small data | the future of digital agencies

Small Data | The Future of Digital Agencies

Savy Agency recently passed its 10th year as a digital agency. During that time, we’ve seen big agencies dissolve and new ones appear. During our time in the market, we’ve wrangled with the challenges all digital agencies share. We’ve also seen many of the big changes—the launch of Facebook and Twitter, the rise of WordPress, and the fall of others. We’ve followed buzz of digital trends alongside topics like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, which many agencies didn’t know what to do with, let alone explain. Big Data is great for analyzing and predicting big things, like trends and algorithms; it is not great for analyzing and predicting small things. Small data, on the other hand, is specific, granular, and used to determine current states and conditions.

Why small data matters

The expectations of digital agencies have increased. The days of awesome creative alone have passed. Business owners and brands want metrics—the click through rate of the creative, the conversions it drives, and the resulting return on investment across not just one but all of its touchpoints—and the customer experience created along the way.

Digital agencies of tomorrow will be tasked with delivering on metrics—from analytics to procurement to business position and beyond. Those agencies must embrace data and marketing technology in a way they haven’t had to before. Why? The market is saturated by an influx of players, from stateside to overseas. One thing’s for sure: there’s no lack of creative or strategic talent. What is lacking is results. Sustainable, accountable, revenue-producing results. Simply producing great creative for someone else to turn into conversions—or likewise, a great strategy destined as great creative won’t be enough for digital agencies of the future.

Two recent studies by Forrester in partnership with Adobe reveal implications for the agency of the future that helps their customer thrive in today’s customer-led digital era. The takehome: marketing is about experiences. As technology advances, so do the expectations of the agencies providing marketing services. A look into the future of digital agencies will reveal a push to stay ahead of the curve. This includes employing the tools and technology that keeps agencies at the forefront of the customer—and the small data that informs them.

Small-data-driven marketing for big results

We’re in a micro moments world. Google says micro moments are the moments where consumers expect brands to address their needs with real-time relevance. Micro moments matter and are driven by continuous monitoring and analysis of small data sets. Those small data sets inform the insights for micro moments to happen. We believe, and what we apply for the brand’s we manage, is that for digital marketing agencies to be successful in the future, customer experience and customer engagement must be tracked and managed as closely as the creative.

The small data toolset to employ this year

Our team at Savy uses Google Data Studio, Moz insights, Search Console, and Supermetrics. We use this toolset to streamline, connect and produce the monitoring and tracking we need for the brands we manage. With our small data toolset, we’re able to provide a level of marketing as a service (MaaS), brand management and brand analysis beyond what many larger than us can.

As a client-centered digital agency that provides positioning, branding, SEO, SEM, ongoing brand management, monitoring and reporting, our small data toolset allows us to connect with and track data from multiple sources, such as Adwords, Bing, Moz, Facebook, Search Console and Bing Webmaster into a single view that we can watch, track and optimize, monitor, and report on.

So, how does your digital agency track data? Or are you a small business owner rethinking your agency-business relationship? Are you receiving the data that supports your spend? Have we over-geeked the role of small data or understated the role of Big Data? We want your take in the comments section. Until then, we’ll see you online — Savy