Around the globe, market conditions are forcing businesses to deal with a variety of difficult challenges all at once: It’s vastly more difficult to attract top talent. Employees are churning at a higher rate than they ever have before. Salaries of digital advertisers are up and margins are eroding across the industry. So where do you turn for help?
As an advertising automation partner, Fluency has been through this many times, helping our partners transform business challenges—such as hiring, risk management, and the like—into opportunities. And many of our prospects already know automation is better as well; they come to us understanding increased quality control, more room to take on business, and increased service are a package deal. But automation also impacts a number of underlying parts of the business that are easily overlooked if you’re only focused on the operational aspect of your organization.
Let’s take a closer look at what automation means for businesses and how it can help solve the wave of challenges today’s market presents.
Staffing in Today’s Market Can Stifle Your Profitability
The current job market presents a clear issue to the industry: salaries of digital advertisers are higher than they’ve ever been before and thus, margins are eroding. In the past 5 years, the average cost of an advertising team has grown over 40%. Salary.com is now reporting 6 figure salaries for these positions that were 50--60k just a handful of years ago. With this reality, hiring your way to scale isn’t a short or long term solution.
You could just tell your strategists you need to double their account load—but this path quickly results in an overworked culture, unhappy employees, and high turnover. Done incorrectly (with no additional tools), it also degrades the quality of service you can offer and is difficult to ensure the work actually gets done. In short, increasing a strategist’s accounts from 50 to 100 can go wrong very quickly if it isn’t done correctly. These are just a few of the reasons why your business should be considering automation.
Automation's benefits here are myriad: Because they’re not forced to hire more people to launch more business, agencies and enterprises can transform their team’s capacity, processes, and results with the staff size and account ratios they already have in place, while also generating greater profit for their businesses.
When Solely Powered By People, There’s Risk In Advertising
Risk management is essential to maximizing profits and overall value, but there’s always risk in advertising if it’s solely powered by people. It’s not only a financial risk from a credit perspective, but it’s also a legal risk due to deceptive or outdated ad copy and potential industry specific compliance issues.
Fluency sees many of our partners wanting to reduce risk in their business from both of these standpoints. Say you have 20 people on your team managing day-to-day advertising operations. In this scenario, you have to ensure each one of these 20 strategists not only understands, but cares about the potential impact and the outcomes. This is, of course, much easier said than done when you’re managing a large team.
With automation, however, you can reduce risk, increase rewards and protect your bottom line; instead of having a team of 20 who are all potential failure points in your risk management strategies, you can have one central point of control when managing your organization’s risk factors.
Automation Puts You In a Position to Say “Yes” to More Business
Every company wants the ability to say “yes” to more business, but they’re not always in a position to do so—especially when relying exclusively on people to support every facet of account management. Have you ever stopped pitching a new piece of business because your operations team said, “there’s no way we can launch that?” At Fluency, we know that’s because you’re relying solely on unsustainable practices.
Instead of worrying about how you’re going to launch an account, what if you could instead say “oh, you want to launch in a week? Sure, all we need is your data in our standard format and we’ll get you up and live.” That’s the difference between an automation-enabled business and one that’s still relying on manual processes to manage their accounts.
How much more successful would your organization be if you no longer needed to worry about getting an account live, or better yet, how you will support it once it’s launched? Automation can elevate your pitch and put your organization into a position where you can say “yes” to more business. This ultimately drives more opportunities for your organization without the need to sacrifice quality customer service in the process.
Automation Isn't the Future—It’s Already Here
While businesses have always had to adapt to constantly evolving challenges, automation isn’t part of some far-off future—it’s already part of the industry from Facebook ad automation to Google, advertisers now have the opportunity to automate advertsing on multiple channels. The harsh reality is, if you’re not automating you will lose more than you will win. For our partners that have automated their workflows, we’re seeing them exponentially scale their business and increase their overall value. And the good news is that Fluency's got everything you need to increase your own competitive advantage immediately.
Interested in learning more? Let’s talk about it. Get in touch today to see how automation can help your agency move toward a more sustainable future.
