Marketing Dashboards
James Richardson Senior VP-CMO of Cisco is quoted as saying ” I want to get to the point where I can say ‘If you give me another $200 million, I can deliver another $1 billion in revenue.’” Read the full article here.
The article talks about how Richardson helped spearhead the creation of a marketing dashboard. The dashboard, which tracks image and brand perception, lead generation, employee retention and customer satisfaction.
I guess if you are Cisco, you have the budget to track image and brand perception. If you are a smaller company, what would you track? Pete (my partner in www.bwmginc.com) and I have been working with a Six Sigma consultant to define the things that are most measureable for small business marketers. In a given month (a simple 30 day iteration cycle) these things include (weighted by the importance to the client) click-thru, conversion, number of appointments, number of cold calls, number of proposals. From month to month, we can improve our sigma or increase our marketing mojo by increasing our marketing grade.
Operating the report card internally has already created a level of transparency. The real benefit (since we’re all accountable for results and that we have agreed that the things we are measuring are the things that are most important to the business) is clarity. If we take the time to agree on the activities that generate the most results and agree up front to execute these activities and take the time to measure these activities — we’ve made a committment to improving the success of these activities.
I guess the most difficult thing for many small businesses is simply agreeing to market. The next most difficult thing is creating marketing that can be measured. Once you accomplish these tasks, everything seems to fall in line.
Getting agreement, by using a marketing dashboard, has also been a success with clients that have a reactionary marketing attitude (marketing A.D.D). When we work with clients that continually get distracted each month by tactics, the dashboard forces structure and continuity on all concerned.
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