According to marketing dynamos, HubSpot, the average marketer spends around 16 hours a week on routine tasks. Think answering emails, list management, social media – the standard day-to-day.
Of the subset of tasks, creating and sending emails takes an average of 3.48 hours per week, while collecting, organising, and analysing marketing data takes 3.55 hours – and that’s a conservative response given that many of the marketers polled would have worked for a single company rather than across multiple clients, which you’d typically be doing if you’re working in an agency.
Multiply that 3.55 by a full 52-week year and the average marketer spends about 184 hours a year collecting, organising, and analysing their data. That’s more than an entire week of your time.
If you’ve got multiple clients on your hands, you’re facing an amorphous time-sink.
So how can a digital marketing dashboard help you to better manage your clients?
1. You’ll cut down on meetings about meetings
In Norse mythology, the Ouroboros is the famous snake that’s depicted as eating itself. In marketing, meetings about meetings are that Ouroboros. Somehow half the day has passed and all you’ve done is talk yourself in circles about impending campaigns and strategies.
There’s an old quote that sums it up even better: “A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.”
A digital marketing dashboard can make for a much more efficient setup. Instead of spending hours talking bosses and clients through marketing facts and figures, you can collate everything into a dash and present the data in a visual and comprehensible manner.
That way, you can focus on actually getting your work done.
2. You can respond faster to client queries and concerns
With all your data at your fingertips, you’ll be better equipped to respond to the questions your clients ask and want answered – pronto. Where once a question about analytics may have led to a frantic deep-dive for information, you can pop over to your dashboard and find what you need quick-sharp.
3. Month end reporting is less of a nightmare
Month end reporting – every marketer’s favourite hobby. It’s even worse if you’re responsible for multiple clients and you have heaps of data to wade through.
You’re drowning in the stuff – and you’re also responsible for making sure it all makes sense and the client can understand what you’re presenting them with.
Clients may understand the hard stats like conversion rates, sales, and revenue generated but they may struggle to understand more complex data – especially if they’re running a large site with multiple data streams or Big Data.
Data visualisation helps marketers make data digestible. A giant spreadsheet and report may explain everything – but the true value is in simple graphics that lay all the important points out.
The crux of intelligent data analysis is in storytelling. Gather your data and use it to tell the story of your marketing activities.
Visualisation documents the story so that your clients can come away from the report with a real sense of everything you have achieved. And you’ll have more time to get on with the actual marketing!
4. If it’s cloud-based, you’ll have access anywhere
An email thunders into your inbox from a client on a Saturday and you’re glued to the telly watching the rugby. You can ignore it (and face the wrath of your boss on Monday) or, if your dash is cloud-based, you can wait ‘til halftime and log in on your phone or tablet to quickly and efficiently deal with it.
Sorted.
5. You can address problems before they happen
Data mining is super useful for adopting a competitive edge: you can use it for sales forecasts, affinity analysis (aka the quippier ‘basket analysis’), merchandise management, marketing segmentation, and product production.
If you’re working with ecommerce clients, all these factors are imperative to the success of the brand. And sure, data analytics aren’t always right, but they can still help you have a contingency plan in case anything goes wrong.
Want to manage your clients more efficiently?
If you are looking for a way to streamline your marketing efforts, we have the answer. Statwolf provide a cutting-edge marketing analytics dashboard that integrates all your data and presents it to you in the most intuitive way possible – leaving you free to concentrate on marketing.
Get in touch today to see how we can help you increase the ROI of your efforts with a digital marketing dashboard. Feel free to check out our solutions for digital marketers too.
