Requirements
The explosive growth in demand over the past decade for Internet and social media marketing has created many challenges for agencies, who increasingly require sophisticated online tools to help them understand and incorporate the complex research, analysis and reporting needed in their client campaigns.
To address this, the company required new software that would provide digital marketers with a unique single access route to an assortment of Web and social databases to retrieve research, analysis and reporting data. The software would also compare the client’s online marketing performance against key competitors, identify their relative online marketing strengths and weaknesses and present the results in the form of agency branded dashboard-style marketing reports.
Rokal undertook extensive pre-development research with over 20 marketing agencies around the UK to determine the design requirements for the software before handing the project over to Blueberry to develop into a market-ready product.
Our Solution
Blueberry made use of third-party API’s / HTML visualisation libraries, such as SEMRush, High-Charts, Google Analytics, Adwords etc., to design a modular Windows system using C#, ASP.NET and JavaScript, which processes marketing data from multiple tools to generate a detailed dashboard-style marketing report.
The system comprises the following major functional parts:
- Administrative Pages
- Agency Pages
- SEO Research Tools
- Approximately 10 online tools which allow specific research activities, and produce geographically sourced data from a selection of databases, that can be used in internal research reports and a final client-customised Marketing Report.
- Reports /Tools
- Keyword Research – tools to allow the user to build a keyword list.
- Online Marketing Reports
- A high quality output report.
- A Commercial Subsystem
- A ‘User and Usage’ module to manage licenses and billing
- Automated Report
- A monthly trend report summarising key activity and performance indicators
To use the Rorkal software, a user simply enters a client URL, plus any competitor URLs. The user can then use the Rorkal workbench SEO toolset, to analyse any sub-set of the Web or social sites listed.
The Results
Digital professionals can currently take up to two days to research and compile a single client marketing report. The Rorkal SaaS is able to complete comprehensive in-house and client marketing reports in less than three hours.
Rorkal’s research and reporting toolset includes a number of specific reports for agency digital professionals:
- Competitor Research – providing a more detailed examination of a clients’ product or brand web and social sites, versus their competitors in their industry and market sectors.
- Keyword Tool – using an interactive tool which allows the agency user to build a keyword list.
- Social Media Tool – to report on the content, quality and visibility of selected Keywords, to indicate how well a site is using social media.
An agency user can also request, on demand, a client Marketing Report, which is output in professional dashboard-style, with interactive graphs and charts, supported by appropriate interpretation. Originators can produce this report online or in print.
As part of the production of the Marketing Report, the agency user has the option to select which sections are produced, add branding, or create a customised Executive Summary.
The Rorkal software supports four different output formats:
Standard Quality:
- In-house agency viewing of social and web-based research, and marketing reports
- PDF output for agency-only use
Premium Quality Marketing Reports:
- Shared viewing of social and web-based ad hoc and monthly agency-branded marketing reports, customised for agency clients
- PDF format of the same reports
Peter Hartley, Marketing Partnership Director at Rorkal, said: “Blueberry was chosen by Rorkal from a shortlist of specialist software companies because the company met our demanding commercial and technical evaluation criteria.
“This included expertise in developing commercial software for mature markets, and a pool of technical specialists with relevant skills and experience.
“In addition, they had the credentials of successfully managing complex technology projects -on time, to specification and within budget. “
Rorkal is the first of a portfolio of software products to be developed by Blueberry. The blueprint has already been created of a similar software toolset for digital professionals in corporate marketing departments.
“Blueberry was chosen by Rorkal from a shortlist of specialist software companies because the company met our demanding commercial and technical evaluation criteria. This included a pool of technical software specialists and the credentials for successfully managing complex technology projects – on time, to specification and within budget.”
Peter Hartley - Marketing Partnership Director | Rorkal