The manual management of multi-location ad accounts can ruin a team’s efficiency and effectiveness, and result in everything from executional errors to client and personnel churn. And as with other aspects of legacy digital campaign work, there are no economies of scale. Quite the opposite: the more clients and accounts your strategists service, the worse the issues get. One area that often wastes the most time? Client communications. No matter what the cadence you have with your clients and accounts, conversations—and the dependencies that follow—are often the most inefficient means of dealing with many of your clients’ most important actions. If you need a way to streamline the communication process, Fluency’s CoLab may be the tool you’re looking for.
Handling multi-location ad accounts manually can quickly overwhelm a team, leading to mistakes, personnel turnover, and frustrated clients. As you take on more clients and accounts, these issues can spiral out of control. One common time-sink? Client communication. Whether you're frequently in touch or not, conversations often become the least efficient way to address client needs. If you're seeking to simplify this process, Fluency's CoLab might be the perfect tool for you.
Important Decisions, Impractical Methods
From up-to-date reporting to budget modifications and change orders, important facets of your clients’ campaign management are often dealt with through phone or video conferences. As comforting as these interactions are, they’re an effort to schedule, take time to do, and come loaded with liabilities. Take multi-family housing as an example. In an average day, an ad strategist or account manager might talk with people at five different properties about their advertising campaign performance, budgets, changes, and upcoming specials. Those conversations demand documentation, along with five unique sets of recommendations. Those recommendations then need to be reviewed, possibly edited, approved, and THEN scheduled and implemented. The amount of time, “touches”, and effort involved multiplies with every post-conversation action. Your team, your advertisers, and their campaigns deserve a more structured and practical method for achieving strategic and tactical goals.
Key aspects of client campaign management, like up-to-date reporting or budget adjustments, are often handled via phone or video calls. While familiar, these methods require a lot of scheduling, effort, and come with risks. For instance, a typical day for an ad strategist might involve discussions with five different properties about their ad campaigns. Documenting these calls, creating unique recommendation sets, reviewing them, and finally scheduling and implementing changes is a time-consuming and repetitive process. A more structured, practical method could greatly benefit your team and clients alike.
Introducing Fluency CoLab: Making Client Communication Consistent, Efficient, Accurate, and Actionable.
To solve many of the toughest agency-advertiser communication challenges, Fluency has developed CoLab. Now live and available for select Fluency users as part of a public beta, CoLab addresses some of the most challenging issues in agency-advertiser communication by combining structured messaging, decision-making guidance, and simple, reliable execution in one platform:
- Success Starts with Structure
Each CoLab space can be customized based on your category expertise, your clients’ needs, and other relevant considerations. The result: a consistent, pre-structured conversation that—from beginning to end—covers the majority of topics and actions you’d typically discuss with anyone you’re running campaigns for.
- Guiding to Greatness
Knowledge is power: CoLab puts everything your clients need to make informed decisions right in front of them, including key performance indicators like CPC, CPM, and CTR—all accurate and up to date. You can then add in editable budget calculations that allow for accurate refinement of targets and goals and then further bolster your clients’ understanding of their budgeting with customized narratives. Finally, CoLab delivers budget recommendations based on this series of pre-set and editable parameters, giving your advertisers the comprehensive and accurate information they need to make and approve changes to their spend.
- Automated Action
CoLab can also translate requests into automatically executed tasks, making almost any type (and volume) of campaign request easy to implement. From the aforementioned budget recommendations and changes (which can be approved and implemented right within the tools,) to building out and customizing new ad creative, incentives, and specials. You can set up sections and fields so that each account can quickly and easily input exactly what they want done to their campaigns. In addition to its self-service capabilities on the front end, any or all actions can also be automated based on criteria and permissions you can set and modify at will. Don’t want them automated? We can surface them to your analysts and allow them to simply accept or reject the changes with one click.
Mutual Benefits
By streamlining communications from end to end, CoLab delivers myriad benefits for agencies as well as advertisers, acting as a time multiplier for people looking to do more—and better— work in less time. Its customizable, relevant, and predictable format is easy to understand, allows for a robust amount of information, and the ability to adjust and implement budget, spend, and campaign creative without the lag involved with legacy processes. Do you have compliance, regulatory considerations, brand standards, or brand safety issues your advertisers’ campaigns need to operate within? CoLab can be set up to automatically solve for these. Plus, it’s also always on, always accurate, and provides a transparent and trustworthy record of all your account and campaign adjustments.
The challenges and limitations created by traditional client communications are real—and will continue to hamper your team’s ability to successfully serve its clients. If you’re interested in learning more about how Fluency’s CoLab can help eliminate these issues, we’d love to talk. Reach out and we can schedule a demo today.