Marketers are not only charged with perfecting the customer experience across all campaigns and channels, but also with doing more with every marketing dollar they spend in the process. Enter marketing dashboards. Unlike traditional BI solutions, marketing dashboards address requirements specific to the marketing function—data integration and management for increasingly complex marketing data, streamlined implementation, ease of collaboration across the organization, and much more. But with a growing selection of dashboarding tools to help understand marketing performance, and Gartner’s findings that 77% of marketers are currently using or in the process of deploying them with limited support from IT, finding the right marketing dashboard solution is as daunting—and critical—as ever.
Gartner’s recently released report aims to helping marketers identify what solution is best for their organizational needs. The “2018 Market Guide for Marketing Dashboards” breaks down the categories of marketing dashboard solutions, differences in capabilities among them, and considerations for marketers currently searching for a partner.
Some of the recommendations Gartner offers marketers looking for a dashboard solution include:
- Determine the number and type of data sources you need to integrate, and use that as a list of requirements when you evaluate providers.
- Assess your marketing dashboard provider’s cloud-based data storage, and flexibility in adding data streams, preparing the data and creating visualizations on demand.
- Automate manual data preparation by taking advantage of offerings that streamlined data integration.
- Understand how your dashboard provider will facilitate collaboration and workflow, and whether it will integrate into your existing project management and communication tools.
- Evaluate the level of service and support you’ll need for initial deployment and day-to-day maintenance.
If you’re a Gartner client you can check out the full report here. And don’t miss Beckon’s dashboard examples on pages nine through twelve!