In the marketing agency industry, staying power usually comes down to a few key things. Among them, transparency and results. It’s easy for young marketing agencies to flame out when they fail to hit those two notes.

Gravity Digital—a video-first digital marketing agency—is one example of that. With over 20 years of experience, the team has come to value transparency with clients above all else.

To get a sense of how the team uses Databox to facilitate that transparency, we talked with founder Casey O’Quinn.

The Challenge

Casey and the team wanted to build a truly transparent agency. But there were some realities standing in their way. Real-time transparency with clients required the team to have real-time transparency of their own—into their marketing data.

Before finding Databox, the team didn’t have that. They spent hours each week digging through the minutiae of each individual platform and its data. Still, they were left with disparate information that didn’t paint a big picture about their work.

Here are the challenges Gravity Digital faced:

• Boost transparency with clients: Transparency is a core tenet of Gravity Digital’s strategy—but it requires they have their own transparency into real-time data and marketing performance.

“One of our core values is transparency with our clients. We all want to be on the same page—we want to know what’s working and what’s not,” Casey said. “It’s hard to expect clients—with everything they have on their plate—to actually go in and view the reports you’re sending them. When you’re sending them reports from so many different platforms, they’re just not going to take the time to do it. They don’t have that kind of time.”

• Refine their own services: Before using Databox, Casey and the team were offering a broader list of services to clients, including many that just weren’t moving the needle. Paring these down to the most impactful services would allow them to scale and become more efficient.

“In using Databox, we were able to discover which services we were providing that were creating the most impact for our clients. So we actually pared down our services based on that.” Without Databox, Casey said, “we would probably still be trying to be everything to everyone.”

• Unify disparate data sources: Jumping from Google Analytics to Facebook to Instagram to LinkedIn… the Gravity Digital team was spending too much time just to get access to the data they needed.

“[Reporting] was very manual in the sense that everything was very disparate—it was in different places. It was very painstaking,” Casey noted, “to go and find that data on so many different platforms.”

The Solution

“With Databox, we were able to incorporate everything into one platform—for many clients, one Dashboard,” Casey told us.

“One simple screen that they can look at and, from a high level, everyone can see what’s working, what’s not, how tweaks we may have made have changed things. It allowed us to be so much more transparent because our clients can view the data so quickly and so easily.”

After discovering Databox, Casey and the team quickly set about getting set up. They connected LinkedIn Ads, Campaign Monitor, Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, CallRail, Google Ads, Hubspot Marketing.

Casey also built out a core databoard template they could use to streamline the reporting set up for new clients.

Gravity Digital’s Top Integrations

Here are the solutions Gravity Digital found with Databox:

• Boost transparency with clients: The flexibility of Databox allows Casey and the team to be transparent with clients in the most effective way, both sending out real-time data and lasering in on their monthly calls.

“We share a link to the databoards so people can see them in real-time. However, we know that most of our clients don’t do that—they’re running their business. So we do a monthly call with all of our clients where we review the reports with them,” Casey added. “We’ll go block-by-block to review and talk through any issues.”

• Refine their own services: Gravity Digital uses the same reporting setup internally as they do for their clients. It’s helped them better understand the big picture around the value they provide to clients.

“Databox gives us the big picture,” Casey said. “We have one main template that we use, and every client’s dashboard gets customized a bit, and we use the same report for ourselves that we use for our clients. We hire ourselves to produce the same kinds of things that we do for our clients.” And you can check how that looks like below.

• Unify disparate data sources: With their Databox template and dashboards, the team brings together all the data they need—from a number of different data sources—into one cohesive report.

“I’m looking at a report right now, and I’ve got 6 data sources in one place. That’s huge,” Casey told us. “Six data sources on one beautiful report that I can look at and diagnose and see things in seconds. It’s essentially the health of a client’s marketing that I can glance at and know how well their marketing is performing in seconds.”

The Results

According to Casey, the results they’ve seen from Databox speak for themselves: “We’re more efficient and more profitable.”

They no longer manually pull data together or get lost in the weeds of each platform’s native reporting. They’ve refined their service offering to the core value-adds for clients. They’re better able to prioritize radical transparency.

“I’m probably saving a couple of hours a week,” Casey told us. “With what the founder of the company should be working on, for me to be saving a couple of hours a week is pretty big.”

Here are the results Gravity Digital saw using Databox:

• Boost transparency with clients: Since implementing Databox, the team is able to be transparent with clients on both the broad strokes and the granular details—like ROAS and the value clients get from working with the agency.

“The great thing about Databox is that it lets us be transparent about ROAS specifically—that you’re getting a return on your ad spend,” Casey said. “Your investment with us as an agency, you’re getting a return on that. That’s very important for us. It’s a game-changer in terms of our conversations with our clients.”

• Refine their own services: The agency has narrowed its focus to video-first digital marketing because those services drive results for their clients.

“It helped us understand there were some services we were providing that weren’t really all that beneficial to the client. As a company, we didn’t necessarily know that until we saw it in Databox. It helped us kill some services that really weren’t impacting clients all that much,” Casey highlighted.

• Unify disparate data sources: Without having to jump from one platform to another, Casey and the team are able to get more value out of reporting while spending a lot less time on the manual aspects of the process.

“It’s a huge time saver,” Casey said. “Not having to jump into 3 or 4 different platforms. When you do that, you can get lost in the weeds a little bit because you go down a rabbit trail. I love the high-level view that our dashboard gives us.”