The Problem
A 12-person performance marketing agency was losing its best people to admin. Every Friday, three senior strategists spent 4-6 hours each pulling data from Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, GA4, and Shopify into hand-built client decks. Every new client brief was being turned into a "kick-off deck" by hand. another 8 hours of work per pitch. The team was good at the actual marketing; they were drowning in the paperwork around it.
What I Built
Two distinct automation systems:
1. Weekly reporting engine. Each client has a Looker Studio dashboard auto-populated nightly from connected ad accounts, GA4, and (where applicable) Shopify. Friday morning, an n8n workflow pulls dashboard screenshots, generates an AI-written commentary section ("here's what changed this week, here's why, here's what we're doing about it"), and assembles it into a templated Google Slides deck. The strategist reviews and adds their voice for ~20 minutes; deck is sent.
2. Brief-to-deck AI pipeline. When a new client brief lands (in Notion), an automation:
- Researches the company (web search, social presence, competitor scan)
- Drafts a positioning hypothesis
- Generates an initial pitch deck with channel recommendations
- Surfaces 3-4 strategic questions that need the strategist's judgement
The strategist now starts with an 80%-done deck instead of a blank document. Pitch turnaround dropped from 3 days to 6 hours.
Outcome
The agency absorbed 8 new retainer clients in 4 months without hiring. Strategist net promoter scores (internally tracked) climbed from 6.2 to 8.9 because they were finally doing the work they'd been hired for. The agency's average proposal-to-signed conversion went up because the pitches arrived faster and looked more researched than competitors.