What tasks do you find most challenging as a marketing leader?
Probably demonstrating the financial impact of your marketing campaigns is in your top three.
Attributing revenue to marketing has been a long-standing challenge for marketers. And communicating the importance and impacts of marketing to other departments, especially finance, can often be a struggle. It sometimes feels like you are speaking two different languages as your marketing often provides less precise metrics than other areas of the business.
Measuring marketing is essential for accountability for your team and can be exceptionally helpful in ensuring your team gets the budget it needs to thrive. So how can you overcome the challenge of demonstrating your team's worth to your finance department?
Short answer: Marketing dashboards.
In this post, we will cover threekey reasons you should be using marketing dashboards to report to your finance department.
Your finance department cares about numbers. They are all about the benjamins and want to see solid data about revenue. They probably don't care as much about you about social media followers, brand awareness, website visitors or other metrics they do not directly correlate to purchases.
With marketing dashboards, you can simplify and speed up the process of creating your weekly, monthly or quarterly reporting for your finance department.
You can create dashboards that are specifically for your finance team and only pull through the metrics that they care about. This process is then automated and your dashboard will show them accurate and up to date metrics.
This saves a lot of time for your team who otherwise have to go back and forth with your finance department and search for data that your marketers may not regularly be viewing.
You don't want to give your fiance department the full picture but more of a 'peek behind the curtain' at all of your marketing metrics.
We’re not saying you want to exaggerate or manipulate the data you have. However, you probably don't want to show all the data you have because you will then end up spending huge amounts of time explaining metrics and what they mean to your finance department when they perhaps aren't relevant to your finance team's decision making.
Marketing dashboards can be customised to show only the specific metrics that are most relevant to your finance department. This way you can go through your dashboard one time to explain all of the information and save a lot of time from having to explain new reports every month because they include different metrics.
Marketing campaigns are not as simple as one prospect saw one campaign and then converted to a customer and your business gained a specific amount of revenue.
Customers go through a life cycle. They often see multiple pieces of marketing content before they convert to a customer.
For example, you may run an ad campaign that does not directly result in any sales because it focuses on brand awareness. To your finance team, this could seem like an unsuccessful campaign.
With a marketing dashboard, you can connect the dots and give a big picture view of your overall marketing revenue.
When finance teams have access to your marketing dashboard, everyone can see what’s working and what isn’t in your campaigns. Rather than having a narrow view by showing only certain reports, dashboards pull information from multiple sources and help you and your finance team see the overall impact of campaigns.
This makes it easy for cross-department communication to take place and helps with informed decision making.
The goal of marketing dashboards is to optimise your marketing strategies. By sharing certain dashboards with your finance department you can help them see where your strategy is working, ensure that you get budget allocation for your successful campaigns and help demonstrate the value that your team has to the business.
Mastering the art of dashboard creation for your finance department will help you thrive as a marketing leader. You can help with company-wide understanding of marketing and give everyone a deeper understanding of the impacts your team is having.
See inspirations here:
Need to give your marketing efforts a helping hand? If you’re struggling to find an easy tool to help you understand what your data is telling you to help fuel your marketing campaigns, then contact us here to find out how Streams can help.
