Dashboards: More than Keeping Score

Marketing dashboards are an essential deliverable for any marketing team. Senior leaders want to know what they are getting for their investment in marketing, and how marketing will advance their strategic plan. And for marketers, it is important to document how effective you were in achieving your stated goals. So, where to begin?

In this day of digital marketing, creating dashboards are easier than ever—unless you do not have an advanced digital program. If you don’t have a strong program, you need to be very clear with management about what you can deliver and document in your annual marketing plan.

• If you want to improve your brand strength, then have a methodology and vendor to measure that.
• If you are going to drive business to a certain program, then work with operations to track new patients, returning patients, newly referring physicians and patient origin.
• If addressing the patient experience, then have a mystery shopping program and vendor in place to capture benchmarks and then improvements in the scores.

For those with digital programs in place, the challenge is what data to report. You have abundant data and multiple audiences that want communication. So, segment your groups and design dashboards that speak to their priorities:

• Senior leadership:
  • Brand strength vis-a-vis competitors
  • Increased volume of new and existing patients
  • Expanded service areas
• Service-line staff:
  • Newly referring physicians, especially for specialty services
  • Number of patients coming from your employed medical group
  • Patient origin, by geography
  • Increased volume of new and returning patients
  • Patient-experience scores
  • Payor mix

Just as dashboards are important to your constituents, they are doubly important to your marketing staff. Dashboards can concisely communicate:

1. Which campaigns worked, and which fell short of projections—this is a learning moment to identify success factors in your market.
2. If there are patient messages that need to be stressed in strategies and tactics—something your colleagues in operations can help determine.
3. If, based on ROMI, you need to consider greater or lesser investment in campaigns.
   • What timing worked?
   • What channels had the best results?
   • How can you transfer successful results to other services or geographies?
   • For any successful campaign, secure patient stories for program use.

AB&C has worked with a number of clients who do and do not have advanced analytics. Working together, we can design dashboards that document your efforts, results and successes to your organization.