Data and the Agency Case Study

Anyone who really knows the marketing and advertising agency business will likely agree that the challenge of demonstrating outcomes and ROI can be a substantial one.

You may know instinctively or anecdotally that the successful social media campaign you managed for a previous client achieved excellent brand awareness among the client’s key audience members, based on the high amount of engagement the campaign achieved.

But a prospective client who’s hyper-focused on outcomes may view terms like “brand awareness” or “social media engagements” as fluffy marketing jargon if you can’t link the campaign directly to sales, customers, or something else that”s measurable or substantial.

Sometimes these conversations are opportunities to show your leadership by helping the prospective client understand why, at least in some cases, they might need to think about expanding their view of marketing outcomes. In the meanwhile, there’s the question of getting that extra-picky-about-outcomes type of client to ring your front doorbell in the first place.

To make that happen, agencies have to convey a culture as one thats focused on results. Case studies, ones that are included on your website or your print collateral or both can be very helpful in achieving this purpose. And the more data-packed your case study is, the more likely it’s going to get the job done for you.

Acceptable formats for case studies vary, but generally speaking, they should all have at least the following elements:

• Client/Company Profile
• Problem Statement/Challenge
• Campaign Overview
• Results

Now let’s talk about how you can infuse data into each of the sections for better results:

Company Profile

Use data to paint a vivid picture of the company and the challenge you were hired to address. If you can get your hands on data about the client company’s position in the market or annual sales revenue, use it in your description.

Problem Statements

Data can be particularly relevant in this section, especially if you can weave it into your agency’s analysis of the client’s problem. For example: After studying the client’s website analytics, we determined that more than 20% of key product pages were underperforming. Also, use data to make your depiction of the challenge as meaty as possible, such as “The client had previously achieved an unsatisfactory annual new customer growth of only 2%.”

Campaign Overview

This is an easy one. Pepper your brief description of the campaign you developed on behalf of your client with figures and stats about the goals and objectives you set for the campaign.

Campaign Outcomes

Instead of characterizing your results like this: “At the end of our campaign, we improved the client’s brand awareness among key audiences”, re-package with some stats and figures. “At the end of our campaign, we improved the client’s social media reach and corresponding brand awareness among key audience members who have opted in to the client’s social media channels – by an average of 27% across three social media platforms over a period of six months.”

Got an agency marketing problem you need help solving? We’d love to hear about it.