Why Billy Grace can be the backbone of your agency … and how to make it happen

One sector embracing these tools is advertising and marketing, notably agencies. Many are already enjoying smoother workflows, higher margins, more sales and longer client engagements. It’s natural: after all, agencies are packed with people who thrive on new ideas and fresh ways of thinking. But they’re discovering the diverse set of applications they use – standalone software, often niche in function and hard to integrate – simply isn’t big enough for their ideas. What they want is a platform for those ideas: software that can act as a “backbone” for your workflows, with all information brought together and given a boost by AI.

And that’s what drives Billy Grace. We’re software developers, but we’re marketers as well as data science geeks. Our founders have a background in the most important business activity of all: communicating the benefits of products and services to customers who need them.

Which is why we believe our software should be top of the consideration list at your marketing or advertising agency. Because it’s the one we’d use ourselves. (Yes, we built it that way.)

In this article you’ll see why Billy Grace is the right software backbone for your agency, and how it unleashes your people’s creativity without boxing them in – letting you perform even better for your clients. (And win new ones, too.) Best of all, you’ll see how the benefits are multiplicative, not additive – becoming more effective the more data and processes you use it with.

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

• The Challenge Agencies Face
• The Risks of Retaining the Status Quo
• Marketing Software as Backbone: Future-Proofing your Agency
• What’s in it for Agencies: Let’s Get to the Money
• Why Partner with Billy Grace: Our Technology

The Challenge Agencies Face

You’re probably surrounded by right-brained people whose ideas and imaginations don’t always connect well to the numbers-driven, analytical methodologies used in the back office to provide metrics and recommendations to clients. It’s why even small agencies can feel like much larger enterprises, with a mishmash of applications, fragmented data in silos, and teams pursuing goals that sometimes conflict. 

Note this isn’t all bad: intuition and creativity are the lifeblood of an agency. But these side effects mean new software adoption, particularly platforms that cross departments,  isn’t always a priority. That’s where the problem lies. 

Because all those team in separated silos, apps created for different tasks, and disconnected datasets are preventing you seeing a “single version of the truth” in your clients’ marketing data. Individually, each may have its charms – but in the Big Picture they create friction and drag that isn’t good for you or your customers.

All this affects the accuracy of your advice. And with it, the effectiveness of your agency. A simple example: many marketers concentrate on BOFU (bottom-of-funnel) activities because it’s easy to connect a clickthrough with a sale … but research shows more spending upfunnel contributes a substantial chunk of sales volume. Which means your customers are missing out.

Nielsen notes a 1-point increase in TOFU metrics like awareness can lead to a 1% rise in sales. While the respected CMO Survey states many clients prefer a 40:60 split between branding and tactical, with many aiming for 50:50. Are you misallocating half their spend?

That’s the first and biggest reason we built Billy Grace: to be your agency’s software backbone. It takes all data into account – reputable first-party data, not partner cookies or the like – and builds a complete picture of the customer journey for each of your clients, letting you make better decisions about what you do for them. If you take nothing else away from this article – take that thought.

The Risks of Retaining the Status Quo

A long time ago, one agency boss said his “entire inventory goes down in the elevator each evening”. With people their product, and every seat costing money, many agencies have considerable legacy investment in technology … investments many CFOs are reluctant to write off and replace. Here’s why that’s wrong. 

Those existing software investments may carry a long list of “friction factors” taking up people’s time and energy. with all the missed insights and opportunities that risks. 

Try this experiment: across your agency, how many reports and calculations are performed with manual input? Even if it’s cutting-and-pasting into an Excel, or asking an AI to reformat a table, each one taxes agency labor just a little. And all those little drags add up.

In brief: if you’re creating even one monthly report manually, or even one metric needs human eyes to compile, it’s a signal your software isn’t integrated enough to keep you competitive. So instead of worrying “We need to get a return on our software investment”, think what that “investment” is costing you … in lost hours and unhappy clients. 

