Just imagine running a business where you don’t get to see the whole picture of how it’s really performing until the end of the month, or worse still, the end of the quarter. That’s when you get hit with a thirty page performance report that reads like ‘War and Peace’.
The trouble is that by the time you’ve deciphered it and you realise that you need to take action to address key areas, it’s often too late. You could say it’s like driving a car with a blindfold on. How do you know in which direction you’re supposed to be headed? This is where a business dashboard can help.
The importance of monitoring data
Every SMB owner knows the importance of monitoring information or data about their company to help them streamline their business. A business dashboard helps you to consolidate all of your data and statistics and display it in an easy-to read format on one screen. Doing so, allows key aspects of your business such as marketing and operating metrics, plus a whole host of other information, to be seen at a glance.
So why consolidate data?
No matter what type of business you run, your business data will be spread across multiple screens and multiple channels. Retrieving this data and collating it in one place can be both time consuming and frustrating. Easy visualization of data is a key factor for any business scaling and monitoring.
What an all-in-one business dashboard does is to pull this information from the multitudes of channels, and display them all on one screen in an easy-to read way. So now, if you want to check how your social media campaigns are doing, then it’s all there in front of you in one dashboard.
Image Credit: https://www.cyfe.com/blog/social-media-dashboard/
What about traffic sources, advertising leads, or daily/weekly sales? Again, no problem. Using a fully-customizable business dashboard everything is there, on one screen. The advantages of this are that you can quickly log on and see the overall health of your business in real-time.
Ultimately, what does this mean?
By having a holistic view of your business, it enables you to quickly spot problem areas, or areas of over/underperformance. In doing so you’re able to invest time, money and/or resources into the right places. These could be areas that are either working well and delivering great results, or vital areas that need improvement. For small businesses, having this type of information to hand is key. What’s more, as your business starts to make incremental improvements, it will lead to a better streamlined, customer-focused business.
So ask yourself this? As a business owner, are you content at steering your ship without a clue where you’re headed? Or would you rather have a clear path of where you need to take your business so you can compete in your industry? This is what a business dashboard can do for your company.