Award-winning creative agency, Markham & Stein is recognized for their strategic thinking and cutting-edge creative work. Representing premium and luxury brand clients, the agency is committed to providing a level of service and product quality that is on par with their clients.
Measuring performance and effectiveness has always been part of the Markham & Stein recipe for creating the most impactful messaging. The strategic services team pulls reports, consolidates data then reviews it internally and with clients. In the process of assessing their efforts, they recognized an opportunity to go beyond typical success metrics and look deeper into data to produce even more impactful campaigns.
The assessment raised the point that going beyond campaign performance metrics and analytics would provide valuable insights for the Markham & Stein and its clients. Social insights, marketing intelligence, and data from their clients’ enterprise systems would offer a more accurate understanding of consumers, competitors, and show the impact of marketing for each client. The conclusion was to bring in experts that could connect to the relevant platforms, build out dashboards, and provide on-going analytics support.
Exigent Digital was selected for their expertise in systems integration, advanced visualization techniques, and experience in media and marketing. The option for personalized dashboards would appeal to Markham & Steins client base, which is comprised of premium and luxury brands. Exigent’s on-going data strategy service would mine the data on a daily basis to identify trends as they unfold and provide insights on strategies to optimize performance.
The first step of the process was a review of current reporting, technologies, and processes. Next, requirements were defined and objectives of the agency and its clients were mapped. The project began with a single luxury brand. The solution would connect client’s enterprise technology with analytics and marketing data, social media, advertising and marketing platforms, lead generation, and call center platforms. Off-line data, from events and print marketing, would also be represented. The goal was a comprehensive picture of each client’s marketing investment tied directly to engagement, leads and revenue.
With brand integrity and consumer satisfaction paramount, reputation management and social listening data would provide insights into consumer sentiment towards the brand, its retailers and quality of service they were providing. Competitive insights were gleaned from social listening and web traffic data, enabling the client to compare their performance against like brands and their retailers.
Dashboards were created to provide clients with insights organization-wide, not just marketing. Audience acquisition, advertising, operations, sales, revenue, and social media data were all charted, showing exactly how the business was performing each day and the impact marketing has on meeting business goals. Marketing spend was broken down by channel, revealing the platforms that offer the highest conversion and engagement levels. Automatically highlighting top performing creatives allow the ops team to continually optimize campaigns, thereby increasing engagement and generating more sales.
For Markham & Stein, the breadth of data in a single platform, with expert visualizations and insights, the data is truly actionable. The creative and strategy team has insights and the feedback on their work that yields more impactful campaigns. Exigent data strategy team provides Markham & Stein the insights to more quickly respond to changes in the market, continually raise the bar company-wide and exceed the expectations of its clients.