No matter what industry or niche you occupy, your business’s data has the potential to help you become more efficient, productive, and innovative.

Data gathering is not enough

Aside from assiduously collecting data, you need to be able to correctly evaluate and analyse the data you’re collecting. Misinterpreting or collecting the wrong data could lead to poor business decisions and loss of market share.

In this article, we’ll take a look at digital dashboards: what they are, and the benefits of using them to track, analyse, display and report your business intelligence metrics.

What is a digital dashboard?

A digital dashboard is a data tracking tool that collects raw data from multiple sources including websites, databases, CRM and ERP data, and online data trackers. The digital dashboard collates and interprets the data and presents the results in an easy-to-follow, interactive visual presentation.

What are the benefits of digital dashboards?

The interactive graphics provided by digital dashboards make it easy for business decision-makers to monitor and report on crucial business metrics. This has several benefits. We’ll unpack just a few of the big ones here:

1. Cutting through data overwhelm
Digital dashboards are highly effective at cutting through the overwhelming amount of data available, organising and presenting only data that is accurate, useful, and relevant.

2. Turn business data into business intelligence
With the right software development, your digital dashboard will transform business data into business intelligence. Digital dashboards are incredibly powerful and capable of combining data from multiple sources so that you can deeply analyse and explore the data directly in the dashboard.

3. Monitoring a variety of key business areas
Digital dashboards are incredibly versatile, and, with a little custom development, they can be designed to track a variety of business areas from human resources and supply chain monitoring to sales and marketing, and much more.

In marketing applications, you can view and interpret data from every phase of the customer life cycle in your digital dashboard. This helps you to direct your marketing efforts more effectively and boost your marketing ROI.

Digital dashboards will also organise all your sales data, making it easy to identify key trends, make more accurate forecasts and recognise opportunities for increasing revenue.

4. Make faster business decisions
A well-designed digital dashboard will contextualise the data you collect, converting it from mere facts and statistics into actionable insights. You’ll be able to drill down into important metrics with ease and make faster decisions in all key aspects of your business. Historical trends will become clear, as will valuable insights and knowledge that not only direct and inform business decisions, but also reveal opportunities for growth.

5. Boost your business intelligence capabilities
By facilitating access to historical, real-time, and predictive analytics, and combining these with data relating to your business goals and key performance indices, digital dashboards enhance your team’s business intelligence capabilities and make it easier to put your business intelligence into action.

6. Display and share data in meaningful ways
Digital dashboards enable you to present your business data to all stakeholders in an intuitive and meaningful way that makes a clear and compelling argument for your recommendations.

7. Improved communication, productivity and innovation
The dynamic nature of digital dashboard presentations makes it easy to communicate data-driven discoveries and decisions in a fast and effective visual way to all levels of the organisation. This reduces organisational silos, breaks down barriers and encourages interdepartmental communication, which, in turn, improves productivity and opens the way for innovation.

8. Proactively seek out and create business opportunities
Digital dashboards go way beyond attractive graphics to deliver insights that are custom-tailored to your specific goals and strategy. They not only provide you with real-time information but also clearly indicate the steps you need to take to hit important milestones.

With the right strategy and a well-designed digital dashboard, you will be able to easily turn your data into viable opportunities for growth that take both resources and risk into consideration. And by proactively seeking out and creating opportunities within your niche, you’ll easily establish a competitive edge.