Truth be told, when I hear mention of the metrics dashboard metaphor, I think less of driving a sophisticated spaceship or a car and more about those disembodied dashboard toys we had as children - lots of levers and buttons but not attached to anything.
Rob O'Regan has an excellent article about marketing measurement approaches and dashboards over at Marketing NPV. He interviews several CMOs to get their pov on measurement and creating routine metrics to guide marketing mix, new initiatives, and tie marketing to business performance.
He talks with:
- Cammie Dunaway at Yahoo
- Bob Calamari at Bank of America
- Karen Haefling at KeyCorp
- Roger Adams at Home Depot
- Tony Ueber at Office Depot
- David Churbuck at Lenovo
- and more
Here are some of the interesting points that I pulled out of it:
1. Not only do Marketing and Finance need to be joined at the hip, but so does Marketing and IT. CMO's come down differently on whether the dashboard is owned by Finance or a finance-focused team inside Marketing. The former offers a bit of separation of church and state for credibility. But I noticed a sentiment that CMOs want more cooperation and collaboration from IT who make have the keys to the data and the know-how to create new, relevant reports and dashboards
1. Everyone relies on regular numbers. In the day and age of 24 month CMO lifecycles, no one is walking away from the importance of numbers. And they all have their own approach, I liked some of the detail in Cammie Dunaway's (Yahoo) approach:
"Yahoo! has a similarly broad mix of dashboards and scorecards, which fall into four main categories:
- a high-level CMO dashboard that Dunaway uses to show senior management "the things that are really moving the needle for the company and the brand";
- a scorecard on revenue driven through Yahoo!'s marketing efforts;
- engagement metrics that examine time spent on the Web site, share of time spent, page views, etc.; and
- a quarterly scorecard around various revenue-driving initiatives â€" search, for example, or a specific product like Yahoo! Answers."
I particularly liked seeing "engagement metrics" here as that is our big focus this year.
3. Give the business owners the chance to add insight to the numbers. At CA the scorecards are sent around to the business leaders for their input prior to senior leadership distribution. the risk here is that this becomes a spin cycle, but most CEOs can through that crap pretty quickly and this step allows the business experts/owners to proactively interpret the dashboard numbers.
4. More niche (read: Long Tail) marketing channels require more complicated reporting solutions. Bob Calamari from Bank of America captured this:
"This more dynamic approach to spending is not a luxury; in the current environment, it's increasingly a mandate. "We're serving smaller platforms and niche audiences," says Calamari. "A more proactively engaged consumer is tapping into information. Having a more sophisticated database around mix modeling is critical to optimizing our spend." "
5. And lastly, just as the dating industry has been revolutionized by services like LookBetterOnline that help daters create more appealing pictures of themselves, someone needs to do that for executives (myself included). The mix of mug shot/high school yearbook-thing isn't doing a lot for any of these talented people.
Read the whole article. It's great.
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