You probably already use—or at least have thought about using—some form of marketing dashboard to track and manage your analog and digital marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). But how has it impacted your decision-making ability concerning customer engagement? And do you effectively leverage that data to help you manage all the most important marketing factors that drive success for your organization?
I subscribe to the basic premise behind the Smart Insights RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage) framework for organizing and tracking digital marketing KPIs as they relate to customer engagement, but I’ve expanded it to include analog marketing activities as well.
[Editor's note: Since Kent Huffman wrote this post, Smart Insights have created a RACE dashboard based on Google Analytics to automatically display month dashboards]
In this post I'll explain how I have been applying the RACE marketing framework as part of an integrated model for my marketing dashboard at BearCom Wireless over the past few years and have been very pleased with the actionable insights it has provided. Although the application of the various elements will necessarily vary from company to company, if you follow the basic structure laid out in part two of this blog post, your dashboard should yield similar results for you.
I’ve found that the best way to organize and present the metrics related to the performance of my marketing initiatives is to relate them to the customer engagement process. That way, everyone who is exposed to the marketing dashboard understands not only which metrics have been incorporated, but how they impact customer experience, and as a result, the bottom line. This is where the RACE framework really shines.
A visual depiction of the RACE Digital Strategy framework developed by Dr. Dave Chaffey and his team at Smart Insights looks much like a traditional sales/marketing funnel, with stage 1 at the top and stage 4 at the bottom. But before we explore how those stages relate to your marketing dashboard and customer experience, let’s begin with a short discussion of one of the most difficult marketing topics to accurately measure: brand equity.
Dr. David Aaker, a renowned marketing professor and brand consultant, highlights 10 attributes of a brand that can be used to assess its strength. These metrics should be review for relevance to your dashboard. They include awareness, differentiation, personality, leadership/popularity, perceived value, organizational associations, satisfaction/loyalty, share of market, profit margins, and distribution coverage. Dr. Aaker doesn’t weight the attributes or combine them in an overall score, as he believes any weighting would be arbitrary and would vary among brands and categories. Rather, he recommends tracking each attribute separately.
Depending on the size and type of the organization you work for, measuring brand equity using all—or even some—of these attributes may be difficult or even impossible. But do the best you can, as tracking the value of your brand is an important element of the overall picture of your brand’s health.
Now back to our discussion of the RACE framework
This initial phase in the customer engagement process is where your prospects are conducting research and exploring their options. Your primary goals should be to publish quality content and use effective direct marketing techniques to build awareness of your brand, products, and/or services. The KPIs associated with this step for different media channels include:
During this phase, it’s all about persuading prospects to start interacting with your brand and begin making buying decisions.
Your primary goals should be to continue publishing content and using direct marketing techniques, but also to engage directly with your prospects—online and offline.
In addition to the KPIs associated with stage 1, you should include:
During this phase, your prospects become your customers.
Your primary goals should be to generate purchases and integrate various nurturing, marketing automation, and remarketing techniques to ensure relevance and drive repeat sales.
In addition to the KPIs associated with stages 1 and 2, you should include:
During this phase, your focus should be on creating repeat customers and leveraging your relationships with those customers over time.
Here is where you build and expand customer engagements and measure customer lifetime value, not only from individual customers, but from the value of the customer advocates you’ve created.
In addition to the KPIs associated with stages 1, 2, and 3, you should include:
As you build your marketing dashboard, incorporate as many of the elements as possible from the four stages of the RACE framework detailed above. And tie your dashboard as closely as you can to the customer engagement process, as doing so will make it more meaningful not only to you, but to the rest of your organization as well.
When it’s all said and done, the impetus for creating and using a marketing dashboard should really be about measuring results—effectiveness, efficiency, and bottom-line ROI—not just activity. If at all possible, make your dashboard available publicly, and tie the goals to the compensation program for your marketing team. You’ll be amazed how that will help drive marketing and sales alignment, as well as the specific results most important to your organization’s success.
Before I look at this First, a few thoughts about Marketing Metrics and Analytics
Creating the Dashboard is only the beginning of using it to improve the business - it's how it's used for decision making that is important. It's as well to remember these five key lessons suggested by Marketo to improve your performance, profitability, and credibility with marketing metrics and analytics:
1. Plan for future success:
2. Maintain financial integrity:
3. Measure strategically:
4. Create an environment to succeed:
5. Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement:
A final thought, well known, but worth repeating:
“What gets measured, gets managed.”
Peter Drucker
Thanks to Kent Huffman for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Kent is Global Vice President, Marketing of Servergy and author of 8 Mandates for Social Media Marketing Success - read his updates and book details on this blog. You can follow Kent on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
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