How Do You Get on the Inc. 5000 List? Create Something That People Really Need
How it all started
When Matt Hertig and Michelle Jacobs created Alight Analytics, they had a pretty simple mission. They wanted to help build trust in the power of marketing, using analytics to prove the value of campaigns and connect marketing investments to bottom-line business outcomes.
In the beginning, it was just Matt, Michelle and the cat.
But here’s the thing: Marketers really needed help with analytics. Unlike a lot of other business functions, marketing relies on a lot of different data sources, and they aren’t always very user-friendly.
Why marketing analytics is such a challenge
If you’ve ever had to pull together a monthly marketing report, you know exactly what we’re talking about. Manually pulling data from source after source, then cutting and pasting everything into a common spreadsheet, then trying to make sure all the dimensions and metrics line up.
There are literally THOUSANDS of different sources of marketing data.
Under those conditions, even highly experienced teams were spending days and even weeks every month building @%#$ing reports.
That’s what life was like for Matt and Michelle when they first went into business as marketing analytics consultants who helped advertising agencies measure and analyze their digital campaigns, and it’s what inspired them to create ChannelMix.
ChannelMix solves the data problem, reducing data prep time by 80%
ChannelMix is a best-in-class marketing intelligence platform. It automatically collects data from any marketing, media and sales platform, bringing everything together in unified analysis-ready datasets. ChannelMix is supported by a team of experts, who help manage connections to data sources and perform other critical tasks so users don’t have to.
Advertising agencies and brands loved ChannelMix’s ability to provide fresh data every single morning. Some clients say they save hundreds of hours each month by working with ChannelMix. They go from spending 80 percent of their time on data prep and management to 20 percent or less.
And they’re not using those extra hours to perfect their ping-pong skills. They’re tackling more advanced forms of insight, including cross-channel reporting, multi-attribution modeling and predictive analytics, with their ChannelMix-powered datasets and support from our experts.
They possess a deeper knowledge of how their campaigns are performing. It’s the knowledge they need to align marketing and sales strategy, so they can maximize their spend and tactics and, ultimately, drive business growth.
Again, we want to emphasize: We just wanted to help marketers by making them look like the geniuses they are — we weren’t trying to win awards!
Things Spiraled Out of Control, and We Kept Landing on the Inc. 5000
Of course, word gets around. You help one marketing team, then a bunch of others get interested. ChannelMix, which started out serving agencies and brands in the Kansas City region, soon had a client base that reached across North America, including companies like Adidas, Mattel, Tinuiti, Maui Jim and many, many more.
And our team grew, from a spare bedroom to an entire floor of an office tower in Kansas City, from a duo to dozens of developers, strategists and data experts.
Pioneering the next generation of marketing analytics
Over the years, our approach has evolved, too. We started as an agency. Then we became a technology provider.
And finally, we realized something that our competitors still haven’t grasped. To produce the insights that marketers demand, you need technology and services, working hand in hand.
That’s why our team has developed a suite of next-generation analytics solutions that bring together all the resources that marketers need to answer their biggest questions. Those include:
- Marketing dashboards for Tableau, Power BI and other leading BI tools with built-in attribution and forecasting capabilities.
- The ChannelMix platform powers those dashboards with data aggregated from any marketing, media or sales source.
- Strategic services delivered by a team of data experts for all the things that software can’t do. This frees up marketers to focus on what really matters to them and their companies.
ChannelMix's reporting solution for lead gen marketers.
Ending up on the Inc. 5000 might not be, strictly speaking, an “accident,” if you really want to get bogged down in how the dictionary “defines words.” We may have possibly submitted an entry form for the Inc. 5000. (Six years in a row.)
You got us: We’re human. We love the sheet cake that comes as a result of winning a national award.
But we love helping marketers more.
How can we help you? We’d love to know more about your reporting goals and challenges.
Analytics represents the single most powerful tool for empowering marketers. To give them documented proof that their work makes a real, measurable difference. To allow them to see trends faster and more clearly, so they can guide strategy for their entire business. (Without being forced to pull an all-nighter or take work home.)
If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, we’d love to talk! Just hit us up below to start the conversation.
Let's Talk
Schedule a 30-minute solution consultation with our team to get started!