Marketing Software as Backbone: Future-Proofing your Agency

Before we go deeper into Billy Grace itself, let’s see what “backbone thinking” could do as a general rule. Imagine all the data you work with today – Google Analytics 4, PPC ad managers, social media applications, campaign optimization, and more – could be integrated into a single platform. Here’s what’d happen:

• Insights from the Big Picture. With data from all channels in the same place, each data point is informing the whole – not seen separately. That alone creates a shared understanding agency-wide that wasn’t there before.
• Decisions supported by evidence. Of course, you always back your recommendations with data – but if it’s partial data, the decision won’t be the best it can be. 
• Assured high quality of data. When your data is first-party, it’s not just more reliable: it’s GDPR-compliant too. Reducing both your risk and your client’s. 
• Easily communicable insights. It’s amazing how much help a consistent report format or well-drawn graph can be. When trends, nuances, and findings in the data can be shared across teams, it aids understanding – making the most of your human capital.
• Predictive ability, not rear-view-mirror. Reports often look back at what’s just happened. Imagine the value of looking forward to what happens next. Seeing patterns helps plan for the future. 
• AI-inclusive, not human-exclusive. Establishing a backbone for all marketing data points lets you put AI to work without losing the creativity of your human workers. Ask it to interrogate data at scale, come up with new metrics, offer suggestions for what to test. It’s a tool.

And let’s repeat the best part of all this: with the right analytics and optimization software connecting your agency – like Billy Grace (duh!) – your advantages get bigger as your dataset grows. The more data you have on a client’s customers, the greater your opportunity for using that data, seeing customer journeys in ever more detail with ever more opportunities for using it for advantage, even offline effects like an ad campaign. If it had an impact, it’ll be visible in the data – and valuable to clients.  

What’s in it for Agencies: Let’s Get to the Money

Let’s expand on that, with a look at what it means for your top and bottom lines. The biggest advantages are the oldest ones: lower churn in your roster, higher spending as you deliver better results, and more growth among your clients themselves. Enabling you to grow too. Think better margins, longer engagements, and a larger share of your client’s marketing budget.

But the benefits don’t stop there. With access to more complete data and more accurate analysis, your people will simply be even better at their jobs. Spending fewer hours to get the optimum result. Fewer frazzled people, better mental health, deeper skillsets you can offer to clients. All the good stuff. 

“As long as you track the data in your account … any adjustment made in Billy Grace retroactively updates all your historical data. Tomorrow, you bring the new reality into all your past data.”

Akke Pennin

Founder IWB Agency

There’s one more – and it may be the most important of all. With a software backbone instead of a rattling bag of non-integrated apps, you’ll be able to handle that growth more effectively – scaling up your agency without the same scaling-up of costs. You’ll automate processes previously done by hand, and apply those models to more client scenarios. Share insights across both right-brained departments like Creative, and left-brained departments like Media, so people with different skills can all get value from them. 

It’s all about doing more … with less. 

Why Partner with Billy Grace: Our Technology

Any software backbone will touch a large number of teams and job titles – and offer value to each one. So to finish up, here’s a summary of Billy Grace technology. We’d bet you can think of multiple people in your agency who’d benefit from each feature.

• It all starts with data tracking: making sense of all that lovely customer information from websites, social media, PPC, and more. This part “recognizes” a unique individual from first-party data and “identifies” them across sessions, sites, and devices. There are integrations to link seamlessly to many data sources, too. So tech benefit 1: you get that single version of the truth. 

• It continues with attribution modeling: looking not at the “last click” but at the whole customer journey from that first brush with your website. Social posts, pages visited, PPC ads consumed or clicked: each interaction contributed something to the end result – and by applying models like UMM (Universal Marketing Measurement) with AI to assign credit where credit’s due, you’ll see which channels are working hard to secure the sale.

• The value rises again with AI-assisted predictive analytics. By looking at the landscape and seeing patterns and trends, Machine Learning sees what action tends to lead to what result and draws connections and conclusions that aren’t easy for a human to see. Insights you can take straight to your client.

• And the final part of the jigsaw is automated optimization for adspend. The ideal marketing software backbone wouldn’t just gather data or analyze it – it’d act on it. And Billy Grace does just that. Looking back at all attributions, taking all data into account, it can decide for you how much you should be spending on campaigns to maximize actual sales at BOFU. The one number your agency lives or dies by.

Agencies are our partners – we’ve found we thrive (and have more fun) when our agency clients succeed. We’re working with many already – and they’re growing with us, taking on more clients and handling bigger adspends. And it all starts with an understanding of what our software backbone can offer.

CONCLUSION
With that in mind, let’s talk about the potential you could unlock at your marketing agency – by integrating your data, empowering your people, and creating even more success for your clients.