Dashboards remain a necessary navigation instrument for today’s marketers. With the upsurge in the availability of information and the practice of analytics as a way to stay one step ahead of the competition, it’s very likely that your dashboard is a work in progress. Just like Indiana Jones (Indy), who may need to traverse mountain passes and rivers, and other obstacles in search of hidden treasure, today’s marketers need a marketing dashboard that will effectively reveal how well the various content and channels you employ unlock Marketing’s value.

Selecting the ideal metrics for your own dashboard is akin to Indy’s search for the Lost Ark. Our decades of experience and research have identified several best practices for developing a relevant and actionable Marketing dashboard.

5 Best Practices for Your Marketing Dashboard Expedition

Five Steps to Successfully Complete the Dashboard Expedition and Unlock the Value of Marketing
Follow this map to avoid many of the booby traps that come with completing the dashboard expedition.

Follow this map to avoid many of the booby traps that come with completing the dashboard expedition.

1. Relate Your Marketing Dashboard Directly to Your Marketing Plan

In any expedition, the initial step is to determine the objectives, make a strategy to achieve them, and properly prepare for the adventure. While Indy may have been in pursuit of Crystal Skull, growth is the Holy Grail of business. Marketing helps a company achieve growth by acquiring, keeping, and growing the value of profitable customers. Therefore, synchronize your marketing plan to measurable customer-centric business results. A marketing plan aligned with the business is the foundation for your dashboard.

Action Step: Explore all the KPIs you currently measure and excavate those that align directly to the business outcomes defined in your marketing plan. Now you have the essential building blocks to produce a dashboard that communicates to your C-Suite how marketing is making a difference. You have vaulted past your first obstacle.

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2. Aim to Measure Both Performance and Risk

Any great explorer knows time is of the essence and that course adjustments may be required. Paramount in maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing is the ability to analyze your results quickly and concisely in order to shift as needed.

Action Step: Verify that your dashboard provides the necessary alerts and trend elements to help you improve performance and make critical decisions. These icons help you dodge any bullets that are coming your way and redirect efforts that may be faltering before they fail.

3. Keep the Links Between Investment and Value Clear

Marketers throughout the world share the struggle of translating marketing activities and actions into numbers that are relevant to their respective C-Suites. Walking into a meeting where you’re expected to present exactly how your marketing programs are moving the needle can feel like that famous boulder bearing down on you with nothing to stop it.

In today’s world of rankings, followers, fans, shares, downloads, open rates, click-throughs, and so on, it’s easy to get sidetracked with measurements that don’t come back around to business results. Avoid a mishmash of activity metrics on your dashboard.

Action Step: Create clarity around how your work is helping to attain your own Ark of the Covenant by making sure your metrics form a chain between your efforts, outputs, and outcomes. When you can trace the stepping stones between your work and the business results, you will be able to show your C-Suite the value of the work.

4. Identifying Relationships is Paramount in Today’s Marketing World

There are currently over 60 different marketing channels, which makes tracking extremely complex. If you choose the wrong ones, you may find yourself double-crossed and steered in the wrong direction. Connecting channels to engagement and measuring and revealing the relationship among the different channels is a challenge.

Action Step: Make sure your dashboard identifies the relationships between marketing activity and customer behavior and provides insight into the overall system. This will also help you ascertain when and where gaps are present so you can bridge them instead of finding yourself falling into an endless chasm.

5. Make Your Marketing Dashboard Actionable

Without a purpose, your entire adventure can result in you and your team in the midst of a wild goose chase. The end goal of all of this hard work and data collection is to help your leadership team and marketing personnel make informed decisions about strategy, markets, customers, and products. The data on your dashboard needs to be relevant across the organization. When your dashboard is relevant, you gain credibility and influence.

Action Step: Design and construct a dashboard that helps the C-Suite and your traveling companions in sales, service, and product facilitates business decisions.

Even Indy couldn’t have escaped the Temple of Doom without some help along the way. Employing an expert familiar with the terrain helps you avoid pitfalls and perilous mistakes so you get where you want to go faster and more safely. To secure a partner who can help you successfully negotiate the dashboard expedition, contact us for a free consultation or purchase a dashboard assessment.

FAQ:

(written by Penn of Sintra.ai)
Q1: Why do dashboards remain a necessary navigation instrument for marketers?
A: Because the volume of available information and the growing use of analytics make dashboards essential for monitoring performance, staying ahead of competitors, and revealing how content and channels contribute to Marketing’s value. For most organizations, the dashboard is a work in progress—requiring iteration as strategies, channels, and data evolve.
Q2: What is the core purpose of a Marketing dashboard (in practical terms)?
A: To reveal how well your content and channels are unlocking Marketing’s value—so leaders can see performance, understand risk, and make timely course adjustments.
Q3: What are the five best practices for building a relevant and actionable Marketing dashboard?
A:
  1. Relate the dashboard directly to the Marketing plan
  2. Measure both performance and risk
  3. Keep the links between investment and value clear
  4. Identify relationships across channels and customer behavior
  5. Make the dashboard actionable for decision-making
Q4: Best Practice #1—Why must the dashboard relate directly to the Marketing plan?
A: Because the Marketing plan aligned to measurable, customer-centric business results is the foundation for the dashboard. Marketing drives growth by acquiring, keeping, and growing the value of profitable customers—so the dashboard must reflect the outcomes and KPIs defined in the plan.
Action step: Review all KPIs you currently measure and select those that align directly to the business outcomes in your Marketing plan—these become the building blocks for an executive-relevant dashboard.
Q5: Best Practice #2—Why should the dashboard measure both performance and risk?
A: Because speed matters. Leaders need to see trends and alerts that indicate when results are drifting off track—so they can adjust before performance failures occur.
Action step: Ensure the dashboard includes alerts and trend elements that support rapid analysis, risk visibility, and course correction.
Q6: Best Practice #3—How do you keep the links between investment and value clear?
A: By avoiding a mishmash of activity metrics (followers, shares, downloads, open rates, clicks) that do not connect to business results. Instead, create a metrics chain that links investments and activities to outputs and outcomes—so value is traceable.
Action step: Confirm your metrics form a clear chain between effort, output, and outcome, enabling you to show how Marketing is “moving the needle.”
Q7: Best Practice #4—Why is identifying relationships paramount in today’s multi-channel world?
A: Because there are dozens of channels and they interact. Measuring channels in isolation can mislead decision-making. The dashboard must reveal relationships between Marketing activity and customer behavior and provide insight into the overall system—so gaps can be identified and addressed.
Action step: Design the dashboard to show relationships across channels, engagement patterns, and customer behavior—highlighting where gaps exist.
Q8: Best Practice #5—What makes a Marketing dashboard truly actionable?
A: A dashboard is actionable when it supports informed decisions about strategy, markets, customers, and products—and when it is relevant across the organization (Marketing, Sales, Service, Product). Relevance builds credibility and influence.
Action step: Construct the dashboard to facilitate business decisions for the C-Suite and cross-functional stakeholders—not just to report data.

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