While the term “cloud computing” came to ideation in 1996 by two Compaq Computer employees, today’s modern view wasn’t fully formed until 2006. In an industry conference, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt officially coined the term for the masses.

Now, businesses are welcome to still store their files locally which is called on-premise. However, cloud computing is the more popular choice with 92% of IT living in the cloud and growing to 95% in 15 months. 

With every piece of your business living on the cloud, it can be a lot for any IT team to take on. For any company looking to streamline their storage, managed cloud service provider Arxus has a solution. 

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Belgium, Arxus tackles management of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings with solutions in the public, private, and hybrid cloud. It does this through customizing cloud utilization, managing those services, providing consultations, and ensuring business continuity along with increased productivity.

To learn more about the challenges the company faced and how Databox’s offering was able to help, we spoke with Arxus’ Marketing Manager Davy Vandevinne.

The Challenge

Any communications related department, whether it’s public relations or marketing, is subject to intense scrutiny. These creative and strategic professional areas are often seen as extras or nice-to-haves. 

This is why when it came to Arxus’ Marketing, Vandevinne knew there needed to be an accessible and visually appealing way to clearly present its data. 

Here are the challenges Arxus faced with its previous data analytics service: 

• Accessibility: There wasn’t one overall way to view marketing data from Arxus’ various campaigns and the software wasn’t intuitive which made it difficult to use. 

• Visuals: The charts and graphs were in a very traditional format that didn’t allow for attention-grabbing presentations to people outside the Marketing department.

• Time Management: Each monthly report took two days to compile and polish for anyone outside the Marketing department. 

• Metrics: The ability to get granular on KPIs and campaign goals was non-existent.

“Before, we used Google Data Studio which allowed us to get a lot of data as well but not nearly as visually attractive as Databox, with fewer possibilities, and a lot more complex to use.”

How important is it to have access to quality data? 

The answer should seem obvious but here’s something to think about. In this data-centric space, 47% (a 38% increase from 2017) of respondents from researcher McKinsey’s latest study on the topic said “data and analytics have significantly or fundamentally changed the nature of competition in their industries in the past three years.”

Think of how far behind the competition a company like Arxus could be without access to quality data and analytics. 

To help illustrate the importance of his Marketing team, Vandevinne needed a way to keep up with all marketing KPIs while offering up hard data to reinforce its value. 

The Solution

Monthly reports. Weekly reports. Every company has them (and dreads them) and every department needs to do them to show their value and earn their budgets.

Reporting is one of the tougher pain points for a lot of companies. It takes time, project management, and attention to detail all of which aren’t always in great supply while juggling day-to-day activities.

To better highlight its Marketing efforts, Arxus decided to make the switch to Databox. It started off using Templates but over time was able to customize based on Arxus’ targeted KPIs. 

“In the end, we came up with a strategy that we tried to have customized templates to use on all different channels,” said Vandevinne. “For each channel, we narrowed down what to measure on each channel by having six to eight metrics on each. Whether you’re looking at visibility and branding to increase audience engagement or closing deals, Databox has metrics for everything.” 

Arxus integrated its work from Google Sheets and HubSpot to start its work in Databox’s platform. It then connected its eight different data sources which included its Instagram Business, Facebook Pages, Google Sheets, HubSpot Marketing, LinkedIn Company Pages, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console.

Harmon Brothers’ Top Integrations

For managing campaign cohesion and consistency, Vandevinne set up 13 Databoards for Arxus’ blogs, newsletter, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Search, and its company website. 

Here’s how Databox solved Arxus’ Marketing data challenges: 

• Accessibility: Databox’s simple system gave Arxus’ Marketing the capability to easily pull up dashboards in any meeting. 

• Visuals: The aesthetically pleasing visuals offered through Databox allowed for more eye-catching presentations. 

• Time Management: Through its ease of use, Arxus was able to drastically decrease the amount of time spent on creating monthly reports. Before Databox, it took two days, and now the team puts reports together in less than half a day.

• Metrics: Every channel is now measured independently (websites, newsletter social media channels) with six to eight metrics each. Arxus is also able to more broadly measure its reach, interest, and engagement for its overall campaign efforts. When it’s doing campaigns, Arxus has monthly or weekly goals in place along with alerts for each. 

The Results

Marketing is now being more effectively and efficiently measured at Arxus. Because of Databox, everyone now knows where all the marketing money is going which allows a more vested interest in their efforts across departments. 

“With Databox, Marketing’s value is brought to the forefront which is important for most IT teams. Most of the time, they think Marketing just asks for bags of money and that’s it. Here, we’re able to show the results of those investments. Now, I can show them with every detail what we’re measuring, what’s working and what’s not working.”

Here are the results from Arxus’ Databox use:

• Accessibility: With its ease of use, and ability to pull up dashboards at any given time, a light was shone into Marketing’s efforts. It’s able to sync up with the sales team to pinpoint any churn and instantly adjust messaging. Here is where outside departments were able to contribute to Marketing and vice versa for a truly integrated experience.

“The connection between the different sorts of data is the major difference for us,” shared Vandevinne. “Now, we’ve got an overview of individual channels and a broader view of campaign performance. This allows me to pinpoint what’s working for replication across channels.”

• Visuals: The simplistic nature of Databox’s system allowed Arxus to better articulate its Marketing efforts in presentations to anyone across departments.

“The visual aspect of Databox is really great to show what marketing is doing for the business overall,” shared Vandevinne. “You can easily show how it’s performing month over month, year over year, and adjust campaigns accordingly. Databox helps get marketing on the map and demonstrate how it’s impacting our bottom line.”

• Time Management: In addition to reducing time spent on report building, Databox has also saved the Arxus Marketing team time on project management.

“With Databox, we can act quicker on what’s happening in real-time,” Vandevinne commented. “We saw growth of about 30 to 50% and out of 12 KPIs, we reached 10 of them. It helped us prioritize what needs to be done.” 

• Metrics: Measurement is at the forefront of the Arxus Marketing team. Goals are checked monthly while dashboards are checked weekly. Once all of these are checked, Vandevinne and his team are able to adjust their work in a timely fashion.

“With so many options, the most difficult part in setting up Databox was to decide what not to measure,” shared Vandevinne. “While some goals are checked more often than others, Databox allows us to get into granular detail for each. At Arxus, we’ve made weekly and monthly goals for campaigns to measure how they’re performing.”

Arxus now has growth paths outlined which it hopes to see grow by 30 to 40% by this time next year. Now, the team at Arxus will be more than well equipped to take on its competition with a heightened data-driven Marketing approach.

We here at Databox will be checking back in with Vandevinne and his team in 2021 for a status update and can’t wait to share it with you.

Favorite Databox Feature?

“How easy it is to quickly set up the Databoard. With just dragging and dropping you can set up a Databoard in a few minutes and you don’t have to be tech-savvy. It’s very simple.

The integration between Databoards and goals where you can see the average and line on your Databoard. It’s a combination of ease of use and the visuals.”