As businesses continue to face uncertain macroeconomic conditions, Magna predicts the growth rate of marketing budgets will decline in 2023¹. Given this climate, it’s paramount to demonstrate the ROI of marketing spend. As a marketing agency, one of your primary functions is to uncover insights from the mountains of campaign data.  

With limited resources, how can you ensure that you are efficiently taking the lift of the brand, without putting extra lift on yourself, and continue to show your clients the value you provide?

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Common outdated data integration practices

You likely have dozens to hundreds of clients, each one with differing budgets and needs, looking to get most out of their marketing investment. To continue to demonstrate value for your clients, your team needs to efficiently extract insights from data.

Here are some practices that make it difficult to uncover those insights:

• Manually aggregating data from numerous platforms is a full time job in itself. It’s a tedious and error prone process; your data may be stale by the time it’s aggregated.
• Homegrown ETL pipelines require lots of upkeep and waste a lot of your data engineers’ time on tasks that don’t drive value.
• Open-source solutions can require you to wait for someone in the community to make updates and changes.
  

Saving on data analytics with automation

Any time spent filling out spreadsheets or fixing data pipelines wastes valuable resources your agency could use elsewhere. Process client data more efficiently with the modern data stack (MDS). An MDS consists of:

• A fully managed ELT (extract, load, transform) data pipeline
• A cloud-based data warehouse or data lake as a destination
• A data transformation tool
• A business intelligence or data visualization platform
  

Data engineers and analysts don’t need to worry about extracting and cleaning data, so they have more time to focus on more impactful aspects of your business. The MDS provides utility in many different functions, but it can also be leveraged with a data activation tool to build a Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP). A Composable CDP provides a single source of truth across the entire organization, greater flexibility, improved data security and greatly reduces launch times to solve complex problems.

The goal of an MDS is to analyze your business’ data to proactively uncover new areas of opportunity and improve efficiency. Break down data silos to:

• Better understand customer journeys and identify growth opportunities
• Build a customer 360 to create more effective campaigns
• Provide greater ROI for your clients.
  

Take Seer Interactive as an example. The digital marketing agency transitioned from using its own pipelines to open-source solutions and ultimately to Fivetran, which resulted in saving dozens of hours per week for their engineers and over 700 hours a year for their account managers. That extra time allowed them to focus more on uncovering valuable insights.

“Imagine your car needs repair; open-source is like fixing your own engine, while Fivetran is like taking your car to the shop. Fixing it yourself takes a lot more time and money — leaving you wishing you had taken your car to the shop in the first place.”

- Ethan Lyon, Associate Director of Engineering, Seer Interactive

Being a value add

In uncertain times, budget control is essential. As organizations tighten their belts, visibility into ROI and the effectiveness of campaigns are under close scrutiny. Without the ability to centralize data and integrate information into a single, shareable source, marketing teams cannot deliver meaningful insights to the business or make actionable changes that drive better results.

Seer Interactive received this exact request from a client. By building strong data flows that enabled them to automatically enrich Google Ads data with other data sources, the team was able to build an automated dashboard to report on how effective their recommendations are and where their dollars are being spent.

By syncing their data and leveraging this dashboard, Seer helped a financial sector client save a potential $60,000 in advertising spend by identifying why the term “bank account” all of a sudden experienced high volume of PPC.

Analysis paralysis is easy to fall into with the limitless data available to us. Firms can overcome this by using a platform that provides a holistic view of marketing efforts, including insights to leverage with other departments.

Data consultancy Untitled, for example, uses Powered by Fivetran (PBF) to effortlessly connect to its clients’ data. PBF is an implementation of standard Fivetran designed to embed into web applications and analytics portals. It includes all of the data replication and automation technology found in Fivetran’s core offering, as well as specific components designed to support the unique requirements of efficiently collecting data from an end user.

With PBF, Untitled can quickly provide answers to critical questions, such as:

• What’s the ROI of advertising dollars?
• How can we better predict customer churn?
• How is the marketing team pacing towards spending their budget?

Metrics that your agency should be looking at

As an agency, you’re likely running various campaigns to help retain and grow your client base. Some common metrics to analyze the performance of these campaigns may include:

• Net promoter score (NPS): Measures the loyalty of a company’s customer base
• Click through rate (CTR): Tells the engagement rate for an email or ad campaign
• Cost per lead: Tracks how cost-effective your marketing campaigns are when it comes to generating new leads for your sales team.
  

Although these metrics are often scattered across different platforms, you can centralize your data to get a comprehensive view of your agency’s performance. By doing so, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance your performance and grow your client base. An ideal comprehensive view consists of the following:

• See your entire marketing mix: Know how and where all your ad dollars are being spent to maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Brand awareness: Understand what’s capturing prospects early on and optimize your marketing funnel
• Cost of acquisition: Determine the efforts necessary to acquire customers efficiently
• Customer 360: Build a holistic view of your customers and segment the user base & personalize outreach to provide customers with the best experience.
  

Media giant Red Ventures (RV) used to spend 100 to 150 hours per data integration. Today, that figure is 10 hours — which frees up data engineers to work on higher-value tasks. And because Fivetran provides the same data set for every client and dbt™ gives everyone a clear view of data transformations, RV’s engineering team has reduced troubleshooting from 50 percent of its time to less than 20 percent. This data democratization helped its clients increase cost efficiency by 20 percent while supporting 30 percent more clients — without increasing headcount. Saving your clients money is a surefire way to help your NPS.

Centralize marketing data and drive ROI with Fivetran

Fivetran simplifies and optimizes agency workflows with its scalable, fully managed automated data movement platform. By enabling marketing agencies to quickly and easily set up multiple data connectors from over 300 sources, including 60 in just marketing analytics, Fivetran helps agencies uncover valuable insights for clients and demonstrate their value. With Fivetran, agencies can streamline their processes and improve efficiency, rather than investing time and resources in building and maintaining complex, costly data pipelines.

Fivetran offers flexible pricing based on usage. Whether you use a separate Fivetran connector for each client, or one connector per source for all of your clients, you’re not charged for adding connectors as you continue to grow and add more clients.

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