Challenge:
IDG Communications, Inc. wanted to streamline their internal reporting process and enhance the customer experience through better data visualization and automation.

Solution:
Domo platform with custom data integration.

Impact:
Through the adoption of reporting efficiencies and by providing clients with data analytics dashboards, IDG has gained and retained customers based on their reporting and analytics.

Background

Since 1964, International Data Group (IDG) has pursued their vision of making the world a better place by enabling the right use of technology. They have also been a pioneering force in the media landscape surrounding technology. Today IDG has 3,000 employees serving 147 countries in 40+ languages. Their success is tied to strong relationships within the tech landscape resulting in unmatched 1st party data. To help connect technology buyers and sellers, they have increased their emphasis on customer service and efficiency, putting them ahead of their peers.

To do this, they had to find the right technology, and the right partner, and for both, they turned to Domo.

IDG and Domo have worked together to help generate an international transformation of IDG’s external and internal reporting processes to create a competitive advantage. IDG’s clients, employees, and owners have reaped the benefits that come from true data integration: access to automation, customizable dashboards, and up to the minute client reporting. As one IDG customer summarized, “no other publisher is doing anything like this.”

Back in 2016, IDG had plenty of customer feedback, but it too often came with a request. As Gordon Plutsky, VP of Insights and Performance Marketing at IDG, explains, the company did a series of focus groups with customers and heard over and over that IDG’s clients wanted more details than they were getting from existing reporting and analytics. Delivering on that desire — even in part — was difficult and labor intensive. According to Gordon, “it was a real problem we needed to fix,” and so Gordon went searching for a partner that could help.

After an extensive review, IDG found Domo’s simple interface and overall ease-of-use compelling. As Gordon explains, “we chose Domo because it had a lot of pre-built connectors for all of the things that we wanted to do in the marketing world, particularly Google analytics and a few others like that, and then also felt that it was good for a business user. We looked at a few other BI tools, but those tools required a little bit more of a technical background to do some of the things our people needed. I knew that at some point we would be looking to expand the use of Domo outside of actual analytics people to business users.”

IDG started with 13 seats in 2016. Today, that number has grown tenfold, and now Domo technology assists with everything from IDG clients’ custom campaign data to web traffic, to e-commerce data.

From Better Data to Stronger Relationships

Deanna Moore is IDG’s Senior Manager of Digital Marketing Analytics. Part of her job has been to help build custom dashboards so that IDG clients can access real time reporting and analytics. Before Domo, IDG reporting consisted of a monthly report which was created by copying and pasting different datasets into three excel documents that were then emailed to clients. Today, Deanna and her team send a live link to clients that takes them to a custom dashboard.

As Gordon explains, when a client gets a live link that takes them to the dashboard that shows so much data, and from so many platforms, “it provides the professional and sophisticated experience that the other parts of our campaigns already offer, making the metrics more memorable and actionable.”

In addition to empowering clients by giving them better access to their data, the process of constructing the custom dashboard affords Deanna and the sales team an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with their clients. Creating the custom dashboard involves asking clients about what data they care about and why. The natural give and take of that interaction affords IDG employees an opportunity to talk about all of their products and to solve problems for clients that they otherwise may have never asked about. As Deanna explains, “Every client that we work with, we’re really on a first name basis since we are working together to get the dashboard right. We know them and we have a relationship that goes beyond looking at the data. The dashboard affords more relationship building, as opposed to our prior process.”

Driving Efficiencies Through Data Integration

Although it may sound like this level of client engagement would require more work, the truth is that IDG has gained massive efficiencies through the Domo automation process. Gordon’s team worked to assess just how much time was saved through the adoption of Domo for client reports and analytics. They estimated that before Domo, they were spending 20% of their time copying and pasting various data sets into excel. As Gordon explains, “we were spending lots of hours each month just copying and pasting from other marketing platforms. So now we send the client a link that’s always live. It is literally hundreds of hours a month in savings to get better data and the time savings allows us to invest in building better relationships with our clients.”

IDG’s reporting process has now become a competitive advantage. In Gordon’s view, client satisfaction is the key to the business and outcomes like reporting and analytics are the heart and soul of client satisfaction. As he explains, “Our customers are sophisticated marketers, so excel documents full of analytics were not cutting it. The question we needed to solve for was, how do we get all this amazing data into our customer’s hands in a timely and actionable manner. With Domo, we can now provide premium and real-time reporting, as well as an analyst on call to walk you through the data. It’s a completely different experience.”

In addition to getting beyond excel documents, IDG has utilized Domo data connectors to harness the power of data from a huge variety of platforms. As Deanna explains, “the big query connector is awesome. Especially since it’s really fast and updates, essentially in real time. If we don’t have a connector from Domo out of the box, we’ll basically work with our engineering team to pull that raw data into big query, and then from big query, we’ll grab it.”

Beyond Clients: How IDG has Utilized Domo to Transform Their Global Business

When Gordon picked Domo, he wanted a product that could be used by anyone in the IDG organization. Five years later, he has seen first-hand how the company has been transformed by empowering people to have access to data integrated in real time.

As Gordon explains, “We were moving from a lot of manual systems and we had a little pushback at first. But eventually the demonstration was enough once people realized there was a way to automate what would have required hours of manual work. We could connect all these systems and put the data on everyone’s desktop. So, there was a cultural thing to overcome first, but now people are clamoring to get their processes automated.”

The combination of speed and transparency have been essential for IDG’s global business and the client benefits from having constant and immediate access to the program reporting via Domo’s data integration. As Gordon summarizes, “for our clients, Domo is really the key tool for all the data that is now there at their fingertips. They are able to watch it on a daily basis to see the performance of their integrated marketing programs and to be able to tell if there’s going to be any misses early rather than being surprised by it.”