Choosing a Digital Dashboard for your Online Business

Hey everybody, it's Tara Bryan and you are listening to the Course Building Secrets Podcast. Whether you're a coach or a CEO, the success of your team and clients is based on your ability to deliver a consistent experience and guide them on the fastest path to results. This podcast will give you practical real life tips that you can use today to build your online experiences that get results and create raving fans. Why? So you can monetize your expertise and serve more people without adding more time or team to your business. If you're looking to uncover your million dollar framework, package it and use it to scale, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Hey, in this episode I'm going to talk about the dashboard or the hub. One of the biggest tech sort of wins that you can do is to create a central, sort of like one central location for your customers to go to get everything that they need around your products and programs and your whole digital experience. Now, this is something that a lot of people don't talk about, but I believe it is the difference between a successful, curated online experience and one that's just sort of a hot mess of, you know, paperclips and duct tape and all the things put together. So what typically happens is that when people are shifting into an online model, they've got some things here and some things there and everything is a little bit all over the place, right? You have some documents or templates or whatnot in Google Drive or Dropbox. You have some, maybe some courses that you've created in the past that are in some random tool. You've got you've just got everything kind of in multiple places. And this is really typical as entrepreneurs and business owners start to grow. And they learn about new tools and they've sold lifetime access to prior versions of whatever it is that they're delivering. And so you have, you know, kind of this prior version and this random tool, and then you are moving into this new tool. And so customers come in and they're not exactly sure how to log in, where to log in, or how to find what they need. And so regardless of what system that they're in, now I 100 percent endorse like moving to the right foundational system that becomes your core platform and everything goes from there, which is what we're really helping our customers do is, okay, start with the right foundation, start with a core platform and then build from there. But in reality, tools change and evolve. and so you're going to find yourselves, if you haven't already, in a place where you want to explore a new tool to become your platform of record that you use with your customers. So the way to deal with this is to create a dashboard or a one place where people can log in and they get everything they need in one visual view. That way they're not relying on you or your team to help them navigate or log in or figure out where to go or like what is, you know, all the things. You have one central place and then from there you can link to those different areas. So if you have a calendar and in your calendar tool is not in your core platform, you can still have a link to the calendar from that dashboard. So people know they log into this one place and it's going to send them to all the places that they need. So a calendar or to schedule a call or to take a, ah course or a program, a learning component to join a group or communicate with a group to send a message to whatever it is that you want them to be doing throughout your experience, you're creating a central place for them to go so that they can get all the answers. You can also put announcements or new things that are happening, but when you're just constantly changing tools and sending emails and sending various things, you know, your customers don't know where to go and they get confused and that's when they bounce. That's when they leave and you're not retaining them to be customers for life. And so regardless of what tool you use, I always recommend starting with a core dashboard. One place they can log in and visually see everything. Imagine if you were to go to Amazon and Amazon would send you to every single individual company's website when you were searching for a particular product that you wanted to purchase, right? Like it would be a disaster. You would be going down rabbit holes. You would, you know, find yourself trying to compare different things and be all over the place. So Amazon combines all of those into one platform that allows you to get that visual view. So, you know, you go to the one place and then you're going to search for all sorts of products all over the place. Same thing with Netflix. Netflix aggregates all the movies together into, into their platform. Some of the movies are made by Netflix, but not all of them. And so it aggregates it all into one place so you can go and search for what you want. And that's, that's the same concept of having a dashboard that really allows your customers that, that sort of comfort and consistency that they know where to go to get what they need and they don't have to think about it. They're already trying to exert so many brain calories to get from the problem they have to the result that they want. The last thing that they should have to be worried about is like, where do you go for this? How do you find that? What, how did I dig up this? Even just the other day, I had to go back and search for a kind of a random platform that, that was part of a program that I was in once, and luckily I keep all my emails. So if you're in Inbox Zero, I don't know how you do it, but I did a search in my email box for the login. It was from like back in like, I don't know, 2016 or something, but there would have been one central dashboard. I knew I could have logged in there and then gotten what I needed. I didn't have to hunt around and spend an extra half hour or 45 minutes in my day trying to figure out. What was that link again? Where do I go? How do I navigate? Right? That's somebody that's going to just bounce and they're going to go to the next program because it's just too complicated for them to find things. So even if you're changing tools, still put it all under one house, under one umbrella, so that everybody knows how to find things. regardless of where you're sending them within your digital environment. And I'm going to tell you that the other thing that you can do is start getting really strategic about what you're placing on that dashboard so people can find what they need, but they can also find other things that they don't even know you have yet, right? Other things that may be of interest to them that you can serve them as you start building out your digital dashboard. So again, highly recommend. And if you're interested in learning more about this, or you want us to help you create your digital dashboard, then go ahead and send me a message. You can find my information on the show notes, and I hope that you have a great day and that this tip is helpful for you as you continue to grow and scale your business.