As we get closer to the May 1-2 Digital Revenue Summit in Chicago, we’ll profile some of the winners from our Digital Innovation Awards contest. Some of the winners from that contest will present at the conference.
Today, we’ll feature Gordon Buchanan, Client Services Manager at WRAL Digital Solutions. They won for best digital agency over $5 million in revenue.
Name: Gordon Buchanan
Title: Client Services Manager – WRAL Digital Solutions
Tell us a little about the structure and services your agency is offering? We are a full service digital agency blending a variety of disciplines into a single cohesive team, making us able to tackle any marketing challenge a client might face. We have blended our advertising operations into a single unit, where all of our publisher side business is handled by the same folks doing programmatic, OTT, paid search, and social media buying. This allows us to pivot quickly and lets our team see patterns more effectively to better manage ad budgets for clients. We have a unified design team who handles our countless ad requests, web design duties and other graphic design jobs. We also have full time SEO, web dev, social content, and web content people on staff. Finally the engine that makes us go is our project management team, who quarterbacks every project, has a diverse skillset, and really keeps the trains on the tracks for us.
What do you think is making it so successful? I think we have been successful because we have hired really smart, dedicated people who all have been given ownership of their job. We realized early on that no one had really set up an operation exactly like us before, so looking for models and frameworks of exactly how to do it wouldn’t work. Instead we allowed our folks to zealously root out inefficiency, build their own processes, and figure it out as we went/go.
Another big focus of ours is total transparency for our clients and internal stakeholders. We ask our employees about how we can do things better and we share a lot of the data and decision making process which I think helps them to feel involved and included. We also are transparent with clients, owning any mistakes, focusing on core business value as the ROI, and helping them to understand the full picture of their marketing.
What’s next for your agency? We have our eyes on a few major things: OTT is big for us both as a publisher and as a buyer, along with the continued growth of our O&O offerings and programmatic/social abilities. We are really trying to win SEO with a focus on AMP, Schema, accessibility and voice search. We are trying to grow our ticket size for websites and get bigger projects. Then we are always looking at how we manage accounts post sale and handle reporting, we are working through some upgraded reporting tools along with tinkering with our process for managing the reporting to offer more detailed analysis and show real growth for clients beyond the silo of a single campaign or a “click”.
*You can register for the Digital Revenue Summit by clicking here*