Owner of Your Data
One of the most significant wins you will get by in-housing your creative team is that you will be the owner of your data. This means that you can use advanced data analytics to continuously optimize multiple channels. By collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing vast amounts of data from paid and non-paid platforms—including web, video, search, mobile, and social media—you will be able to match a vast number of different data types into valuable segments for targeting and assessing. And, of course, be able to provide robust evidence of your success.
But the main advantage of owning your own data is that you will be able to establish connections between various sources that your different agencies won’t. Since you have access to all your data, you can take advantage of your information quickly. The most significant bonus of having all your data at hand is that it enables your team to be agile. Rather than waiting to respond to a brief when changes in the market happen, decisions can be made and rapidly put into action by your teams.
The world of technology has leaped ahead to help in-house marketing teams manage this large set of tasks. The marketing technology industry has made vital technical advances, which means that many of these are pretty much off-the-shelf solutions that offer end-to-end tools to automate much of the process for content and channels. By retaining command of your data, possibilities emerge. It means your in-house team can optimize and deliver personalized messages to the right people in the most relevant manner. It’s easy to quantify performance-based marketing, but by having all the cards in your hand, you will also be able to methodically analyze both successes and failures.
There are also more essential advantages of controlling first-party data. For starters, it means your customer data is secure, which is critical in a post-GDPR world. By having a clear and transparent understanding of your marketing performance—not influenced by the agency that created the content itself—you are likely to be able to compare your metrics with each other. People tend to forget that their agency could potentially work with a competitor down the line. You often pick an agency based on their experience with a particular type of client—usually clients that look like your business. Knowing that you typically choose an agency to get that outside-in view, you probably do not want to share your data outwardly.
We often find that companies’ clients have a limited, filtered view of what is happening with their online marketing because they don’t have ownership access to their accounts. Consultants and agencies typically provide periodic reports, but they control which pieces of data to include.
Of course, a good agency will identify this same trend in your impressions and clicks, but if you’re not privy to raw data like this, you won’t be able to tell them what to look for. Regardless of your agency’s skill, a client’s active participation in looking at and analyzing their marketing data is massively beneficial to both parties; ignoring your responsibility wastes their time and your money.
Let’s say your online sales have been disappointing and you make the decision to move to a new agency. If you are the creator and owner of your marketing accounts, or if the agency created the account on your behalf, this is a piece of cake—simply end your contract and add the new agency as a manager to your accounts.
However, if your previous agency created your accounts under their umbrella of other clients, all your data is their data. You will need to start over from scratch with totally new accounts. Unfortunately, valuable information about your company’s online marketing will be lost.
The data transformation process cultivates your team’s competitive content advantage. It moves you away from the reactive and restrictive content building and toward prescriptive and proactive marketing content that fuels success. Having easy access to trustworthy deeper data sets empowers your team to begin this process.
