The challenge: balancing localization and operational efficiency for Home Services ad campaigns

Jeremy Williams, Strategic America’s Digital Media Strategist, manages hyper-localized campaigns for HVAC and home services clients. When creating campaigns for national brands with regional offices, he adjusts assets like headlines, copy, and images to promote products and services based on local availability or weather conditions.

“The weather plays a very, very large role in our strategy,” said Williams. “During transition seasons like spring and fall, the demand may not be as high but the competition is still there.” 

This sophisticated attention to detail meant constantly launching, updating, and localizing ads—all while keeping pace with seasonality and consumer demand shifts.

“The effort it took to launch these accounts and understand the trends for each one was so time-consuming,” said Trista Webster, Digital Marketing Director at Strategic America. “It just wasn't scalable.”

Williams agrees that the “scale of it was overwhelming.” The team manually paced weekly and optimized accounts monthly. With so many manual processes throughout, launching campaigns for 20 accounts could take two full days and caused “a lot of internal struggles,” said Webster.

These operational bottlenecks started to encroach on the client experience. As a company that prides itself on both stellar customer service and maximum ROAS, it was becoming harder to have meaningful client conversations as the company grew.

“As an agency, we don’t just ‘set it and forget it,’” said Webster. “But when we spent all of our time manually adjusting, optimizing, and pacing, we felt that our level of service was compromised.”

The solution: Automating localized HVAC campaigns, powered by dynamic weather data

Bringing automation and AI into their daily AdOPs has helped Strategic America reimagine how they run localized campaigns and use AI. 

“Fluency answered two big questions for us,” said Webster. “First, how do we scale in a quick, easy way? And then on top of that, how do we personalize at scale?”

Running hyper-local ads across the nation 80% faster with automation

Fluency Blueprints sit at the core of their localization strategy. With Blueprints, Williams and team can prebuild core campaign components in one place and use them across multiple accounts in bulk. 

“Before Fluency, an order of 20 different accounts would probably take a couple of days to launch,” said Williams. “Now we can get everything done in a few hours, from getting all the information together to setting the accounts live.”

Automation has made account launches 80% faster. According to Williams, this gives the team valuable time “to think more strategically on a high level and also on a local level for individual accounts.”

Running dynamic, weather-based ads at scale for 150+ clients

Fluency Blueprints also enable the team to build weather-specific campaigns that turn on or off based on live local weather conditions. Powered by a weather API within Fluency, Williams and the team can automatically turn on relevant ads in hyper-localized geos for every client at scale.  

For example, when the temperature drops below a certain threshold, Fluency’s advertising automation tools automatically swap out headlines, copy, and images to promote heating services or products. The reverse is true when temperatures rise: the “cold weather” ads turn off and “hot weather” ads turn on automatically, showcasing services like air conditioning installation or pool cleaning. 

“Integrating Fluency’s weather API into Blueprints ensures that our clients remain highly relevant, regardless of local conditions,” said Williams. “We can dynamically adjust ad messaging so the most relevant ads are served out to our customers’ local markets depending on the weather in their area, not a generic rule.” 

By using automation to dynamically update ads based on real-time weather conditions, Strategic America can serve highly relevant ads in key markets, year-round, with minimal manual work. 

“The weather API is the only way we can run a campaign strategy like this,” emphasized Williams. “It saves us a ton of time.”

This unique localized approach has piqued the interest of Strategic America’s home services clients. Not only does it solve for the fluctuating nature of both consumer behavior and the HVAC industry, but Williams confirms they’ve “seen a drop in cost-per-click throughout the year” for those opting in to weather-based ads. With automation on their side, the team has scaled this strategy to other clients with minimal effort.

Integrating AI into daily workflows for maximum efficiency and insights

Automation isn’t the only technology helping Strategic America deliver stellar service and strategies to clients. Webster says they also “lean on Fluency’s great AI features to make ourselves and our clients more competitive.” 

Muse, Fluency’s integrated AI technology, helps them with multiple daily AdOps functions. Whether the team needs to make budget adjustments, write new ad copy, or adjust an account’s strategy based on trending data, the team finds Muse is a helpful and vital contributor to their work. 

“We use Muse to get insights into account performance and to tailor performance reports to different clients,” said Williams. “Muse also suggests budget increases and identifies trends or improvements that we may not spot right away, all of which saves us a lot of time.”

Williams says his favorite thing is that “Muse can be very specific because it uses account-level data.” By using AI “on a localized and individual level,” Williams feels that Muse’s insights are “definitely more actionable” than those he’s gotten from generalized AI tools.

“Because Muse is integrated with Fluency, we can simply ask Muse anything about an account and it uses all relevant account data to make recommendations or give reporting recaps,” added Williams.

The result: faster campaign launches and lower CPC with automation and operational improvements 

Williams wholly agrees that automation, especially the adoption of Blueprints for campaign launches and budgeting, “has eliminated a lot of the repetitive tasks that used to take up most of my time.” 

“Automating budget requests, plus the quick creation and launching of campaigns, has allowed us to reallocate time to finding opportunities that have improved performance metrics year-over-year,” he added. 

Shifting how the team utilizes their time has enabled them to deliver fantastic results for clients, including: 

• 32% decrease in cost per conversion
• 81% decrease in CPC

Testing new ad formats and delivering high-touch service—without new headcount

According to Webster, another advantage is that the team can "roll out these campaign strategies to more clients, which is helping us grow," while still keeping clients happy.

“We’re able to provide the high level of customer service that our clients expect as we grow without expanding headcount,” says Webster. “We can focus on what matters most to our clients.” 

Webster also feels Fluency has “opened bandwidth” on the team to “think outside the box” for building client-specific strategies. This further solidifies their dedication to both advertising innovation and fostering strong client relationships.

“We’re able to explore new industry innovations, which our team wouldn’t be able to absorb into their workload without automation,” said Webster. “It’s made our team stronger because we can expand the strategies we offer to clients.” 

As the agency continues on its rapid growth trajectory, Webster and the Strategic America team are excited to have Fluency as a partner. Fluency’s compounding impact on their ad operations has shown Williams, “from an agency perspective, the true impact and benefit of using technology.” 

“If you want to work smarter, not harder, then Fluency is your answer,” she added. “It truly does help you.”

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