An agency backed by data

Data-driven brands are thriving. Revolve, StitchFix, and TheRealReal are perfect examples of this - these brands are known for using data to hyper-personalize the online shopping experience. If you’ve ever visited those sites, then you know exactly what I am talking about. 

As a result of this marketing strategy, these brands are seeing billions of dollars in revenue.

Let’s single out Revolve. They are an online fashion retailer known for having gotten “customer personalization” down to a science. I would know, I have used their site countless times, and have made countless purchases, because when I go to the Revolve site, everything I’m seeing is tailored to my personal style. Many other shoppers must feel this way too, because Revolve is worth over 1.53 billion dollars. 

We can’t give them all the credit though - behind every data-driven brand, there is a data-driven agency. 

Revolve’s past agency partner Media Monks is known for their “creative end-to-end, data-driven, personalized customer experiences.” - and they’re worth 2.2 billion dollars. 

Are you picking up what we’re laying down? Hyper-personalization is going to be one of the biggest marketing trends for brands in 2024/2025. Meaning, that the agencies brands will choose to work with, will be the ones known for their data-driven approach. 

Let’s dissect some agencies that are already taking a data-driven approach to marketing, and see how they do it.

Data-driven agencies

Merkle

Merkle is a massive global agency that describes itself as “the data-driven customer experience company”. 

They aren’t lying. Merkle places a heavy focus on data science, CRM management, and predictive analytics.

Recently Merkle helped KFC leverage their customer data to uncover the behaviors, preferences and trends amongst their Gen Z audience in China. The problem KFC was facing was a decline in “in-store traffic”. 

By leveraging this customer data, they discovered that Gen Z customers craved a virtual brand experience over an “in-store” physical experience. This prompted them to create a virtual store for their Gen Z customers. 

This “virtual experience” brought in 19 million visitors, and resulted in 4 million KFC burgers sold in its first week of release. 

Jacobs & Clevenger

Jacobs & Clevenger prides itself for always being a “data-first” agency, who claims to “turn data science into sales” for their clients.

They are big fans of customer segmentation and they analyze things like consumer sentiment and customer needs to help optimize audience targeting. 

Their goal as an agency is to “seek, uncover, and use uncommon insights in marketing to provide breakthroughs” for their clients - in this day and age that’s a great goal. This is evident in the way their clients describe them too:

We love an agency that uses data to create more personalized offers and overall better shopping experiences for their client’s customers. 

Ladder 

Ladder is another example of an agency that has evolved with the times to become more data-driven. 

Their tag line is “Grow your business through data-driven creative”. 

They use something called “Growth Benchmarks” which refers to their indexing tool that gives context to their clients marketing data. 

Basically it's a tool that they use to diagnose the “why” behind their client’s marketing performance. It answers why a campaign might be working or not working. 

If the campaign is not working, their team uses these “why” insights to create a better strategy that drives results. 

They work with brands like Meta and Nestle to increase their conversion rates. 

So, what does it take for an agency to be considered “data-driven”?

You’ve probably gathered this from the agency examples above, but to be considered a data-driven agency you have to be known for your use of data, insights and analytics tools to help your clients bottom line. 

Here are the data-driven activities your agency should be performing:

1. Customer segmentation

This one is pretty basic. Every agency should be working with a segmentation tool. It’s not always the case that you will have access to your client’s first-party data so you must at least have a tool to segment their social audience. 

Customer segmentation is the process of segmenting people based on their shared interests and behaviors so you can customize to that segment accordingly. If you don’t segment an audience, you end up treating every customer the same - so you’d be doing the exact opposite of what successful brands like Revolve are doing.  

AMP Global Media is an agency known for their amazing customer segmentation practices, among many other things. They are an agency that’s “curiosity fueled and data empowered”.

As an agency they’ve done a lot of work around customer segmentation and persona building, using a mix of their own proprietary tools and outside audience intelligence tools like Audiense.

Audiense is the perfect tool for customer segmentation, as it can be used to segment social audiences or first-party data audiences. After segmenting any audience, the tool surfaces rich insights on those audience members that can be used to build out detailed customer personas. 

2. Personalization

Personalization involves analyzing audience data to uncover insights that help your agency create highly personalized customer experiences for your clients audience. 

Marketers tend to focus on things like audience needs, behaviors, interests, passions, and content consumption (among many other things), to help build out content and experiences that will resonate with the audience. 

Mindshare is an agency known for their audience personalization skills. They take an innovative approach to audience segmentation, media buying/planning, and audience targeting. 

They use tools like Audiense to create personalized marketing strategies that resonate with different audience segments - which drives high engagement and conversions for their clients like Dove. 

3. Campaign tracking

This is another basic, but equally as important practice. It involves using the best tools to analyze website traffic, google ads, social ads, etc. and identify what’s working and what’s not working so you can adjust accordingly.

This is simple but critical if you are going to be looked at as data-driven, and yes probably all agencies do this, but are they using basic tools and basic metrics - or are they diving deep and looking at all the factors to really make “data-driven” decision. 

HubSpot is one tool that always comes to mind when we think about campaign management and tracking, and most agencies and their clients have HubSpot, or Salesforce. 

But agencies that also have platforms like Dash Hudson for example, have another competitive edge, and additional insights that help them really identify what's working or not working in relation to the creative, imagery, content, copy etc. in the ads. 

Brands like Hulu use Dash Hudson to help determine what content is going to work best on their different audiences, and since using this tool Hulu has in some cases increased their social engagement by 40%.   

Thrive Internet Marketing agency is known for their stellar campaign tracking, and they use a myriad of tools to cover all the angles and to understand what’s going on with their clients ads. 

4. Split testing 

Split testing or A/B testing is the practice of comparing the performance of two different ads. 

You test ad version A against ad version B. 

You can differentiate things like the copy or the image itself in the ad to see which one resonates most with the target audience. You can also test website copy, different emails, and blog content. An agency that runs lots of tests like these start to have a deeper understanding of what makes their client’s audience tick.  

Optimizely is a popular A/B testing tool that’s perfect for website tests or ad tests, and they make it easy to run experiments and generate the insights you need to optimize your clients ads. 

So much can be learned through extensive A/B testing, and all the best data-driven agencies know this. 

There is more pressure than ever on brands to create more personalized experiences for their customers aka “hyper-personalization”- which means there is more pressure on their agencies to figure out how to do that.

Brands will only work with agencies that can prove their decisions and recommendations are driven by data. 

So become a data-driven agency with Audiense.