How Hybrid Marketing Co. Offers More In-Depth Client Reporting While Saving Thousands Every Month

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For the better part of 50 years, cannabis has been one of the most controversial topics in America. While in the past, every farm in the US was required to grow a strain of hemp to manufacture hemp products (like clothes, ship ropes, etc.), today, cannabis is legal in only 11 states for recreational use and 33 states for medicinal use.

Due to strict laws, anything done or said for promotional purposes is heavily regulated, and any cannabis companies looking to boost their brand image may face significant challenges.

This is where Hybrid Marketing Co. comes in.

This Denver-based marketing company specializes in cannabis marketing and offers to their clients custom integrated marketing plans that include everything from trade show assistance to content development, go-to-market strategies, SEO services, and more. Their goal is to help their clients get the most out of their industry while staying within legal regulations. 

To dive deeper into the challenges they were facing and how Databox was able to help, we sat down with Hybrid Marketing Co.’s Director of Strategy, Johnathan McFarlane. He’s solely responsible for developing the roadmap for each of their clients.

The Challenge

With so many regulations at the federal level and differing state laws, cannabis businesses need to be selective in which creative companies they work with. Whatever content is put out there needs to abide by specific state guidelines that aren’t the same in every legal cannabis area of the nation. In other words, you can’t make a blanket ad for the entire country. 

Hybrid Marketing Co. specializes in cannabis and has since its founding. But because of these varied state-by-state legalities, McFarlane’s team constantly needs to pull together out-of-the-box custom marketing strategies. 

“If we say or do the wrong thing on one of our clients’ social media accounts, they could be shut down,” said McFarlane. “It’s a very high-stakes game so we have to be very careful to get things right but that’s what makes it exciting.”

As the business grew and added new clients, its monthly reports became an onerous task. For each client, members of McFarlane’s team were spending at least half a day per client to complete these reports. The time spent away from business development, sales support, and other highly creative time-consuming marketing campaigns heavily impacted the company’s bottom line. 

Here are the challenges  Hybrid Marketing Co. faced and why it needed a change: 

• Growing Business: As Hybrid Marketing Co. added new clients, they realized their current monthly report format style didn’t allow for deep data dives. As more clients came in, the amount of data sources needed to integrate into these reports also grew. 
  
• Team Productivity: Hybrid Marketing Co. was pulling team members from other concentration areas outside of marketing to assist with building monthly reports. The amount of time to put together monthly reports takes focus away from everyday core work tasks.
  
• Report Compilation: Painstakingly pulling together screenshots into PDFs and powerpoints took many hours to complete. This inefficient process was cumbersome and potentially made the reports not look as professional as they could be with a more formal formatting process. 

“What we were doing before was not sustainable. Prior to using Databox, our marketing team was taking screenshots from different data sources and putting them into a PDF or PowerPoint,” said McFarlane. “We needed a way to speed up and streamline the process. Since it allowed for a quicker onboarding process and was within a reasonable price range, Databox was the answer for us.”

The Solution

Hybrid Marketing Co. knew they needed a way to increase monthly report efficiency while increasing its insights to multiple client data sources. The company also wanted to ensure its access to quality data was swift so they could but their cannabis regulation knowledge to use in unique client marketing campaigns. McFarlane and the team at Hybrid Marketing Co did their research and found Databox. 

“We needed something that was going to speed up the process and make things much easier,” said McFarlane. “We looked around at a few different solutions. Ultimately, we landed on Databox because it’s relatively easy to use regarding the onboarding process. Also, anyone can make a high-end report without being a graphic designer. Databox was also the most reasonable in terms of price for what we were getting.”

Rather than continuing to piecemeal together their monthly reporting efforts in a manual process from 10 to 12 different sources, McFarlane began implementing Databox’s offerings for Hybrid Marketing Co.’s clients.

Hybrid Marketing Co.’s Top Integrations

Here’s how Databox helped Hybrid Marketing Co. address its reporting issues: 

• Growing Business: Hybrid Marketing Co. began offering Databox as part of its services when in business development meetings for new clients. Their in-depth reporting is a differentiator for the agency among its competitors. McFarlane takes this one step further by giving clients a shareable link so they can see their data at any time which provides transparency and allows for marketing campaign alterations throughout the month. 

• Team Productivity: All other team members were able to step away from report development entirely. McFarlane was able to step in and take on the sole responsibility for these monthly client reports without disrupting his chief marketing duties.

• Report Compilation: For each of its clients, Hybrid Marketing Co. was able to seamlessly integrate data from multiple sources which include solutions like HubSpot Marketing, LinkedIn Company Pages, Twitter, Facebook Pages, Instagram Business, and Google Analytics. From this, they were also able to significantly reduce time spent on compilation.

The Results

From the time Databox was implemented into Hybrid Marketing Co.’s efforts through today, the benefits have been tremendous. Clients can more easily understand their marketing data, the overall process for building out reports is more efficient, and Hybrid Marketing Co. can more easily demonstrate its value. 

Here are Hybrid Marketing Co.’s results from its Databox use: 

• Growing Business: From their initial Databox use date through today, Hybrid Marketing Co.’s business has seen a significant year-over-year customer growth with 10 new clients just this year.

• Team Productivity: Team members who were previously assisting in putting together monthly client reports no longer do so. McFarlane was able to take sole responsibility for producing client reports which gave other team members time back to dedicate to their work. 
  
• Report Compilation: Having Databox’s swift reporting platform in place allows McFarlane to complete these reports in half an hour or less which results in an $800 savings per client.