What is Data for Your Business?

I recently read an article about data-driven marketing and thought that data would be a great topic.  The article that I read was, in fact, just about “customer data”.  It was primarily about data related to specific people.  When they purchased in the past, social media interactions, etc.

This is not the type of data that we refer to and use for our contractor clients, at least in most cases.

The data which we help our contractor clients use for marketing is any data which we can use which will allow us to improve our marketing results.   Some of the data is related to individuals but in most cases the data is much different.  This illustrates the fact that valuable data can be different for two different businesses.  When we are building our client dashboards we always go through some exercises in exploring what data we need to use.   It is helpful for us, at the beginning, to understand what data we are going to be using.  We will explain more about that.

What Data to Use

There is no “standard data” which all contractors can use.  We always spend time exploring available data and determining what to use.  There are certainly data sources that our different clients have in common such as Google Analytics data.  Another data common to most of our clients, is lead and sales data.  There are, however, variations in lead and sales data.  How our clients store the data and how we can export that data vary from client to client.  You must be able to bring data from all of your data sources into one dashboard.  In many cases we also need to be able to manipulate the data in various ways as well.

You have to think about what data, if you could have it, would help you achieve better results.  Think outside-the-box.  Don’t be limited to data is is easily available.  Don’t be limited to how you visualize the data.

If you need certain data then figure out how to get, store, and visualize that data!

Dashboard

Once we have figured out what data we are going to use we then start building our clients’ dashboards.  Just as all data is different, so too is every dashboard.  We know what data we want to visualize so we determine ways to collect, manipulate and display it.  You do need to be creative when it comes to your data as  not all data can simply be exported and imported into your dashboard.  Sometimes you need to create a database where you can store the data that you need.  This is very often the case.

If you simply rely on each of your data sources and their corresponding dashboards you are not going to get the most out of your data.  If you do not have ways to combine and manipulate data then you are going to not get the most out of your data.

Having our data in one central dashboard is great for us when we are working on behalf of one of our clients.  It also makes it great for our client as they can access their dashboard 24/7/365.

If you would like to schedule a private demo we would be happy to show you one of our client dashboards.  Click here to schedule.

Here is a screenshot from one of our client dashboards: