As marketers, we’re used to complex campaigns that cross multiple marketing channels and have a ton of moving parts. We manage websites, blogs, design assets, content production, social media, advertising, paid search, SEO, public relations and the list goes on.
All of the reports, metrics, and analytics that we have access to just adds another layer to the story and can make reporting results to the higher-ups a challenge. As we go up the flagpole from marketer to marketing director to CEO, the data needs to be presented at an increasingly higher level and must show results that interests the C-suite–specifically how marketing contributs to generation of sales revenue and ROI.
A great way to do this is with a CEO marketing dashboard that brings organization and clear reporting to all marketing activities. It can also help to guide your marketing activites to move specific result-producing data points. The great thing about the dashboard is that you can show the high-level data points over time. We usually recommend using Traffic, Leads, and Sales–and supporting them with a breakdown of the source of each figure.
The ultimate way to correlate marketing with bottomline numbers is to use marketing software that will identify and track customers throughout the buyer lifecycle. Google analytics can help with this if it’s fully configured, but we highly recommend utilizing marketing software like Hubspot that provides full closed-loop reporting features.
For instance, if your sales team just closed a new $1M account, closed loop analytics would allow you to track that customer back to their first encounter with your company’s website. Maybe it all started with a blog article that you wrote. From there they visited a handful of other pages, following a click path that was devised by marketing. They downloaded a white paper and ended up responding to an email nurturing drip campaign with a question about your service – again, all devised by marketing. The interaction led to a demo and eventually a sale.
Closed-loop analytics allows you to track this process from start to finish. (It looks like marketing should get credit for this one – not sales.)
Many of the things that we do as marketers are very difficult to correlate to results. But with closed loop reporting and a system for driving traffic, leads, and sales it is possible to measure or at least correlate ROI from otherwise hard to measure activities.
We have provided a free downloadable template for a CEO dashboard that you can access here.
Since every company is different, we generally customize the dashboard to match all of their different channels, campaigns, KPIs, and initiatives – so feel free to do that for your company.
If you’re interested in producing and demonstrating more clear results from your marketing, please feel free to get in touch. We’d love to help.
