Agency Spotlight: GlynnDevins (Life Before ChannelMix)

We’re chronicling a handful of our agency clients, giving you a window into their experience both before and after partnering with Alight Analytics. First, you will see the marketing data management problem through the eyes of marketing and advertising agencies. Then, the positive impact to the agency’s workload and client satisfaction is brought to life as a result of the tailored solution ChannelMix, Alight’s marketing data management platform, provides.

Agency posts will be split up into two parts: life before and after ChannelMix.

Up first: GlynnDevins

ABOUT GLYNNDEVINS

GlynnDevins is in a unique position: with hundreds of senior living communities as clients, they have a wealth of self-created industry benchmark data to mine. Based in Overland Park, Kansas, GlynnDevins is the nation’s leading marketing and advertising agency for senior living communities and their development and management partners.

GLYNNDEVINS: BEFORE CHANNELMIX

GlynnDevins knew they were sitting on a pile of gold, but just couldn’t access it. As Alight’s longest-standing client, GlynnDevins has been ahead of the curve of the analytics revolution. They were early to implement Google Analytics for website analysis and they were quick to pull and measure data from their marketing channels. They quickly created a vat of client-specific marketing performance data, all from the same senior living industry. Their own first party research, so-to-speak.

However, before partnering with Alight, their marketing analytics infrastructure was vastly different – an unwieldy behemoth, due to the number of clients and the sheer volume of data being extracted and analyzed. Each source system was siloed and separated, unable to communicate together to tell a holistic story about client performance or be used for determining critical industry benchmarks.

Between extraction, cleansing, and connection, data prep time alone could take well over 80 hours a month to support, leaving little time for analysis. As Blake Hodges, GlynnDevins’ Director of Data Strategy and Digital Analytics, describes, “Before we had [ChannelMix], it would take hours to put the data together. Our first reports were confusing grids of numbers and rows of data that didn’t tell a story. And by the time you pull that data out to show some kind of performance, you have no time to actually conclude anything from it.”

As Hodges notes, with so much time spent mired in the preparation of client data, it was difficult to average results, summarize performance, show trends, and glean an actionable path.

Even worse, clients would focus on the wrong metrics, getting hung up on data points that were not actionable. One client continually focused on the “average position” of their Google AdWords ads, in lieu of more critical metrics like conversion rate, and becoming increasingly agitated as it moved up and down each month.

“It was frustrating, because you knew there was a story inside the data, and you knew that people wanted the kind of information to know how their campaigns were performing,” said Hodges. “But it took so long to get to those conclusions that each month would just come faster and faster as you’re having to process those reports over and over again.”

Getting basic reporting out the door took so much time, none was left for looking cross-client for industry trends, rollups and overall agency performance.

As frustration boiled over into contempt for a burdensome and clumsy process, GlynnDevins finally contacted Alight to help develop a strategy to manage their data and provide a consolidated, connected, and holistic solution to their data aggregation needs.

Stay tuned until next week, as we’ll detail how ChannelMix has alleviated the headaches experienced by GlynnDevins and put them on the road to better reporting, analysis, and client value.