Want to Prove Content Marketing ROI? You Need an Actionable Marketing Dashboard

Content marketers are believers. We believe our content brings real value to our prospects, clients, and partners. We believe our content is essential for driving demand. And we believe that content marketing is essential for bolstering our company’s bottom line.

However, we’re also realistic; as it’s often said: Seeing is believing. So, we need to be able to show proof of content marketing ROI to get our key stakeholders to believe, too.

And to do this, we need a source of truth that artfully and easily shows how we’re performing against our benchmarks, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs), as well as where we’ve identified opportunities to improve results. We need an actionable content marketing dashboard.

To put it simply, when set up right, an actionable dashboard allows us to answer two simple questions: 1) Is what we’re doing working? 2) Why is it (or isn’t) working?

How does this help you identify, show, and prove ROI across the organization? Let’s dive in.

How Actionable Content Marketing Dashboards Can Inform, Inspire, & Show ROI

What are the benefits of an actionable content marketing dashboard? All the fun and exciting benefits that come from knowing how your content is performing at a granular level aside, there are a ton of benefits that come from a holistic content marketing dashboard—especially when it comes to getting stakeholder engagement and buy-in.

An actionable marketing dashboard isn’t just a long, dry analytics report. It’s visually engaging and easy to digest.

Highlight the Bottom Line for Leadership

The executives hold the purse-strings. And they want to ensure the budget you’ve been given is being put to good use.

With an actionable dashboard, you can avoid the awkward “What have you done for me lately?” conversation with your leadership team by easily showing them how your content marketing efforts tie back to overall business objectives.

With the right data and insight readily available in your dashboard, you can showcase performance from visit to sale, so when they ask: “Is this content getting us an ROI?” Your answer can be: “You bet. In fact, overall our content marketing efforts drove 200% ROI in 2018 and we’re trending to exceed that benchmark in 2019 based on our goals.”

Of course, as a general rule, you don’t lose marketing funding for something that pays for itself and more.

Inspire Your Peers Inside & Outside the Marketing Department

When your marketing team members are able to see the fruits of their labor, they’ll be more driven to continue what’s working and looking for innovation opportunities to take it to the next level.

In addition, if you’ve been working with an internal subject matter expert such as your human resources director or sales manager to create content, showcasing how their contributions are making an impact will make them more open to ongoing collaboration—which can help all parties reach their goals.

As a little tip, consider making a leaderboard in your dashboard so contributors can easily track how the content they’ve contributed to is performing. Adding a little competition based on objectives is a fun way to level-up performance. (Betting on this performance is optional.)

Set New Hires Up for Scalable Marketing Success

Another key benefit is that actionable marketing dashboards can help you scale your content marketing efforts. For example, if you find yourself proving so much ROI that you need to expand your team to keep up with demand, you can easily transfer knowledge to your new hires about what kind of content works and doesn’t work, and how they can know the difference.

This kind of results-focused training and new hire orientation helps keep your full team aligned around what really matters—creating and marketing quality content that exceeds your benchmarks and blows your goals out of the water.

Strengthen Relationships With Clients & Influential Collaborators

Whether you’re working with industry influencers to co-create content or you regularly engage clients to provide testimonials and case studies, you have the opportunity to use your marketing dashboard to show them not only how valuable they are to your marketing efforts, but the mutual value being incurred.

For example, let’s say a client helped create a testimonial or case study that saw a 300% increase in visibility over benchmark for that content type. Your message to them can be that together you’ve driven an incredible amount of brand awareness for both of your organizations.

Your Actionable Next Step? Create Your Content Marketing Dashboard

The performance of your content marketing means much more than traditional success metrics—it can mean visibility for your business, strength for your bottom line, and alignment for your internal teams.

If you’re ready for more visibility and creating a stronger business case for your efforts, the first step is to create a dashboard of your own, tailored to your marketing and business objectives.

Again, when properly set up, an actionable dashboard should allow you to answer two simple questions: 1) Is what we’re doing working? 2) Why is it (or isn’t) working?

Wondering how to create this magical dashboard? Check out our guide to marketing dashboard essentials to get started on your path toward data-driven success.