Grow Your Agency Effectively With Analytics Engineering

So you want to grow your agency? in this article I want to talk about the way in which Analytics Engineering can help..

You’re looking for..

Well thinking about these in turn..

Obviously you’ll want people to talk to. But once you’ve got them…

You’re going to want convincing stories to share..

Stories about your past successes? What you did, and crucially what the client got from it?

If you’re selling to any significant company – you’ve several stakeholders to convince. Some of them may believe marketers are like used car salesman. That it’s going to be hard to tell fact from fiction.

So apart from the brochures and whitepapers what can you show the hard bitten cynic? The CFO ?

Well how about the kind of clear reporting that can’t be argued with? Numbers that relate the marketing activity to business outcomes are good. Like qualified leads, or transactions. Exactly the kind of numbers that I’d expect a good analytics account to produce.

Imagine the difference? You’ve got trusted third party reports. Google will help sell them on how effective your agency is! It won’t outweigh all the other things you’re already using to help you sell.. But it won’t half help?

Extending the scope of your involvement involves buy in. Your immediate contacts will have to convince higher management. Lots of people will want to know that your marketing is working for them. And there are going to be cynics there too. Those who want to know the numbers? So again if you’re wandering in without the tools – you’re going to find it much harder than it need be!

To grow your agency you’lllYou need Case Studies – war stories? AND numbers.

Clear reports make it much easier to have a high value conversations with directors. Achieving the same buyin with poor reports is hard.

And the other area you’ll be looking to work on – is client relationships. That’s an area where – as the second part explained – the analytics engineer can help.

Technical employees often don’t appreciate commercial nuances and imperatives. These are more pressing in bigger clients.

So imagine a situation like one I recently had.

Imagine if your agency could introduce your “GA expert”. It the expert could lead a multi way phone conference. That’s you, GA expert, your client, web development partner team to client.

It’s not easy doing web conferences. Particularly if side conversations can happen between participants in the same room

In this case the client wanted to proceed. But the web development “partner” had expressed doubt that it could done.

My game plan was to talk through the data gathering needed. I had analysed the website. I had an informed view about how implementation might work.

I created a situation where I could quiz the partner on the details of their current solution. I could listen for the situation where the client hasn’t grasped the detail of what the partner has done. Despite the client believing they understood.

We wanted to leave the partner “having” to play ball to secure their relationship with the client.

Now you could get an employee to do this – but it wouldn’t be a trainee – it would be a senior (expensive) employee.

That kind of meeting enhances your relationship with the client. You’re helping them deal with difficult but important partners. You’re ensuring that the stakeholders see improvements from your involvement. That intransigent third parties can’t delay things.

As you grow your agency it will be increasingly involved in multi party projects. There will be peers – and even potential competitors round the virtual table.

A tame expert can exert rare skills that enhance all the other relationships. The client will value this. It makes an important contribution to building your business.

I hope these articles have given you a new perspective on Analytics Engineering.

In the first article I looked at the contribution Analytics Engineering could make.

In the second article I looked as how the freelance model would help many agencies work with bigger clients.

And finally that this could help you grow your agency deal with complex customers. To follow this up with a chat – just fill in your details in the box below.