No doubt, the need for information of a Marketing Executive has increased due to a fiercer competition and globalization. Whereas information on market stakeholders, classic market information on own products/services and the ones of competition, general market research abilities have become more refined and sophisticated, the marketing mix itself has pretty much remained a black box .....

It has been very cumbersome and labour intensive to actually look into the marketing activities and audit their efficiency and effectiveness. To track actual results has only to some degree been practised in the direct marketing area, where tracking seemed fairly easy and comprehensive. However, even this has been an isolated effort and mostly hasn’t been analysed in the context of the entire marketing mix.

Recently, some CEO’s or CFO’s have dared to pose questions such as: on what exactly have we spend our marketing budget? what has been the effect? how specifically did marketing helped the company to reach their overall business objectives? on which target groups and marketing channels did we spend how much of our budget?, etc. Confronted with those “nasty”, but business wise very relevant questions, Marketing Executives have to chase their managers and agencies to come up with both reasonable explanations why those marketing activities have been executed in the first place and also how successful they were. A cumbersome, error prone and essentially impossible exercise if you think of larger organisations with hundreds of campaigns and thousands of activities they perform per year.

Yes, we all agree and know that the ultimate and exact determination of the effect of my marketing initiatives is not easy to determine, and, to some degree is not trackable at all, because we are living and acting in an open and dynamic system, where the behaviour of all stakeholders and participants in the market and also environmental factors influence the outcome of our campaigns. Maybe our competitors happened to have some difficulties in their supply chain during our campaign period, or for whatever reasons the consumer didn’t react to our campaign as anticipated, etc. etc.

But let’s leave all the very valid and less valid excuses aside we marketers have and let’s think about what we would need to make our marketing better and more effective, instead of looking at these questions as a threat to our judgement or our abilities.

Maybe we could agree on this:

- Yes, we would like to reduce the time our marketing team spends on pure admin work (chasing people and agencies, preparing reports by hand, responding to inquiries, re-do things repeatedly due to lack of systems, etc.)
- Yes, we would like to be able to know exactly how we spend our marketing budget based on products/brands, target groups/segments, channels, etc.
- Yes, we would like to create an integral view of business objectives, marketing strategy and tactical marketing plan.
- Yes, we would like define objectives to each marketing activity, measure the result of the activity and bring it into relation to the objectives and budget spent.
- Yes, we would like to spend our marketing budget more effectively and target oriented.
- And yes, we would like to access all of this information through a single point of entry.

Introducing the Marketing Dashboard!

To improve on exactly the problems described above, a new category of enterprise software has been emerging over the last years referred to as Enterprise Marketing Management, Marketing Resource Management or Marketing Operations Management. Essentially, terminology doesn’t matter, what matters is that finally marketing organizations can now also get solutions geared towards their specific needs, much the same what Financial Departments and Production Departments have introduced over the last 25 years in their respective areas (ERP and SCM systems).

A typical Marketing Dashboard delivers a personalized view of all relevant marketing information to a specific job and role.

Typical information we can expect from a Marketing Dashboard:

- Up-to-date overview of marketing budget (budget, planned, committed, spends)
- One click reports on all major views of marketing budget (by division/business unit, product, market segment, channel, cost center break down, type of activity, cost category, etc.)
- Marketing Calendar
- Overview of my marketing campaigns and activities
- Overview of my projects
- My tasks
- My marketing content (images, artworks, etc.)
- Compliance Management
- Brand Management
- Important links

Example of Marketing Dashboard

In addition, Marketing Dashboards cannot only be customized to internal audiences, but can also build the exchange platform and interface to our Channel Partners, Customers and Agencies, etc.

The following guide can help you in your efforts to optimize your marketing operations management:

Stephan Nobs
Assetlink
Email: stephan.nobs@assetlink.com
Website: www.assetlink.com