Creating, disseminating and tracking effective marketing content involves a lot of moving parts. It can be hard to keep tabs on everything — yet doing so is essential if you want each campaign to be more successful than the last. As with any project that consists of multiple tasks, collating them in some way will help free up your time, keep everything organized and generally make life easier on a project-by-project basis. This means locating everything in one handy, centralized marketing dashboard.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can create better content by using a solution that offers a variety of management tools (such as analytics, social media and keyword-related widgets).
Let’s get started!
Components of a successful content marketing campaign
As you probably know, a marketing campaign is very much a commitment. Putting your full effort into the venture is the only way to succeed. What’s more, there are inherently many different components to any effective campaign.
For instance, you’ll need to spread your message via multiple channels.
- Social media is often a primary vehicle for a marketing campaign.
- Your business website will likely play a pivotal role.
- Email marketing remains a key component for many marketing campaigns.
- Depending on your campaign and goals, you may also want to use crowdfunding platforms to curate interest and promote your products.
Of course, juggling that many balls can be a challenge. Plus, you’ll need to factor in development and sales work, such as putting together in-depth reports on how the project as a whole is faring. That’s a lot for any small- to medium-sized business to keep up with.
Related: How to use omni-channel marketing to grow your small business
The pitfalls of managing your marketing channels separately
Ultimately, looking after and giving full attention to all vital aspects of your marketing campaign requires plenty of manpower, if not more hours than the day offers. If you’re finding the pressure of managing your campaign tough, that can impact your ability to be effective.
For example, imagine that you’re preoccupied with making sure your social media posts are performing well, and are having a positive effect on conversions. Doing that well requires a lot of effort, which could result in another area — for example, your email marketing — taking a back seat.
In this case, social media could provide a fruitful return based on the work you do. However, email marketing has been proven to offer a fantastic conversion rate, but only if managed correctly.
By picking sides due to time constraints, you’re essentially sacrificing one for the other.
The central issue here is how to dedicate the same level of resources (in this instance, your time and attention) to all areas of your marketing that need it. In our opinion, there’s only one answer — a marketing dashboard.
Advantages of using a marketing dashboard
Why use a marketing dashboard? Let’s turn to an analogy. Imagine that you have two cute puppies on opposite sides of a room, and both are in severe need of petting. This sounds like a job for you, so you begin the task.
However, you soon realize that there’s a lot of wasted time in having to travel back and forth across the room, and it keeps you from offering enough attention to satisfy everyone’s needs. The solution in this case is to bring those puppies closer together, ideally in the center of the room. That way, you can dedicate two hands to two heads, and keep both happy for longer.
You can probably see where we’re heading with this.
The various channels and tasks in your marketing campaign are like greedy puppies, drawing your attention from all corners of the room.
Using a content marketing dashboard to collate all of the various metrics, analytics, data sources and more brings them all into one space, where you can care for them more efficiently.
This kind of marketing dashboard can also provide you with more time to keep an eye on every important aspect. Plus, it will offer tools that can make it quicker to complete vital tasks. In other words, it’s an invaluable resource for pretty much any campaign.
How to use a marketing dashboard
Let’s wrap up by taking a look at exactly what a content marketing dashboard can do for you. In a general sense, it’s a central “base” for everything related to your campaign, which can be accessed through an easy-to-understand Graphical User Interface (GUI).
As for specific features, most quality solutions include the following:
- An ability to monitor practically everything related to your campaign metrics.
- Real-time reporting, which gives you the ability to react to developments almost immediately.
- Historical data preservation, so you can make predictions and comparisons from a larger sample size.
- A fully-featured social media publishing solution, giving you the option to manage all your social media from within the marketing dashboard.
This is only a snapshot of the functionality you’ll get, and each individual tool differs. Fortunately, there are a number of marketing dashboard options at your disposal.
For example, Rivery is a code-free solution that lets you aggregate data from several platforms into your own cloud-based data systems. This lets you run queries and generate reports.
On the other hand, Domo is arguably a more feature-packed option, allowing for sophisticated data discovery, mashups and visualizations.
However, for our money, Cyfe is the best of both worlds. It’s used by thousands of enterprises, such as ABC, AT&T and Whole Foods. Plus, it includes a wealth of integrations across the board, and also uniquely lets you “mash up” metrics to create new insights — even if they’re from completely different apps.
Conclusion
Content marketing isn’t an easy thing to do well, especially if you strive to be the best in your field. What’s more, there’s a whole ream of tasks associated even with a small campaign. Managing everything can easily become an exercise in firefighting, rather than the smooth sailing you’d hoped for.
A centralized marketing dashboard is therefore an immensely helpful tool, especially when the solution you’re using offers dozens of integrations.
Ultimately, having everything under one roof that can help you track and ideate content, analyze its performance and make changes for the next campaign can be the difference between failure and success.
