Marketing is often referred to as the heart of a thriving business, and as an agency, that’s just the way you want to be thought of. Your team is responsible for driving awareness and leads to take your client’s business to the next level. Your digital marketing agency makes business happen for your clients. The truth is, even when a company has an amazing product, their business will likely begin to falter without a successful marketing team supporting them.
The challenge for marketing agencies has always been finding a way to decisively prove the value of their efforts and demonstrate that in client reports. By nature, marketing activities are difficult to track. Some activities, such as branding, public relations, and graphic design will never provide a direct link to revenue, yet they are essential to building a brand.
On the other hand, marketing tactics like lead generation, sales promotions, and targeted advertising definitively drive revenue. Although most companies agree with this point, allocating sales wins to specific marketing campaigns and documenting the ROI is often still a challenge.
Fortunately, Business Intelligence (BI) tools can help bring clarity to this challenge. BI tools provide value, structure and insight to the plethora of data available within disparate company systems. The beauty of these tools is their ability to pull in information from multiple sources and automatically consolidate it into a logical, understandable format from which your marketing team can make educated decisions and guide the client to the best next steps.
Access to that kind of consolidated marketing metrics can help you identify potentially drastic changes to specific marketing campaigns that need to be done, and sometimes to overall strategic marketing plans. Locating and reporting marketing metrics is greatly simplified with BI tools and can provide incredible insights that are otherwise difficult to gain.
Once you connect all of the data sources and see the reality of your results from a data-driven viewpoint, you’ll be surprised how much you learn, how quickly you’ll recognize when it’s time to adjust strategy and tactics, and much more clearly your team is able to prove value and ROI with your clients.
With Business Intelligence implementations now simpler and less expensive than ever, digital marketing agencies can provide quantifiable results that demonstrate the value of marketing initiatives at the campaign level. BI software enables you to position your agency as a highly effective, trusted business partner contributing to your client’s bottom line.
That means you move from an ‘expense’ column on the budget to a ‘revenue generating’ line item. By bringing in data from multiple marketing applications and sales systems, you can create standard reports for all campaign metrics and KPIs with just a few clicks.
Let’s look at a few examples.
3 Key Marketing Dashboards to Track:
- eCommerce KPI Dashboard – Track revenue streams, customer profile data, geographic location, and online behavior.
- Google Analytics Dashboard – Uncover trends in pageviews, bounce rates, exit rates, best/worst pages, page views, and more – all refreshed automatically.
- Facebook Performance Dashboard – View total likes and follows for your Facebook page, learn demographic data, and compare results between paid vs. organic impressions.
These are just a few examples of the pre-created digital marketing dashboards available. In addition, you can create your own. Simply determine the critical indicators that matter most to your clients and set up customized marketing dashboards to reflect that information.