Marketing dashboard best practices: Embed images and video

Part of our Dashboard Best Practices series.

According to experts, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual. And visuals are processed 60 thousand times faster in the brain than text. (Read more visual factoids on the Hubspot blog.)

That’s one of the reasons data visualization—and by extension, marketing dashboards—even exists. And given that effective marketing is often done through pictures and video, it makes perfect sense for marketing dashboards to not only include charts, tables and organized KPIs, but also rich imagery and video.

Just like any other piece of content or delivery channel—from websites to presentations and social media—images and video make our dashboards resonant, engaging and memorable. You can use whatever video or imagery you like in your dashboard, but in many cases you already have just the thing: the creative you used on the campaign.

In fact, the choice of creative is often what drove the very results you’re reporting. According to a comScore study, more than 50 percent of media effectiveness can be attributed to the creative. If something works to drive sales, 52 percent can be attributed to the quality of the creative, while only 13 percent can be attributed to media placement.

Including both the creative and the media performance in a single, elegant presentation not only makes your marketing story pop, but encourages discussion around what truly drove performance.

Many of our customers already take advantage of this in their dashboards, so I thought it might be helpful to share some of the ways they do it:

• When rolling out a new campaign, they anchor the performance story with key imagery and video atop the campaign dashboard.
• When communicating results, they put the campaign creative alongside the charts and tables for context.
• When comparing the performance of different videos, or overall video performance across channels, they embed the videos in question next to the performance data.
• When conducting a brand audit, they present images of the many manifestations of their brand on a single page.

If you’re a Beckon customer and need help getting videos and images added to your dashboard, or just want to learn more, let us know!