some time. They can be highly effective tools for marketing professionals. They work. The questions are: how can they work for you? And how can you get started?
Concentrix has released a free whitepaper: “Top 5 Best Practices for Creating Effective Campaign Dashboards”. This whitepaper (which you can download here) describes how dashboards can work for you, how you can get started, the top 5 best practices, and 7 mistakes to avoid.
Tableau software is a great tool for developing marketing dashboards (here’s some Tableau screenshots). However, the whitepaper is ‘product agnostic’ - it sticks to the principles of dashboards and is not product specific.
So, to find out more about marketing dashboards, download the whitepaper or feel free to request a copy from [email protected]. Also if you’re interested in Stephen Few’s book ‘Information Dashboard Design’, (which has some excellent reviews) it’s is available on Amazon.co.uk here
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