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From tracking customer behavior to marketing trends and generating ROI reports, the right dashboards can empower marketers to navigate the most valuable data and achieve strategic SaaS business goals.
While SaaS marketers appreciate having data at their fingertips, they need data-driven actionable insights and recommendations in the current competitive scenario.
Building the right ROI dashboard for optimizing marketing performance is a matter of experiment. When finding what works for the business, it’s natural to err.
Most marketers make a few common mistakes on this path to building effective dashboards and tapping into their potential. This post has the top five mistakes to avoid while creating a marketing ROI dashboard for SaaS.
1. Missing Out on Who's the Audience
When building a marketing ROI dashboard, most SaaS marketers miss out on who’s going to see these dashboards and end up taking the one-size-fits-all approach. This doesn't work with dashboards, as different people in the organization seek different insights from the same data.
Marketers! You have many stakeholders to cater to. So, the go-with-your-gut style marketing dashboard won’t work.
Not considering your audience is a terrible mistake that can impact budget decisions and the C-suite’s impression of the marketing team.
The marketing ROI dashboard you build should communicate accurate data-driven insights that answer specific audience questions.
Let’s look at how the CMO, marketing manager, and marketing analyst have different mindsets when working together toward a common goal.
The CMO could need an overview (the big picture) of how marketing campaigns are performing and their impact on ROI and revenue growth. They would also be concerned about the alignment of sales, marketing, and customer support. When these teams are aligned, tracking performance and making high-impact changes to increase the customer base (and revenue) is a breeze.
Finally, they need access to the top customer insights - what customers want and how they make decisions.
A marketing manager needs a bird's eye view of all marketing campaigns, including market research, advertising activities, marketing communications, and customer heatmaps.
A marketing analyst could want a tactical view to track and analyze current marketing processes and trends while leveraging analytic recommendations (through predictive and prescriptive analysis) to build future-proof strategies.
Here’s a summary of what each of them would expect from marketing dashboards.
In short, the data and KPIs shown for one set of audience is noise for the other. So, speak to your audience.
2. Neglecting the User Interface
A marketing dashboard needs to serve multiple stakeholders, including the marketing team, the C-suite members, the sales team, and other departments. Not all are tech-savvy. Hence, it should be easy to use with a clean UI.
If your dashboard doesn't visualize the information precisely, the stakeholders may avoid using it, thus missing out on a whole world of data that could bring value to their goals.
Ensure the dashboard has a user-friendly interface that even non-tech-savvy professionals can use.
Here are a few questions that will help you build clean, uncluttered dashboards which are more likely to hit the mark.
- Who are the end-users?
- How tech-savvy are these users?
- How often do they need to access the dashboard?
- Can they access data and track KPIs with minimal technical intervention?
Making your dashboards accessible is critical. Depending on the users' needs, use simple browser-based distribution for publishing them, especially if these dashboards can pull current or live data.
Further, as a rule of thumb, the dashboard should allow users to access reports within 3 clicks, thus making data more accessible. Anything that requires more than 3 clicks is bound to frustrate users, impacting the dashboard’s UX and usability.
Finally, make it easy for users to select a link and go to the dashboard. Create a prototype and distribute it for feedback from users.
3. Ignoring Integration Capabilities
Uncovering the most valuable insights and analyzing their impact on revenue requires fetching data from multiple sources and getting it on a central platform - a single source of truth.
Hence, your marketing ROI dashboard should seamlessly integrate with multiple applications, allowing the team to merge data without hassles.
For instance, the platform should easily integrate marketing software and data sources like website analytics, social media, digital ads, email campaigns, and others in real-time.
Since these platforms help turn raw data into easy-to-digest reports, you can create comprehensive overview dashboards for the C-suite and detailed insight-driven dashboards for marketing teams.
4. Not Reviewing the Dashboard at Frequent Intervals
Dashboards often get irrelevant with time and the audience you are presenting them to. Hence, you need to revisit them to check for relevance. They should reflect business priorities and spark engagement among whoever needs to take action on that data.
The set-it-and-forget-it mindset will not work here. Abandoning the marketing dashboard can impact business decisions tied to revenue. Review the dashboard frequently to ensure it pulls in updated and relevant data.
There are a couple of vital aspects to consider.
- Design: Your dashboard design determines its usability. So, ask your team for feedback regarding its design. Find out the aspects they find the most/least useful. Implement this feedback to revise the ROI dashboard.
- Data: Data accuracy is pivotal to defining your marketing performance. Review the data connections, auto-refresh schedules, report filters, and more to ensure accurate data integration.
5. Underutilizing the Features
Building a marketing dashboard alone cannot ensure a successful marketing campaign's performance. Your team should be able to leverage all the features it offers for maximum impact.
So, ensure you and the team understand each feature and its application.
For example, most SaaS companies are adopting AI-powered advanced analytics solutions to process data at scale. Advanced analytics methods like predictive and prescriptive analytics help SaaS firms collect and process customer and marketing data without hassles.
- Predictive Analytics: It offers detailed insights into what has happened and what needs to be done (forecasting the future).
- Prescriptive Analytics: This advanced analytics method helps marketers and executives take the next best actionable steps (NBAs) to achieve their goals.
For detailed information on this, we recommend reading our post on - How These Marketing Analytics Types Impact Your SaaS Strategies.
Leveraging advanced analytics features can take your SaaS business analytics to the next level. Make sure your team understands and utilizes all the vital dashboard features.
Revlitix: A Fitting Companion for Your Marketing Dashboard Building Journey
The right marketing ROI dashboard can help your SaaS business make sense of mountains of data by transforming it into actionable insights.
When built correctly, the dashboard can prove a game-changer for SaaS. It can save time, improve marketing processes, track the most crucial KPIs, and the list could go on.
Committing the above-shared mistakes limits the marketing ROI dashboard's effectiveness and can even kill it altogether.
As your organization's data volume grows, you need a reliable marketing ROI dashboard that aligns with your goals.
Revlitix is your one-stop, power-packed revenue marketing platform to meet your needs.
Revlitix offers -
- 100+ pre-designed, drag-and-drop dashboards with a 30-second set-up (Not kidding!)
- Integration with advanced Martech platforms
- Dynamic, clean visualizations coupled with actionable insights in the form of next-best actions (NBAs)
- Tailored KPIs as per the audience needs to track and monitor marketing campaign performance.
The best part? Revlitix is a no-code platform, which means you don't have to write a single line of code.
Built and vetted by experts with over 15 years of experience, Revlitix is the only dashboard you will ever need.
Conclusion
Marketing ROI dashboards open the door to valuable and readily available real-time insights.
However, dashboards are helpful only when designed for relevance. That's not all; you should review and update them according to the current market trends and stakeholders' needs.
With Revlitix, you can build effective marketing dashboards that impress stakeholders and help make data-driven decisions.
Deploy Revlitix to stay ahead in the SaaS marketing game to automate data collection, processing, and analysis
Empower your team to find value in data - quickly and efficiently!
