Automation can be an intimidating idea for digital advertising agencies. The concept is still relatively new within the industry, so it’s understandable why agencies may feel daunted by what it takes to implement such a significant change to their business.
After all, the actual work of digital advertising has only gotten more complex in recent years. With more platforms and more customizable data available than ever, day-to-day account management demands increasingly careful alignment to ensure creative campaigns, brand messaging, and budgets remain on point. It’s easy to settle for maintaining the status quo when you’re juggling so much at once — or, as so often happens in the industry, just throwing new hires at the problem until a solution emerges.
But that won’t work in today’s environment. Technology is outrunning legacy solutions and models, so a hiring spree won’t lead to the results it once did. That’s why automation platforms like Fluency are the key to solving those repetitive, mundane tasks that hold back digital advertising agencies from unlocking better versions of themselves.
It’s true that implementing automation isn’t just a choice. If you want to do it effectively, you are committing to a journey. You have to be prepared to holistically assess how your organization works from top to bottom on a granular level — and an automation partner can help. By challenging the ways you develop, execute, and optimize digital advertising, you will be prepared to deploy automation in a way that makes the most sense for your organization. Here’s a dynamic roadmap for getting it done, beginning with the pivotal first steps. It’s not as intimidating as you might think.
How to kick off your automation journey
Start small. For example, can you identify what your onboarding process looks like for a new advertiser? If the answer is yes — if you can document the questions you ask a new advertiser when you begin working with them, for example — then you already have data that can help you prepare for automation.
Once you understand how your organization onboards a new advertiser, the next step is figuring out where inefficiencies lie. Is your account manager simply passing documents back and forth between people as part of the onboarding process? If so, you have identified your first opportunity to automate away a bit of busy work that slows your business down. An automation partner like Fluency can help get it off your plate forever.
From there, you should apply the same method to look inward at all your agency’s internal processes, one by one — like a deep X-ray for your entire organization. An automation partner like Fluency can help you ask and answer the right questions, such as: How are your teams structured? What does each person on each team do on a daily basis? Where do they spend their time? Does Person A talk to Person B, then Person B talks to Person C in the field, then Person C in the field gets an approval, then that approval comes back into Salesforce, and then Salesforce puts an order out? When you can answer those questions, then it’s easy to recognize where your workflow can be improved with automation.
Building a holistic understanding of the operational ins and outs of your business is essential if you want to find all of the inefficiencies that automation can resolve. The deeper you go into the automation journey, the more efficiencies you’ll discover.
Discovering efficiencies beyond workflow
Looking inward doesn’t stop with the digital advertising workflow. You should also apply the same holistic self-assessment to the parts of your business that orbit the digital advertising ecosystem, such as technology investments. Ask questions like: Why are we investing in this technology? What is our end result? How are our teams actually using it?
Once you are armed with those answers, you will have a deeper understanding of what you want to achieve with your investments and what you expect from your technology partners. You might even discover that an automation platform like Fluency’s encompasses features and functions that solve for several different issues, giving your organization the opportunity to consolidate separate investments into a single solution that streamlines your operation.
Suddenly, you’re not just unlocking efficiency at the operational level by eliminating busy work through automation — you’re also finding financial efficiencies, too.
Why preparation is crucial to success
The automation journey looks different for every agency. That’s why your automation partners should encourage you to look inward, examining every part of your business. You should feel empowered to ask yourself the questions you haven’t asked before, because automation is most effective when it’s tailored to fit an organization’s unique workflow and processes. By helping them ask critical questions of themselves, a journey that can take years instead can be accomplished in months.
Part of that journey is ensuring that people at every level understand how automation can make a difference. For analysts and account managers, it means they won’t need to do the mundane tasks like pasting numbers into spreadsheets or monitoring ad spending all the time. For ad leadership, it means more time to focus on creative strategy. COOs will be excited to see how much the cost of doing business goes down. And CEOs get to leverage the competitive edge that improves the overall health of their business. As one Fluency customer explained, “Most of our processes were manual and took up a lot of time. Automation is the future and Fluency is helping us achieve it.”
When a digital advertising agency is ready to implement automation, their deliberate prep of assessing strategy, auditing technology, and evaluating process will equip them with clear expectations for how automation will improve their business and workflow. When stakeholders understand how automation can help them succeed at their jobs, they are more likely to actively support the automation process, making implementation that much more successful in the long run.
The one thing that is constant in digital advertising is change. If you understand your operations and you’re able to automate inefficient tasks, you are future-proofing your business when change inevitably comes to the market. By leveraging the expertise of an automation partner like Fluency, you can build a better future for your business, your colleagues, and your clients.