True story: Marketing analytics can help your agency win more work, boost revenue and generally revolutionize your business. Just ask Infinity Marketing.
Infinity, an Alight client, has created a successful, profitable analytics practice with only two people. And while they’re a relatively small team, Infinity’s analytics unit is able to deliver the lightning-fast reports and in-depth recommendations that clients are hungry for.
The agency uses ChannelMix, Alight’s marketing intelligence platform, to automate its data aggregation and preparation, saving its analysts significant amounts of time.
Meghan Dimas, who heads up Infinity Marketing’s marketing analytics effort, talked about how the agency has increased its ability to produce game-changing insights for clients.
Tell us a little about Infinity Marketing. What do you do?
I’m the analytics manager at Infinity, which is a fully integrated agency in Greenville, S.C. We serve regional and local clients in healthcare, higher education, retail, financial services and other verticals.
Since our team launched about three years ago, analytics has become one of the agency’s signature offerings.
What were Infinity’s goals for its marketing analytics?
First, we needed to make our client reporting more efficient.
At one time, our team was spending 60 to 70 percent of our time on data aggregation and manually formatting the data that went into those reports. We were able to devote only 15 percent of our time to developing actionable, valuable insights.
We had to solve that efficiency problem because we really wanted to go beyond standard performance reporting — telling clients how last month’s media buy performed, for example — and give them deeper insight and context into what’s happening in their business.
Another big idea was to create a more unified and consistent approach to data management and reporting as an agency. We needed to do this in order to ensure we were always being goal-oriented and creating internal synergies wherever possible.
Finally, we planned to turn analytics into a profit center, something we could monetize and use as a differentiator in new business pitches and RFPs. As the marketing technology landscape continues to change and clients ask more sophisticated questions, we needed to be a pioneer in the space as opposed to getting left behind.
How does Infinity Marketing use ChannelMix?
ChannelMix is our data aggregation software, automatically bringing all our data together in one place. It creates unified datasets that we can easily analyze with Tableau, our visualization tool.
ChannelMix connects to all the platforms we’re using: the Google and Facebook families of products, The Trade Desk, Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce, all of the organic data sources.
Plus, several of our clients have their own CRMs, and Alight’s team was able to create custom connections to bring that data into ChannelMix.
We don’t have an in-house developer, so it was really important for us to have a partner like Alight, that was able to serve as an extension of our team. As a small team, that was very appealing.
We still “own” the overall data strategy since nobody knows our clients like we do, but Alight’s assistance allowed us to focus on the larger tasks at hand like creating easily digestible data visualizations and delivering actionable insights to our clients. This still holds true today!
What kind of results have you achieved with ChannelMix?
We’re much more efficient. Now 95 percent of our time is devoted to optimization and insights — and just 5 percent to data prep and management.
As a result, we’re faster when it comes to campaign optimization and have reduced the time to insight generation. Our marketing dashboards update every morning with results from the previous day, right at our fingertips, in an interactive way.
Because our analytics team and media team have more time, we’re able to undertake more complex, more valuable work for clients, including more frequent collaborative conversations about data and strategy.
Working with our clients to gain access, we’re tracking things like new patient volumes at the service-line level for a healthcare system and loan applications for credit unions and financial services clients.
Our goal is to bring in as much mid- and lower-funnel data as possible to be able to speak to the impact of marketing efforts on key business goals and objectives. This helps us to better understand the customer journey and create strategies that encourage the desired actions.
Our storytelling capabilities have also improved due to the additional information we are able to tap into in an automated way. We can now identify areas of insight that we previously didn’t have visibility into and, in many cases, our clients didn’t have insight into either.
It’s the kind of insight that clients are willing to pay for. We’ve been able to create a series of analytics products that have become a new source of revenue for Infinity. We have been able to create a scalable and sustainable program three times faster than initially projected due to our powerful partnership with Alight. Next up — the wonderful world of predictive analytics and multi-channel attribution!
Discover how Infinity Marketing has transformed analytics into a persistent source of new revenue. Register for “How Small & Midsize Agencies Can Turn Marketing Analytics into a Profit Center,” a webinar featuring Infinity Marketing’s story, on Feb. 20!