Working in marketing agencies, there are a lot of time pressures – and finding the time to understand and implement new martech can be difficult.
Modern agency marketers are already balancing numerous different tasks at the same time, but now there’s another spinning plate to add to the mix. Clients are now demanding a data-driven approach. And that means more of the agency marketer’s time is taken up with data ops.
Marketers who embarked on a career to use their creativity are ending up in a role that’s much more data-focused than they may have anticipated.
While it’s not easy for agencies to step back and realise that there is a simpler way of doing things, by becoming more data-driven in their approach, there are a wealth of benefits to uncover.
Here are the top 5 reasons why agencies need to become more data mature:
1. Optimise campaigns
By creating a clear view of marketing performance across all channels, not only will it become far easier to identify channels that are performing well and boost them, but teams monitoring the performance of campaigns will also be able to spot outliers such as sudden spikes in CPC for adwords. Reacting to these more quickly will reduce wasted ad spend
No team wants to spend time and resources working on a multi-channel campaign just to discover it hasn’t performed well because it has been published at the wrong time or on the wrong channel.
2. Justify budget decisions for your clients
A third of agency marketers say they struggle to have visibility over their marketing channels and activities. Unsurprising when most marketing teams are spending huge amounts of time pulling their marketing reports via spreadsheets.
However, the challenges don’t stop there. In our latest State of Play research, we found:
Over half of agency marketers are still not able to access all their marketing data from a centralised data warehouse/data lake.
Only 58% of agency marketers have self-service access to up-to-date reporting.
Less than half of agency marketers can track the end-to-end performance of marketing campaigns.
Many marketers are still relying on guesswork over the performance of their campaigns, which makes explaining strategic decisions difficult. Being able to measure and report the impact of marketing decisions is a huge draw for any agency.
3. Make timely decisions based on data
Modern agencies can’t afford to waste time on manual data integration. If it takes three days to pull insights then ultimately, by the time you act on them they are already outdated, and acting on outdated insights ultimately equates to wasted budgets.
A recent study found that a consumer electricals company saved $2.9 million in ad spend over three years due to timely insights on performance.
“We were doing marketing in the dark,” said the Head of Marketing Insights and Performance. “We had spreadsheet-based reporting, which is like looking in the rear mirror at what happened last month, but we were not able to look forward and steer.”
4. Cut down time spent on reporting
The recent Adverity State of Play research discovered that 54% of agencies are currently building their marketing reports on spreadsheets. So, it’s no shock to find that almost two-fifths (39%) struggled with the amount of time they were spending on manually wrangling data for reporting, citing it as their number one challenge.
By automating their manual data processes, teams and individuals find they have far more time to utilise the insights from their data and add value to clients.
A recent study on a global consumer electricals company found that having access to automatically updated reports and dashboards saved the marketing teams significant time and effort on running weekly or monthly spreadsheet-based reports.
The company estimated that this could cut down about 75% of their time spent on these activities which amounted to time savings of $1.8 million over three years.
5. Automate data governance
Data governance can be a time consuming and stressful task, and the penalties for failing to comply with data regulations can be devastating. Centralising data into a secure environment means that your data governance is taken care of.
So, with the rise of new sophisticated marketing technology, marketers can avoid being overwhelmed by their own marketing data. By becoming more data-driven, you can free yourselves of the IT aspects of your role, and get back to creativity.