When your organization is trying to grow a key service, marketing dashboards have the most power when developed by and for multiple stakeholders within your organization, including marketing, development, the executive team, finance, operations, and front-line employees.

With all these stakeholders at hand, there is a risk of creating a dashboard that includes everything and the kitchen sink too. However, it is a balancing act worth attempting. By creating a dashboard that measures success, identifies trends, and uncovers roadblocks, you and your stakeholders can proactively manage operational needs to support marketing activities and growth.

As an added bonus, your dashboard can help you create a culture of marketing at all levels within your organization. Its data can help focus internal stakeholders on the most effective and efficient ways marketing can support growth. In some cases, it can help reduce the all-too-often heard request, “Can we have ad for this?”

The role of finance and the executive team
Getting early input and buy-in from your finance, operations and executive team is a key element in creating a successful dashboard that is used as a proactive planning tool. This group can help you create a document that reflects how your organization truly measures success. Start by using their established measurement parameters and enhance with yours. For example, if finance and the executive team measure success by revenue and units per service, make that your starting point. If you measure success by the number of new patients your campaign brings in, tie that measurement into the overall dashboard. 

Engage staff members
Including employees from the service you are focusing on will also improve the value of your dashboard. A physician, an office or practice manager and one or two front-line staff members will help you gain perspective on measurements that are meaningful to that group. Involving staff can help you gain buy-in from the entire department. This becomes critical when dashboard results indicate that changes within the department are necessary. Their understanding and support of the dashboard process can make necessary change easier to implement.

Marketing’s perspective
Include key marketing metrics in the dashboard that support your goals. Incorporate only the most important metrics for the service you are promoting. For example, age may be a key indicator of success if you are growing audiology services for baby boomers, while other demographics like gender may not be important enough to include on the dashboard.

Prioritize and streamline the information
A valuable dashboard is long enough to provide meaningful data to a range of stakeholders and short enough to give a visual snapshot of the health of the service, department or organization you are measuring.

After gathering everyone’s input, work with the team to reduce the report to the most important indicators of success. Try placing each item into one of three groups: Highly critical, moderately important, and somewhat important. Remove the somewhat important items, keep highly critical ones and debate the moderately important items until the dashboard is a reasonable length.

Set a regular review schedule
How often your team reviews a dashboard will vary, depending on the service and need. A good rule of thumb is to create monthly reports and review as a team either monthly or quarterly, depending on need. This approach can foster strategic thinking and action and avoid creating a culture of micro-management. If weekly reports are necessary, watch for signs of micromanagement and increase the length of time between reviews to ensure the group is engaged in proactive planning.

Including multiple stakeholders in your marketing dashboard process does take extra time and energy. However, it helps ensure that you create a dashboard that has the power to help you and your organization successfully monitor and grow services.

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