Data Driven

It’s hard to believe I have been a partner at The Squad for almost a full year now. We have come a long way over the past 11 months and I am excited to see how the journey unfolds in 2017 and beyond for our team.

A Passion for Data

One of the things I began working on when I joined The Squad was upgrading our reporting and analytics capabilities. It is impossible to do high-level marketing for a sustained period of time without the right data set to measure performance and make decisions on the next steps. Our goal is to provide all of our clients with actionable marketing metrics that accurately measure marketing performance and ROI. In short, we want our clients to feel good about writing us a check each month.

Finding the Right Dashboard

Over the past few months, we have evaluated multiple web-based marketing dashboard platforms that have built-in integrations with a variety of analytics sources and marketing software that we use. Our hope was that we could leverage one of these platforms to create high-level marketing reports for our clients.

Most of the applications we tried were very good and would do about 90% of what we wanted them to do, but they couldn’t give us exactly what we want.

Transparency is a big part of our core values and we have to have a mechanism to report data to our clients in a way that is meaningful to them and accurately portrays the work we are doing.

Sometimes Old School is Still Best

After much thought, we have decided to develop our own reporting system that will pull in data from multiple sources and provide each partner client with meaningful marketing data that is both relevant and actionable.

I would love to tell you that we are in the process of developing a fancy software package with advanced APIs that aggregates all of the data and creates magical data visuals, but that is not the case.

We are using a customized Excel platform integrated with a graphics-driven PowerPoint presentation.

Old school, yes. But it works, and that is what we are most concerned with.

We will be completing the marketing dashboard over the next few weeks and revealing it to our partner clients in 2017.

You can get a sneak peak of the basis of our reporting by downloading a free version of our Marketing Performance Report template.