Why is Tracking Important for Your Business
Tracking is a crucial aspect of any successfully run business. It’s the most effective and reliable way to prove a return on investment (ROI) in your company.
Some of the metrics worth monitoring include your sales, expenses, number of leads, website visitors, numbers of subscribers in your email list, number of calls, and so forth. Without tracking your business processes, you can’t possibly tell what’s working and what’s not.
Here is a look at how tracking can benefit your business.
1. Better Money Management
Tracking your efforts allows you to allocate your valuable resources to areas that have a greater potential for profitability. It also enables you to identify strategies that aren’t working, so you can either revise or abandon them. So, the knowledge that comes with keeping track of your business efforts ensures better money management and wise investment decisions.
2. Gives You Peace of Mind
Through tracking, you can easily see how well your products or services are doing. Some tools deliver a daily update of all your key metrics to your email. From that update, you can see your key performance indicators like current sales, profits, number of proposals, number of new clients, outcomes of your email promotions, and much more. By just taking a quick look at your update, you can tell how every section of your business is doing. You can also see what’s not working well and you’ll know exactly what corrective measure to take.
3. Enhances Employee Performance
When you’re not tracking the performance of your employees, they won’t perform at their maximum level. But when you track their performance and present them with their numerical scores in real-time, you will see a dramatic increase in your employees’ overall performance in no time.
For instance, if you want your customer service reps to minimize refunds, you need to provide them with an overview of their performances as quickly as you can. Charts detailing daily refunds, estimated refunds for the month, and month by month comparisons will encourage them to improve their performance.
4. Management Insights
Through tracking, you can gather a lot of data around your business that can offer valuable insights for management, and process that data in a way that ultimately boosts your business. Information about expenditure, profits, and growth will be part of the data collected. Such information can help you develop future projections, marketing strategies, and budgets.
5. Identify Problems
Regular tracking and reporting can help you identify any problems in your business before they blow out of proportions. If you only rely on a single annual report, then you may miss problems and hiccups. And that could result in the loss of both money and time. Tracking an area that has issues and reviewing data compiled over time can help you identify what has caused any problems or where they started. With that information, you can come up with an appropriate solution.
6. Identify Opportunities for Growth
In addition to identifying problems within your business, regular tracking can highlight any opportunities to grow. Regularly keeping track and reviewing your competitors can help you identify future growth opportunities, what is working well, and what can be done to improve the outcomes. This is particularly important if you’re planning to expand globally. The insights you acquire from your tracking reports will help you package your offerings in a way that resonates with your target international consumers.
Expanding globally is an entirely different ballgame. It’s not as easy as opening a new branch in a new location within your home country. There are regulations and requirements to comply with and different cultures to understand. Luckily, a reputable global PEO enterprise, such as New Horizons Global Partners can help you handle those challenges and establish an agile and competitive business in a new country. By letting the company create an international team and handle all processes associated with workforce management, you can direct everyday tasks of your team, focusing on things that are likely to set up your business for growth.
7. Find out the Overall Health of Your Brand
Tracking gives you a true picture of the overall health of your brand. It enables you to gain a deeper understanding of how consumers interact with your products and/or services. It also tells you the effect of your brand messaging on the buying behavior. Some of the metrics that you should track include:
- Awareness
- Purchase intent
- Preference
- Prior consumption/usage
- Impression
- Net Promoter Score
Tracking these metrics and analyzing the data you collect, you can have a clear picture of the quality of your brand in terms of overall health and how it compares with other similar brands. With this information, you will provide correct responses to questions such as:
- Who knows we exist?
- Who is or isn’t purchasing our offerings?
- What opinions do customers have about us?
Your answers to these questions will help you decide if it’s time to re-examine your messaging strategy, your marketing efforts, or perhaps the entire brand.
8. Perform a Competitive Analysis
How does your business weigh against the competition?
Are your products the first choice for your main audience?
To answer these two questions, you must perform some competitive analysis. To get started, identify your competitors and compare data such as revenue, customer loyalty, and costs of products and/or services. That way, you’ll get a clearer picture of where you stand against the competition. There are so many competitive analysis tools that can help you determine how your business measures up to competitors. For instance, if you want to know how your competitors are performing on social media, Sprout Social and Social Blade are your go-to tools.
Final Thoughts
Tracking your business efforts is a reliable way to verify ROI in your business. It enables you to highlight and solve problems while they are in their initial stages. It also enables you to highlight future growth opportunities and take advantage of them to help your business grow exponentially. There is also peace of mind that comes with knowing how every part of your business is performing.
