The Power of Visual Dashboards
If you were to know me, you would understand my extreme affinity for using a whiteboard to express ideas and concepts. Sitting in a room of professionals and sketching out thoughts for others to examine, tear apart and rework is a great process for developing exceptional marketing campaigns and business processes.
With a team in the room, each expert brings their data and shares it with the group. This simple communication allows everyone to collect their thoughts about each perspective provided. While doing this exploration, someone usually steps to the white board and starts collecting the data and, if the group is lucky, transforms the data into ideas, concepts, or brilliance. By connecting the data in various ways, simple data becomes insight. Insight leads to ideas and better yet, great insight leads to brilliance.
In recent years I have grown accustomed to seeing data in different ways. Yes, sometimes the data may be pictures or printed charts, but over the last 10 years they have become visual electronic dashboards.
Visual dashboarding allows marketing teams to gather insight in many ways that were not available in the past. Some may argue that the data was always available in the past, but simply put, in order to collect data and show it in this visual format, only companies with significant resources could be in the insight business. This is no longer true.
So, lets talk dashboarding. There are many different ways to collect data and utilize it for insight. Here are some excellent examples of how data can be shown through a dashboard:
Executive Summary- Every organization has the need for monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). These are the most important numbers that drive your business.
Geography- Once evaluated, the executive summary can lead to questions. A geographical picture of where business takes place can help guide the management team to make different decisions. With a visualization, one can simply click a specific demographic to see how the data shifts. For example, clicking an age range will adjust the rest of the data sources immediately.
Segmentation- For example, Mosaic is a lifestyle segmentation model broken into over 70 different profiles. By identifying past behaviors of your current customers you can increase your understanding on how to best communicate to them in the future. Mosaic segmentation provides channel preferences for communication (email, direct mail, radio, TV, etc), as well as sample messaging tone with key features. Imagine how this might change the way your team manages their marketing messaging. (Learn more about segmentation)
Penetration- One of the most powerful dashboards, is a penetration dashboard that can show how much of your potential market is available. Clearly discovering likely consumers in a geographic area and being able to identify them for prospecting is a game changer. And yes, you can also get the names of those individuals.
Lifetime Value (LTV)- Once a campaign is complete and it was a success, how long will they remain a customer? What is their lifetime value to the organization? This dashboard can help settle budgeting issues and long term strategy discussions.
There are many other dashboards that can be utilized. Here is a list of several others that can be useful to change and grow business:
ROI Analysis- Return on Investment Analysis
Drive Time Analysis- By distance in miles or drive time minutes, how far does your sales team need to drive to a lead?
Weather- How does weather affect your business?
Social Media - Tie your social media activity to your offline sales.
Individual Customers - What additional data do you have on your consumers?
Households - Understand what each household looks like by identifying key demographics?
Business Firmographics - B2B? Look at annual sales, number of employees, actual building size and more.
Like a whiteboard session, the data is only as good as the professionals that can interpret the data and take action. At B2E Direct we specialize in just that. Let us show you how you can transform your organization to utilize data to change the way you do business. Contact us today to start a project.
- Matt
