There are a lot of factors that can stand in the way of growing an agency. Results, for one, and the experience to convert clients.

But, when capable and experienced agencies fail to grow, there’s usually one common reason to blame: bandwidth. Agencies with manual and time-consuming processes suffer from an upper limit on the number of clients they can realistically serve.

With more than a decade’s experience in the industry, Marc Enners—Director at Agent 6 Marketing—knew that. That’s why they turned to Databox to help streamline the agency and make their reporting process more efficient.

A digital marketing agency specializing in SEO and web optimization, Agent 6 helps small and medium businesses access a caliber of marketing savvy they often can’t afford. And the agency depends on its ability to communicate that value to its clients through concise, professional reports.

We talked with Marc to learn more about how they use Databox and how streamlining their reporting processes allowed Agent 6 to double their client base.

The Challenge

If Agent 6 was going to grow beyond the 25 clients they served at the beginning of 2020, they needed to head-off a few key challenges. For one, they needed to create more efficient processes—especially around reporting—so they could spend more time attracting clients and actually working for them.

The team also needed a way to differentiate themselves from larger agencies and communicate their value to clients in a simple, accessible way. Marc saw reporting as a key element in that.

Here are the challenges Agent 6 faced:

• Create more efficient agency processes: Marc knew they needed data to help create and explain their value to clients, but they couldn’t afford to spend hours every month manually pulling that data into lengthy, tedious reports.

“Data is the holy grail—it’s the bane of every agency. You waste unbelievable amounts of time showing people pretty graphs they can’t understand,” Marc said. “I’ve been trying to do this for many many years, and Databox was the first data platform that gave me everything I wanted. It had everything I needed.”

• Get clients more invested in reporting: According to Marc, most of their clients found reports dense and indecipherable. They needed a reporting tool that would bring clients into the fold and get them to understand and engage with the data.

“A marketing manager is only as good as what they promise and what they deliver. We live and die by the data. I’m happy to do it,” Marc told us, “and now [Databox] is a shorter, time-saving way to do it.”

• Create value that’s competitive with larger agencies: Marc knew their ability to compete with larger agencies depended on creating a differentiator—something their clients couldn’t get elsewhere and that proved Agent 6 was a high-caliber agency.

“You won’t be taken seriously if you don’t show nice reports,” Marc said bluntly. “If you can use that to make people understand stuff they think is really complicated but isn’t, and you look really professional doing it, then you can look bigger and better.”

The Solution

“When something integrates with everything you do and you can get the data points you want and they’re quite sexy and they show up on mobile, too… job done.”

That’s what Marc and the Agent 6 team found in a client dashboard software like Databox. After trying out a whole bunch of different reporting solutions—even building a custom setup at one point—the team still hadn’t found what they really needed: A tool that allowed them to spend less time on reporting without sacrificing quality.

Once they found Databox, they connected AccuRanker, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Facebook Pages, Google Ads, and Google My Business.

“It’s a way for the whole team to see the same snapshot, which is fantastic. We’re all looking at the same thing now,” Marc noted. “When you’re looking into Google Analytics or other tools like it, you’re not all necessarily looking at the same view—you don’t know if you are. When we look at the [Databox] reports, we all see the same thing. We’re comparing like-for-like and we’re doing it in real-time.”

Top Integrations for Agent6

Here are the solutions Agent 6 found with Databox:

• Create more efficient agency processes: After using Google reporting tools, the Agent 6 team switched over to Databox and never looked back. According to Marc, that shift has saved several team members a huge chunk of time.

“We do a lot of reporting. We were using Google’s reporting tools for that—it was clunky, it wasn’t particularly beautiful, and it constantly needed TLC to stay on top of it,” Marc explained. “We’ve easily saved a quarter of our time among some of the key team members.”

PRO TIP: To spend less time not only on reporting but also on building a performance dashboard, check out some of our prebuilt agency dashboards.

• Get clients more invested in reporting: Creating more accessible reports for clients makes it easier for the team to showcase their value and justify the decisions and recommendations they make. Plus, tailoring Databoards for each client helps them show clients the data they actually care about.

“As a marketer, if you can show your client what’s working and what’s not working, it’s easier for them to agree with your recommendations. It can be any number of data points,” Marc noted, “but what I like is that you can tailor the report to the client’s pet peeve by making whatever data point they’re very concerned about bigger in the report.”

• Create value that’s competitive with larger agencies: With more focused and streamlined reporting, Marc and the team are able to get right to the heart of things during their meetings—leaving them with more time to take action on the data and create more value for their clients.

“Our meetings are much faster because we’re just focusing on the key metrics,” Marc told us. “We don’t fluff around, we don’t play with many interfaces or jump from report to report. It cuts down the amount of ‘Where am I looking?’ ‘What am I looking for,’ ‘Let it load up…’ there’s none of that. We just blow through it.”

The Results

With a more effective and efficient reporting process in place, Marc and the team are able to better serve clients and focus on growing results and growing the agency.

From what Marc told us, the agency’s performance over the past year tells the whole story. They’ve doubled their client base—from 25 to 50 clients—since the beginning of 2020, and they’re aiming to do it again, by hitting 100 clients in the next year.

“I can spend my time getting more accounts, doing a better job on my existing accounts,” Marc said. “There’s no question—we’ve had our best year last year. We became so much more efficient.”

Here are the results Agent 6 saw using Databox:

• Create more efficient agency processes: With a more efficient reporting solution, Marc and the team have taken the cap off their growth potential. Creating more efficient processes throughout the agency is what has allowed them to double their client base in just a year.

As Marc put it: “It’s saved us a tremendous amount of time. I’ve been able to double the size of our client base because we use Databox. We’re crossing 50 clients—we had 25 a year ago, but data and producing reports every month was holding us back.”

• Get clients more invested in reporting: Agent 6 clients are more engaged than ever with their data and that’s had a surprising effect. The team gets fewer questions and calls now—because clients can quickly and easily both access and understand the data without the agency’s help.

“I’ve found that it’s lessened the number of questions we get from clients. It’s lessened the number of calls we get from clients,” Marc noted. “I find that people used to spend a lot of time going through the reports and getting kind of bored. Because the Databox reports are quite nice, they can look at them on their phone, they can look at them on a big screen in a presentation room. They get the information they were after quite quickly.”

• Create value that’s competitive with larger agencies: According to Marc, the time savings they’ve seen from implementing Databox have helped them grow—and the professionalism of the reports helps them compete with much larger agencies.

“Databox allows us to compete head-on with the bigger fish. It’s mostly the pain and aggravation we’ve saved on, and there’s no price on that,” Marc added.