Innovation is About Mindset, Not the Size of Your Wallet!

How you can start tomorrow without buying new tech

In our experience, your main goal as far as technology goes should not be to adopt any particular technology or to develop a particular capability. Rather, we encourage clients to create an agency-wide mindset that encourages innovative ideas to flourish. That’s how you can identify the most valuable opportunities to pursue on a regular basis.

To execute, all you need is often a combination of the tools your agency already works with, like BigQuery, Google Sheets, and Data Studio. Don’t believe me? Check out this case study about an agency wide reporting solution we built for an Amazon focused agency called Sitruna, using Google Sheets and BigQuery. The set-up is essentially a custom built Google Sheets add-on that allows non-technical staff to query a database in BigQuery.

This custom reporting solution saved one of Sitruna’s account managers 5 hours a week. That’s 5 tedious hours she used to spend on pulling reports for just one client (not why we go into marketing in the first place, is it?). Now she schedules reports and spends less than 10 minutes a week on it so she is free to focus on strategy again! Within a week Sitruna’s employees had identified the next opportunity to automate a process and the backlog keeps growing as ideas keep flowing.

It’s these initial success stories that open people’s eyes to a new approach. We call them lighthouse projects. So really, getting started is what counts. Running a single Google Ads script with a Google Sheets can save a client more than 40 hours a week. With that in the bank, teams naturally have more time to explore other automation solutions and they typically go through a “eureka” moment so they actively look for opportunities to automate more.

Dealing with Resistance to Change

The word “automation” can create resistance to change. Employees might fear that they are being replaced! To change how people feel about this tech they need to experience it – as it has been said, “seeing is believing”.

What are good ideas for quick wins and lighthouse projects?

• Running Google Ads scripts
• Using scripts to enhance feeds with APIs
• Cross-channel reports in DataStudio from BigQuery (we can help you set this up in an afternoon, it’s easier than people think)

Quick and easy to set up, immediate results, what more can you ask for? These solutions don’t just save time, they also enable completely new strategies that deliver results for your clients that would not otherwise be possible. And less time spent clicking around and copy pasting increases job satisfaction.

For more information about how you can start contact us!