How Digital 22 Saves 2 Hours on Reporting Each Month While Offering Clients 100 Percent Transparency with Databox

Successful marketing agencies have one thing in common, the ability to juggle.

To win new clients and get results for existing ones, they need to be able to juggle clients, meetings, content, campaigns, and reporting, among other things. As agencies grow, they need to find the best, most efficient ways to juggle while never dropping a pin.

That’s something Dan Thomas, Lead Strategist for Digital 22, knows very well. An inbound marketing agency and Elite HubSpot partner, Digital 22 is committed to using data to monitor and improve performance while offering full transparency to their clients. Serving as one of the main points of contact for clients, Dan knows how time-consuming all of this can be. 

We talked with Dan to learn how they use Databox to expedite client reporting and deliver 100% transparency.

The Challenge

Before using Databox’s reporting software, the Digital 22 client services team primarily used HubSpot’s native reporting, but they often found themselves compiling data into spreadsheets to enable the reports they wanted to present to clients. Since many of their clients were looking for specific, custom metrics, not readily available in HubSpot or Google Analytics, the team had to manually pull the relevant data points and calculate them in Google Sheets. This was a time-consuming process to prepare for regular client progress meetings. They would also spend hours putting together monthly reports and slide decks based on their spreadsheets. As the agency grew and added new accounts to each strategist’s work load, reporting time started to grow significantly.

“It was a challenge to find the time to do reporting,” Dan Said, “especially when you had a successful month with lots to shout about.”

Digital 22 needed a faster, more efficient client reporting solution, one that enabled them to easily create the right dashboards and reports for each client without spending an inordinate amount of time preparing them.

Some additional challenges Digital 22 faced:

1. Being more proactive based on their data:

Before using Databox, reporting was an end-of-the-month task for Digital 22 strategists, which meant that they might not catch potential problems early enough to take action and hit client goals before each monthly meeting.

“There are metrics we can easily track in HubSpot, but we can’t necessarily set specific goals and show progress towards reaching them. That’s where Databox comes in. We can set goals for specific metrics, monitor them, and report on them in sales and marketing focused dashboards. If we’re not on track at any time, we can make adjustments on the fly.”

2. Saving time on manual reporting:

Dan estimates that just gathering data for reporting reporting took about 15-20 minutes per client. Add that to analysis and report creation, and we’re talking about hours. When you have multiple clients, those hours add up fast.

“We’re all guilty of thinking ‘It only takes 15-20 minutes to put these slide decks together’. When you realize the actual time you’re spending preparing those reports, those minutes change to hours.”

3. Delivering exactly what clients want:

Without a simple way to automate the custom metrics and calculations their customers wanted, the team had to choose between reporting efficiency and client satisfaction.

“I like that we have the option in Databox to create custom and calculated metrics directly in our dashboards, because it means that most of the time we can provide the numbers that a client really wants to see.”

The Solution

When Digital 22 moved their reporting to Databox, everything changed.

They connected their most used marketing applications, such as LinkedIn Company Pages, Twitter Ads, Twitter, HubSpot Marketing, SEMrush, LinkedIn Ads, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Pages, and HubSpot CRM to build easy to understand marketing dashboards.

After setting up a number of dashboard templates for different client reports, the team is now able to onboard new clients very quickly, leaving more time to customize dashboards with calculations that matter to each client. And most importantly, they can continue to deliver the KPIs and results that clients want. 

Digital 22 also uses Databox Scorecards for weekly and monthly internal and client reporting, which gives everyone on the team an instant heads-up on overall results and progress towards reaching goals.

“We have all of our goals set up in each of our client accounts,” Dan explained, “and that includes client goals and our own internal metrics which we want to hit. We use Databox every week to report internally to make sure we’re on track as a team and spot trends across accounts.”

Digital 22’s top integrations

The Results

Dan Thomas and his team have solved some of their biggest problems in delivering more effective, and efficient, client services using a client dashboard software like Databox.

“Databox saves us at least 2 hours a month per client. It’s saved us that block of time and also the headspace as well. It’s just one less thing to worry about. By automating the reporting process, we can reallocate that time to be more proactive in implementing a lot of the work.”

“Everybody’s aligned now on how we’re performing by building and monitoring client dashboards and reports. If we need to make any quick changes to strategies to address potential dips, that allows us to react as quickly as we possibly can.”

“It’s improved how we can spot and jump on some work. It’s essential that we can get a plan of action in place and make sure we’re all aligned—especially now with remote work. Without those Scorecards in place, it would be a bit of a nightmare,” Dan told us.

“There’s so much opportunity to automate processes now and save time and effort. That’s what we’ve done with Databox, automating the reporting process as much as we can. In a meeting or call, it’s just a matter of opening up that carousel link and then running through it with a client. It’s saved us a lot of time in our reporting processes.”

“By building performance dashboards, templates and reports, we’ve now agreed on standardized metrics we want to report on for each client, but then we also have the ability to quickly customize those to include different metrics that a client may request. This process saves us a lot of time and reduces uncertainty during client onboarding and service delivery.”

“We can make sure that we’re making decisions quickly enough to ensure that we’re hitting the agreed-upon goals and targets. Ultimately, that allows us to provide the best service we possibly can. Databox absolutely plays a massive part in that.”

“The ability to create custom metrics also complements our 100% transparency,” Dan said. “And it allows us to delight the client, which is one of our core values.”