Grocery Chain’s Success in Data Integration with Improvado

Industry:

Retail (Grocery)

Location:

Company size:

5000+

Traditional marketing inferiors to digital marketing. Our partner couldn't stand aside from this trend and came to us for help. Here's how we helped them.

Improvado Connectors

Background

Digital marketing is rapidly overtaking traditional marketing due to its cost-effectiveness, great analysis potential, and effective outreach of the target audience. In other words, it’s either go digital or go home. And that’s what the Company's marketing team thought too.

The story behind the company

The company is one of the largest grocery store chains in the US with a revenue of $9.7 billion in 2020. Founded in 1931, it’s an enterprise with 37,000 employees headquartered in Pittsburgh, US. During the outbreak, the company decided to detach from traditional marketing and went digital.

The company needed a solution that could help them understand their marketing expenses better, how their money is being used, and what profit these spendings create. Dealing with digital marketing without organized data flow and data aggregation tools may be a challenging task. The problem is, the more data and metrics you collect, the harder it is to analyze them and understand their value. That’s the problem that the Company faced and that’s why they’ve contacted Improvado.

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The Challenge

Our client’s marketing team had to deal with a lot of cross-platform promotions that were very clumsily put together. The previous data aggregation tool that they used lacked versatility. It didn't allow the team to research data across multiple sources on a single dashboard.

Besides, it was hard to store and organize data in one place without additional manual operations. Due to confusing data crossovers and unorganized data stockpiling it was hard to draw up a comprehensive picture of a marketing process as a whole. Simply put, there was no single source of truth to make data-driven decisions. Additionally, manual data cleaning and normalization were very time-consuming, so the company had to search for an alternative solution.

The main Company’s requirement was to create a unified central marketing data repository to understand how digital marketing means are driving the company’s success and revenue. Back in the day, the company had no data warehouse and data visualization tool, so this mission was in our area of responsibility too.

The Solution

Since the company had no basis for integrations like a data warehouse, we had to start the project from scratch. Our top priority was to create data storage and fill it with data from all connectors requested by our client. Then, we had to normalize all information to ensure the granularity of marketing insights.

With Improvado’s data extraction tool, we pulled out raw data from desired sources such as Google Analytics, Youtube, Google My Business, and others. Later on, we modified these data internally via Looker to organize them for further analysis. At the last stage, the client gets Improvado UI reports that combine our custom widgets with unioned data from Looker.

Throughout the integration, we stayed in touch with the company’s marketing department to get detailed feedback and adjust our further steps according to their wishes. We take customer service very seriously, so as a part of a professional services package we helped our clients create custom dashboards that were up to par with their analysis needs. These dashboards are refreshed every 12 hours to keep our customers updated about any changes with their marketing data.

Besides, our client had a special request for extracting data from an unusual data source. Even though it was a little bit challenging, we developed a custom pipeline to satisfy our customer’s data needs. Improvado offers full coverage to our customers, so we are always open in our desire to meet customer requests.

The Result

Our cooperation with the Company resulted in the growth of the marketing department’s performance indicators. Improvado automated weekly reports for their upper management. Now, the company has full control over various metrics and data from all marketing sources they use. Besides, our solution is integrated all over the company. That means not only marketing specialists but also a sales department and stakeholders can analyze data whenever they need it and get reports instantly. Not to mention the time savings on manual report drawing and gathering information.

Improvado's extensive access to marketing data and integrational support allowed the marketing team to utilize more marketing channels. The flexibility of our services helped our clients integrate new data sources into their existing network of connectors.

Eventually, the company achieved a much deeper understanding of its cross-platform advertising performance. Now, they can identify KPI buckets to manage marketing costs more effectively, aim for the right audience, and detect the most efficient advertisement channels.

Why Improvado?

The company’s marketing and innovation hub has been searching for an ETL middleware for quite a while. After a bad experience with a previous vendor, they had a clear vision of the required features. They needed to display several data sources on a single dashboard to simplify data analysis and the vendor that could meet their requirements and provide professional services.

After the initial contact, Imrpovado turned out to be a one-stop shop for all Company's marketing needs. They admired the benefits from the integration of Improvado and admitted a high level of customer service we provided. Plus, extensive experience with the required data stack. It turned out that the company wasn’t wrong. Our client was fully satisfied with the quality of services, continuous technical support, and the outcomes of our cooperation.