7 Essential Components of Market Planning and Importance of Marketing Dashboard

7 ESSENTIAL COMPONENT OF MARKET PLANNING :-
1. Market research. Research is the backbone of the marketing plan.
Your local library is a great place to start, offering reports like Standard &
Poors or IBISWorld. Some library cards even allow access to online
services from home. Identify consumer buying habits in the industry,
market size, market growth or decline, and any current trends.
2. Target market. A well-designed target market description identifies
your most likely buyers. In addition, you should discuss at least two or
three levels of segmentation. A language tutoring business might target
both students and foreign-born employees who want to improve their
English.
3. Positioning. What is the perception of your brand in the marketplace?
For example, if your restaurant sells burgers, do customers see you as
the place to go for gluten-free or healthy options or the place to go if
you’ve got an appetite for a double cheeseburger? The difference in how
the target market sees you is your positioning. Develop compelling
branding and marketing messages that clearly communicate how you
want to be perceived.
4. Competitive analysis. You need to know who your competitors are
and how your products and services are different. What is the price point
at which your competitors are selling, and what segment of the market
are they aiming to reach? Knowing the ins and outs of your competitors
will help you better position your business and stand out from the
competition.
5. Market strategy. Your marketing strategy is your path to sales goals.
Ask yourself “How will I find and attract my most likely buyers?” This is
the core of what the strategy should explain. It should look at the entire
marketplace and then break down specific tactics including such as
events, direct mail, email, social media, content strategy, street teams,
couponing, webinars, seminars, partnerships, and other activities that will
help you gain access to customers.
6. Budget. Develop a month-by-month schedule of what you plan to
spend on marketing. Also include a “red light” decision point. For each
activity, establish a metric that tells you to stop if it’s not generating
sufficient return on investment (ROI).

7. Metrics. Track your marketing success with Google Analytics for
website conversions and a simple Excel sheet to compare your budget
against the actual ROI. Test programs over the course of a 30- to 60-day
period, and evaluate the results. Repeat any programs that are delivering
sales or sign-ups to your email list, and get rid of anything that’s not.
WHAT IS A MARKETING DASHBOARD?
A marketing dashboard is a platform, or web app, that collects all of your
marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and critical metrics into an
intuitive display. It’s the best way to understand how you’re performing
against your most important metrics in one step. The information that is
visualized is pulled from one or multiple data sources, internal or external or
both, and updated in real-time. You can also add web-based elements like
news and further incorporate elements such as e-mail.
IMPORTANCE OF DASHBOARD
Better decisions through dashboards
Business intelligence dashboards (sometimes referred to as enterprise
dashboards) are an analytics tool used to visualise Big Data across all
industries. These dashboards provide critical reporting and metrics
information and are integral in Business Performance Management. Much
like the dashboard in your vehicle, dashboards display real-time key
metrics and performance indicators, guiding decisions and better
navigating the surrounding landscape.
 Get the real story. When it’s all on a dashboard, you can get to the
heart of how well your marketing efforts are performing – or
underperforming. You can also see the ‘why’ around how well your
planning worked when put into action, from lead generation to social
media to web performance, to get the complete story. Fiona said, “We
need them because we are spending millions of our client’s dollars and
they need to know the effectiveness of what we are doing on their
behalf.”
 Get everyone on the same page. From top-executives to team
members, visualizing up-to-the-minute marketing results means that
everyone knows what your efforts have yielded. Helping internal and
external customers understand where their money is going,
effectiveness, and ROI. One of the benefits of everyone seeing results
and underlying reasons for them Fiona said is, “It can be used to drive
changes within the organization—wiser spending, time-management,
and other practices that affect profitability.

 Get to truly informed decision making. Because you have up to the
minute data, you can understand and then react quickly to do what’s
best for business, whether it’s an email campaign’s effectiveness you’re
measuring, looking at how well your SEO efforts are working to drive
public relations, or website analytics. Information is power—and with a
well-designed dashboard, you can be nimble, and rely not on your gut,
but on the data.
ROLE OF METRICS
Your first digital marketing dashboard
Before we dive into the individual Klips, let's take a look at the final
product..
My aim in designing this dashboard was to provide a survey of the
services and marketing metrics you should be tracking. This dashboard
isn't designed to be a comprehensive, in-depth overview; rather, it's
designed to be a working proof of concept of what you can accomplish
with data dashboards, which, in effect, is gaining visibility into all your
core metrics.
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Google Analytics + Salesforce