Modernizing Data Operations for a Growing Marketing Agency

A small marketing agency transitioned from spreadsheet-based reporting to a centralized data and analytics system, enabling faster insight, stronger governance, and greater operational agility.

Context

The client is a New York–based marketing agency specializing in healthcare and insurance clients. As the agency grew, so did the complexity and volume of its data, spanning multiple sources and reporting requirements across internal teams and external stakeholders.

Much of the agency’s data knowledge and process logic lived inside Excel, with updates performed manually and on an infrequent cadence.

Challenge

The agency needed to modernize and automate its data ingestion, transformation, and reporting processes while remaining cost conscious. Manual spreadsheet workflows limited timeliness, consistency, and scalability, and made it difficult to enforce governance and internal data standards.

To remain competitive, the agency needed a centralized, reliable data foundation that could support near real-time reporting, reduce manual effort, and allow the team to respond quickly to changing market and client needs.

Solution

Unista helped the agency identify and select an appropriate data warehouse platform and supported contract evaluation to ensure a sustainable long-term fit. We then translated the existing Excel-based workflows into a centralized data model and implemented an automated ETL pipeline to handle ongoing data ingestion and transformation.

On top of this foundation, we designed and deployed dashboards and reports for both internal and client-facing use. These views provided near real-time access to data that had previously only been available on a weekly basis. Unista continues to operate and maintain the system, allowing the agency to focus on client delivery rather than data operations.

Impact

The agency gained a centralized, automated data environment that replaced manual reporting with reliable, timely insight. Reporting cycles were shortened, governance was strengthened, and teams gained greater confidence in the data they relied on day to day.

By modernizing its data operations, the agency improved its ability to respond to client needs, adapt to market conditions, and compete more effectively without adding operational overhead.