Imagine this: You, as the Chief Marketing Officer for your business, are put on the spot and asked to report year-to-date marketing revenue by your CEO. You quickly pull up your CMO dashboard and rattle off an update with up-to-the minute results. No need to rely on old numbers, ask your staff to do a deep-dive, or even leave the room.
A good CMO dashboard empowers marketing executives to quickly and confidently answer questions from stakeholders.
A great CMO dashboard gives them the knowledge they need to make smarter decisions for the business.
So what exactly goes into a marketing dashboard for CMOs? What separates the good from the great?
I’ll walk you through all the right metrics, including examples, that make up a great CMO dashboard for both B2C and B2B companies.
What is a marketing dashboard?
A dashboard summarizes marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) and metrics, serving to simplify analytics into easily consumed measurements. Usually updated frequently, dashboards can be used a progress reports for stakeholders, as well as in other marketing reporting.
Dashboards can and should be customizable for each business’s unique marketing goals. It serves as a way for marketing teams and their leaders to track their progress toward goals and ROI, as well as a way for marketing leaders to attribute marketing activities to business outcomes. This is especially important for CMOs, who can be the first to get fired if a company fails to hit its growth goals.
Why are dashboards important for marketing executives?
Dashboards are especially important to marketing executives, such as CMOs, who don’t necessarily have the time to take a deep dive into marketing analytics. They rely on high-level performance and progress updates to quickly assess the big picture.
Being able to get a quick snapshot of results from different activities across the marketing mix is crucial to prove their team’s value to stakeholders at a moment’s notice.
That’s why we’re focusing this post on building the best dashboard for CMOs and marketing executives.
What metrics should be included?
Dashboards should be flexible, to accommodate different business needs and changing strategies. Metrics can be separated out into digital marketing dashboards, campaign dashboards, and more. However, there are several essential metrics and KPIs every CMO dashboard should include for B2C and B2B companies.
CMO Dashboard KPIs for B2C Companies
Audience Insights for Improved Targeting
- Stay on top of your customer identity. Use customer demographics to learn about your buyers and improve the targeting of your marketing campaigns.
Competitive Analysis
- Track ownership of target topics for content versus competitors. This can include competitive benchmarking for traffic and engagement metrics on your company’s blog and across its social media accounts.
Distribution Analysis
- Which channels and mediums are most effective for attracting new audiences? Track unique website visitors by channel and medium: search, paid search, social, paid social, ads, earned media/referral, lead nurture programs, events, etc.
- Which channels and mediums are the most effective for attracting leads that convert into customers? Track new customers by channel and medium: search, paid search, social, paid social, ads, earned media/referral, lead nurture programs, events, etc. Here’s an example:
Attribution and ROI
- What are your most effective campaigns for converting new customers? Track new customer conversions influenced by campaign, medium, and source to find out. Here’s an example:
- What are your most effective campaigns for converting returning customers? Track returning customer conversions influenced by campaign, medium, and source to find out.
- How efficient are your marketing investments? Monitor the average cost of customer acquisition vs. average spend on marketing activities per customer to evaluate your spending efficiency.
Marketing Revenue Analysis
- Prove how much revenue your marketing strategy is generating. Track marketing-influenced revenue as a percentage of total revenue to demonstrate your team’s value to the company.
CMO Dashboard KPIs for B2B Companies
Full-Funnel Conversion Rates
- See the big picture of your marketing machine at work. Keep an overview of average conversion rates from lead to sale as part of your dashboard reporting to ensure your whole department is running smoothly. Here’s an example:
Lead Generation Strategies
- Which channels and mediums are most effective for attracting new leads? Number of leads by channel and medium: search, paid search, social, paid social, ads, earned media/referral, lead nurture programs, events, etc. Here’s an example:
- Which channels and mediums are the most effective for attracting marketing opportunities? New customers by channel and medium: search, paid search, social, paid social, ads, earned media/referral, lead nurture programs, events, etc.
Competitive Analysis
- Track ownership of target topics for content versus competitors. This can include competitive benchmarking for traffic and engagement metrics on your company’s blog and across its social media accounts.
Attribution and ROI
- What are your most effective campaigns and strategies for generating opportunities? Track new marketing opportunities influenced by campaign, medium, and source to find out.
- How efficient are your marketing investments? Monitor the average cost of customer acquisition vs. average spend on marketing activities per customer to evaluate your spending efficiency.
Marketing Revenue Analysis
- Prove how much revenue your marketing strategy is generating. Track marketing-influenced revenue as a percentage of total revenue to demonstrate your team’s value to the company.
How to use dashboards for reporting
A CMO dashboard serves as an excellent high-level report to stakeholders.
Most marketing analytics and BI dashboard tools just spit out complex data and leave it up to marketers to interpret takeaways for non-marketers.
However, the best tools will do this for you, repackaging data into consumable KPIs that allows CMOs to report the value of their marketing to stakeholders in a language they understand. (TrackMaven actually does this, and creates beautiful PDFs and PowerPoint Presentations for easy professional reporting!)
Proving the value of social media and content is difficult — but not impossible. We created The Marketer’s Field Guide to Social and Content Marketing Attribution to show you how to prove your impact. Get your free copy now!
