How Blerter Uses Databox to Track Goals, Benchmark Progress, and Improve Performance

There are a lot of collaboration tools designed for teams working out of both central offices and home offices—but what about teams that leave the “office” concept behind entirely?

Physical teams that spend their time out in the field have different needs when it comes to collaborating  – for example, those running events like sports and festivals – have different needs when it comes to collaborating.

That’s where Blerter comes in. As collaboration software designed for physical teams, Blerter brings together tools for communication, operations, and safety.

After getting their start in the event industry, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Blerter to expand beyond their initial market. To facilitate that expansion, the marketing team needed to be able to track the metrics that matter to them, gauge performance against their quarterly goals, and make all that information widely available and accessible. We talked with Timothy Roberts, Head of Marketing for Blerter, about how they’ve used Databox to make that happen.

The Challenge

As Timothy and the Blerter team looked to pivot the company beyond the event industry space, they needed to be able to gauge general awareness of their product and brand across all platforms. They needed a way to bring data from across those platforms together into one dashboard that the entire team could agree on.

Before Databox, that process would have been entirely manual—and as Timothy told us, manual calculations inherently lead to mistakes, confusion, and wasted time.

Here are the challenges Blerter faced before using reporting software:

• Tracking and automating custom metrics: With marketing data coming from so many different places, the marketing team struggled to pull together a bottom-line metric that captured true awareness across platforms.

“On the marketing side,” Timothy said, “you have data coming from so many different sources. We wanted to be able to show a viewpoint, at a glance, across all of our platforms. We didn’t want to have to go and calculate that number every time someone asked. That is a real pain. There are mistakes, and people get confused. I wanted it to be a number we all agree on, we agree on a calculation for, and we show it on the dashboard.”

• Benchmarking performance against goals: As a growing tech startup, Blerter didn’t have a data team or a BI team to monitor their progress. They needed a way for the marketing and sales teams to do that themselves—without a data analyst’s background, without spending hours on reporting.

“We don’t have a whole team to monitor our progress on things,” Timothy noted. “So if we can set goals and have something that automatically tells us whether we’re ahead or behind, that’s way more valuable than what we would otherwise have.”

• Making data accessible across the org: Timothy and the team needed their data to speak, not just to marketing and sales, but to the entire organization. They needed to make data accessible in order to validate their activities and budget.

“We don’t have a BI team or specialists, so we needed a product that was easy for anyone to pick up—so I could say to anyone on my team, ‘Hey, can we get this information on a dashboard?’ With Databox, anyone can sit down and start creating reports,” Timothy added.

The Solution

After trying a few other reporting solutions, including Klipfolio, Timothy suggested the Blerter team implement Databox. Having used Databox at a prior company, Timothy was confident the tool could solve one of their biggest complaints with other tools: a simple and quick way to pull data from multiple sources.

They got set up quickly in Databox, building both high-level and more in-depth Dashboards to work alongside their data from HubSpot and various social media platforms.

They connected HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Pages, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads and Twitter.

Blerter’s Top Integrations

Here’s how Databox solved Blerter’s challenges:

• Tracking and automating custom metrics: Timothy pulled together data from all of their platforms and built a custom metric to measure their overall awareness.

Timothy explained, “I can bring metrics from lots of different platforms, either surface them on the dashboard or put them into a Calculation and then surface that on the dashboard. To me, that’s the most valuable thing about Databox.”

• Benchmarking performance against goals: The team uses Databox’s Goals feature in two ways—to set internal goals and to benchmark their performance against broader organizational key results.

“I really like the goal feature within Databox, too. That’s something that isn’t necessarily available in other products,” Timothy said, adding, “I use goals in two ways. One way aligns with the organizational key results that we need to achieve our objectives. Other goals are just internal guidelines, loose goals, around how many social followers we have, for example.”

• Making data accessible across the org: Timothy and the team took a layered approach to building their dashboards, creating high-level dashboards to share marketing data across the broader team and more detailed dashboards for their own, everyday use.

“We thought about what’s needed from a governance standpoint? What’s needed from a management standpoint? And what do we think will be of general interest to people throughout the organization? We have high-level dashboards and then ones in more detail. Within our office space, we put the dashboards up on big screens and we loop them,” Timothy explained.

The Results

Turns out, Databox is exactly the reporting tool Blerter needed.

“Databox fits the size of the company we are, the information we need to report on, without having to overinvest in time for existing people to learn or hiring people skilled in data analysis,” Timothy said.

Today, Blerter’s marketing team is better equipped to measure the metrics that matter to them, benchmark their quarterly performance and progress toward goals, and communicate those benchmarks across the broader team.

Here are Blerter’s Databox results:

• Tracking and automating custom metrics: On top of Timothy’s custom awareness calculation, the team has since begun measuring the wider customer funnel and making data-backed marketing decisions.

“We can, at a glance, see what’s happening. Are we tracking ahead? Are we tracking behind? That gives us a baseline to see our performance over the previous quarter—and we can have the goals set up separately to see our actual targets.”

• Benchmarking performance against goals:  With real-time goals and benchmarks, the marketing team can more effectively focus and prioritize their efforts across campaigns, platforms, and more.

“Databox has helped us to keep on top of metrics that otherwise may fall behind,” Timothy told us. “It draws your attention to the things you need to have more focus on. It allows us to make sure, across all our metrics, that they’re all improving and we haven’t missed anything.”

• Making data accessible across the org: With Databox dashboards easily accessible across the organization, the entire team has a better understanding of marketing activities, results, and the value they bring to the company as a whole.

Timothy added, “There’s more awareness now. People can actually see what’s going on around them. We can present information to the wider organization. They don’t need the detail of it, but they can understand the activities that are happening and what’s working and not working. We’re constantly iterating on our dashboards, but it gives us the snapshot that we wanted to have.”