In this digital era, leading brands are tapping into the growing pools of marketing data to measure, report on, and optimize everything. We have data on customer engagement, campaign impressions, clicks, ad viewability, top predictors of sales, and so much more. We want more data, more reports, and ultimately more insight.
For some, reports are (finally!) cross-channel, trustworthy, and full of actionable insight. But, in reality, most marketers are getting buried in mountains of dashboards and reports, digging for answers to critical business questions. If we want to build truly data-driven teams, it’s time to get organized.
Imagine walking into a library, and instead of seeing neatly lined bookshelves, you were met with thousands of books haphazardly piled on the floor. Sorting through each title to find the book to satiate your latest curiosity, or learn how to solve a problem, would be a lengthy chore. Even worse, you might give up and leave the library empty-handed. In the same way libraries use the Dewey Decimal system to thoughtfully organized books into rows, shelves, and sections, portals help marketers quickly find the dashboards and reports they need to get a comprehensive view of whatever program, brand, channel, campaign, etc. is top of mind, and ultimately, take action.
In partnering with the world’s leading brands to build data-driven organizations, we’ve found this exact challenge time and time again. The volume and breadth of insightful dashboards present a world of opportunity, too often users end up scrolling through endless lists of reports, looking for the one that holds the keys to their next optimization. Together we’ve built portals that organize dashboards and scorecards, making it easier for stakeholders to navigate the data in their account. Done right, portals allow report creators and viewers to see the full story of marketing performance, then drill down into more detailed reports, and see how it fits into their overall strategy.
Establishing one clean, organized hub for reporting ensures that every stakeholder across the organization can freely explore the wealth of data available, and tap into the business-building insights needed to do better marketing.
Ready to build a portal for your organization? Start by taking an audit of all the reports, dashboards, data, and users you have currently, and use them to outline the plot of your story. It might help to whiteboard it out or move around sticky notes on a wall to organize reports by topic, audience, campaign, summaries, use case, etc. Similar to when you clean out your closet, you might notice that there are holes in what you need, or that you’ve got duplicates. Once you’ve laid out your story and the corresponding reports, it’s time to build out your portal with section headers for each topic and links to each dashboard or scorecard. Start with cross-channel, topline performance reports on top, then drill into more focused reports (i.e. campaign performance, channel performance, brand performance, etc).
But don’t stop there! We already know storytelling can’t be achieved through numbers and words alone. Just as you would with a storytelling performance dashboard, add brand logos, campaign creative, commentary, and more to artfully lay out your marketing performance portal. Beckon’s completely customizable rich media makes this process simple.
Finally, you’ve got a canvas to display all of the beautiful stories your marketing org has to tell. Once you’ve got the hang of it, you can design custom portals for various stakeholders within the organization or experiment with more focused portals by campaign, brand, and more to further develop your organization’s reporting infrastructure. The sky’s the limit!
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