Where Does Your Digital Marketing Dashboard Fit?
Today we don’t lack the tools to track the customer’s journey and report KPIs. Nevertheless it can be confusing to know how to integrate measures and in which system to report them. Here’s where the marketing dashboards fit.
How do the system parts mesh?
How the various systems mesh together can be confusing, and even more so if they were procured through different parts of the organisation. For example, Marketing bought the CRM, the web team bought the commerce solution, IT bought the marketing automation solution to support both Marketing and Corporate Communications, and social media monitoring was bought by Customer Support.
All these parts have to come together, and they need to be channeled into a comprehensive social relationship platform (which would incorporate social media listening as one module).
We know what a CRM does, and social media monitoring, and commerce solutions, but customers are often confused about how marketing automation and social relationship platform fit – or clash.
In fact they complement each other well. Marketing automation typically comprises:
Email Marketing
Landing Pages
Campaign Management
Prediction/Scoring
Lead Management
CRM Integration, and basic
Social Marketing.
A comprehensive enterprise social relationship platform (SRP) will integrate with the marketing automation package, the CRM and the commerce solution. It has to in order to bring in all the necessary data to be able to provide effective marketing dashboards.
The operational functions of the SRP include listening, social support, SLA management, influencer analysis, audience profiling, collaborative content planning and curation, campaign management, paid advertising planning and execution, engagement reporting, competitor benchmarking, multilevel access and authorisation all supported by extensive automation rules, governance, reporting, and universal API connectors.
That’s a mouthful! And that’s why a SRP is much more than just social media monitoring or Hootsuite.
The key value in getting this enterprise architecture right is in knowing, via integrated measurement and reporting, that your marketing investment is working as effectively as possible.
Dashboards bring the data and the insights
Through good planning of API integration and tagging of data flowing through the various systems e.g. the imported data from the marketing automation solution, a whole picture can be mapped. You can now begin to visualise and optimise your digital customer relationship investments.
There are three key reasons that the need for this type of integration has come:
In order to provide the best customer experience in a social / digital / mobile world and to respond with relevance you need to track KPIs across all platforms, drill down in real time, and respond through “macros”.
Multiple cross-channel and omni-channel marketing initiatives need to be integrated into a single, actionable view which uses common naming and tagging across owned, earned, paid, listening, commerce, web analytics, campaigns, etc.
Customer journey touch-points have to be tracked and reported and acted upon appropriately (and automatically) across social media, commerce, EDM, SMS, downloads, clicks, shares and mentions, and conversions.
Dashboards which display this integrated data and allow click-through drill down are now the voice of the customer for a digital-first customer-first organisation. This is why an enterprise quality social relationship platform is necessary. Not one just in terms of licensing extra users with a few extra features but one in terms of comprehensive integration and enterprise-wide access based on roles, responsibilities, governance and coordination across complex organisational structures.
But it is not just about that necessary governance, that’s just a ticket to the game. It’s about the ability to act, the ability to respond quickly and to have a high degree of trust and confidence that the response is the optimum one. It’s about acting and learning from the reported response to those actions.
From reputation management to marketing, sales, customer support and agency integration the reporting through an enterprise social relationship platform is the next big step in social and digital maturity.