Online marketing can be very difficult to monitor with so many activities being undertaken.
Many businesses spend hours collecting and analysing data or fail to attempt to do any in the first place. This can cause problems with customer acquisition and optimisation of campaigns, which can reduce revenue, increase costs and restrict profits.
Businesses should be concerned with a lack of data analysis as it can result in missed opportunities to deliver more customers to the brand’s website.
To avoid this, use a business dashboard. The best can give excellent analysis across multiple activities as well as offer great control facilities.
Read more about business dashboards and how they can support your business here.
What Is A Business Dashboard?
A dashboard is a piece of software that can perform a variety of tasks. Normally dashboards allow for their customers to monitor the vital statistics of their websites. This includes how many visitors are landing on their website, what pages they are viewing, how long they are spending on pages, their referral sites and bounce rates.
Business dashboards can also be integrated into your marketing channels allowing you to plan, initiate and monitor campaigns from one place. One of the most common digital marketing channels to be integrated into a dashboard is social media. These dashboards normally allow you to schedule and monitor numerous social media plans in one place.
Other dashboards can allow you to run email marketing campaigns, post directly to your blog or monitor pay-per-click campaigns.
What Are The Benefits Of A Business Dashboard?
Business dashboards offer many advantages to your business. The amount of time that a single control centre can save your business is significant. It takes an enormous amount of time logging into each of your marketing platforms and performing tasks.
Also, many social media profiles don’t allow you to schedule posts for future release. Scheduling posts for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social media channels allows you to input all your desired updates in a single session and then leave it to run. Many companies can expect to save a couple of hours a week from using a business dashboard in this manner.
However, dashboards become really useful when they are used for monitoring statistics. Numerous statistics are monitored on a dashboard both for a website, social media, email campaigns and even PPC if they are included within the dashboard.
Some dashboards will also link to social monitoring tools like Klout, to demonstrate your online reach.
These are really important statistics as they can indicate where you need to make improvements. For instance, knowing you have a significant proportion of new visitors can demonstrate you are not encouraging visitors to revisit your site.
Statistics state that 70% of your audience will not return to your site unless you subscribe them to your blog or email list. Therefore, you can determine that you need to look at how you get visitors to subscribe.
Another example would be with the followers. Often these statistics allow you to see if you have a positive or negative net effect. Knowing which way your social following is progressing can demonstrate whether you are including the right hashtags and content in your updates. If there is a negative impact on your following you can take action.
Dashboards can also monitor the number of shares, mentions and click-through rates your updates receive. Some dashboards will even save time by automatically creating shortened URLs for your updates; saving vital space and making them look more aesthetically pleasing.
What some dashboards don’t do is monitor the number of times your updates are ‘favourited’ by users on Twitter. This can be frustrating as this is a major trend on Twitter for users who want to continuously use your content for their own reference or social media campaigns. Hootsuite is a good example of a social media management dashboard which doesn’t allow this function.
The right dashboard can even go beyond the marketing of your business. Some dashboards allow you to monitor the financial performance of your business and how projects are progressing. These functions can save countless hours of work and help staff to be more productive.
How Can You Use A Dashboard?
A dashboard can be used in a variety of ways to improve your online marketing and business functions.
Without a dashboard it would be very hard to monitor all your business activities and know what directed traffic to your website. While Google Analytics has some functionality in statistical analysis, it doesn’t allow for monitoring of social media or email campaigns. Nor does it allow you to create content and post it directly to your marketing platforms.
So while useful, Google Analytics is not the full package as it has limited control functions.
Using the dashboard to control all of your marketing allows you to align all your efforts into one seamless marketing persona. This will increase the trust which your audience will place with your brand. The higher the trust the more likely the customer is going to buy from you.
A dashboard can also be used for maintenance of your campaigns. There are many activities which, if using separate systems, can become difficult to manage from a time perspective. However, the time saved with a dashboard allows for more advanced marketing activities.
One of the first activities that should be undertaken is the maintenance of your email marketing list. A dashboard should be able to demonstrate who is not responding to your emails. These individuals should be removed as they are likely not interested in your brand anymore.
Another use is to keep tabs on basic business functions. Your finance, sales and IT departments can all be monitored from one place. This can aid you and your management teams in knowing where investment is required or perhaps other support needed.
Conclusion
A business dashboard is a unique piece of software that enables you and other members of your team to manage the business in minute detail. There are many options for dashboards and each one has its own unique advantages and disadvantages as well features. With the right dashboard you can cut down on lost production hours, increase performance and improve profit margins.
Action Steps:
- Research which dashboard is right for your business and sign up.
- Train your staff in the efficient use of the dashboard.
- Monitor the results and see how much time and money you can save.
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