5 Things You Need to Know About Marketing Dashboards

As part of the AMA Symposium 2015, we took a poll of higher ed marketers regarding higher ed marketing and communication trends. One question we asked participants: Does your institution have a cross-unit/department dashboard that is used to display and monitor marketing and communications metrics? Of those surveyed, only 1 in 4 respondents said their institution uses a dashboard to monitor metrics. This doesn’t surprise me. When I reached out to six friends at colleges/universities to see if they were using dashboards, they mirrored the survey findings, telling me things like “we are planning to,” “we don’t have one yet,” “I wish,” or “I am not worthy.” While you certainly aren’t alone if you don’t have a dashboard, know that you need one and should make it a priority for 2016. Here are five things to consider:

You need to create and distribute a dashboard even if you aren’t being asked to. Many higher ed marketers aren’t expected to report on marketing productivity, likely because marketing measurement is not well understood. Measuring marketing is an enigma to many who think the marketing function exists only to have some vague future impact on brand strength. Nothing could be further from the truth. Reporting on marketing effectiveness is easier and more important than ever. Your marketing team needs the information to develop an understanding of the signs of success and failure and to make better decisions in the future. Your leadership team needs the information to understand the impact and value of the marketing effort, make good decisions about future investments in marketing, and fend off scrutiny and “experts” from outside the marketing department.
Really good marketing dashboards don’t technically look like “dashboards” anymore. Dashboards rose to popularity in the 90s when business data began to proliferate. Early dashboards were overly simple, focused on a few key performance metrics, and typically contained only as much information as could fit on one piece of paper, maybe front and back. Today’s “dashboards” are more comprehensive. In higher education, they tend to be 30-50 page documents delivered to leadership annually. Measuring marketing is a complex function that involves tracking all manner of metrics related to the web, social media, direct marketing, advertising, media relations, events, brand strength, etc. These are typically compiled in a visually stimulating metrics report that uses infographics, creative samples, and both quantitative and qualitative data to report on marketing productivity.
You need clear marketing goals to create an effective marketing dashboard. Creating a dashboard for your institution will force a conversation about marketing goals among your institution’s leadership. What do your President and Cabinet expect or hope the marketing function will accomplish? Is your operation intended to help build the inquiry pool, affect yield, support fundraising, generate media attention, build your reputation with peers? All of these? The process of creating an effective marketing dashboard will help your institution establish and agree upon the goals and priorities of the marketing function.
It may take years to develop an effective dashboard. It’s important to recognize that your first dashboard will be a bit of a shot in the dark. When starting out, you’ll have to make some educated guesses about what to measure and how to measure it. Over time, you will refine your dashboard into a tool that will more accurately report on the impact of the marketing function. You’ll also begin to develop an understanding of the patterns in your data. Year zero data, alone, is always confusing, whereas three years of data begins to tell a story. As a result, you may want to develop your dashboard and refine it for a year or even two before showing it to anyone outside the marketing department—another reason you need to start now. My recommendations are to measure more than you think will ultimately need, monitor the data carefully over time, refine your dashboard into the key metrics that shed the most light on your institution’s marketing goals, and then begin sharing the dashboard with leadership and the rest of campus.
Sharing your dashboard builds credibility. Miami University (Ohio) posts its dashboard online so that campus leaders and unit-level marketers around campus can access real-time data on an ongoing basis. The dashboard includes a wide variety of metrics related to YouTube, Instagram, website activity, news placements, and more. Reporting on both the successes and failures of the marketing effort is absolutely critical to building credibility of the marketing department. As author John Davis states in my favorite book on measuring marketing, “Marketers sometimes suffer from a lack of credibility inside companies because the effect of their marketing activities on earnings is not always easy to measure.” Enhance the credibility of your department by gathering metrics focused around your goals and sharing them regularly and widely.