The current economic environment is creating a challenging landscape for agencies across the globe: Organizations are either losing employees to mass churn or to mass layoffs. Margins are eroding due to a rising demand for increased salaries. It’s also becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate the value of a product or service offerings due to oversaturated market conditions.
One thing is for sure: Today’s challenges are forcing agencies to come up with a solution—and fast. This is the type of environment where automation can help your business thrive. Imagine transforming business challenges into opportunities. With automation, you can solve your agency’s common resource challenges, all while realizing new opportunities for your business.
The clear difference between an automation-enabled agency and one that’s powered solely by people is being able to launch digital advertising accounts effectively and to no longer worry about how you will support them once they’re launched.
By automating your business, you can put your organization into a position to create more opportunities without the need to sacrifice quality customer service in the process. Let’s take a look at three ways automation can offer solutions and create opportunities for your agency.
Increasing salaries and unrealistic account ratios
The current job market presents a clear issue for the advertising industry. Salaries of digital marketing professionals are higher than they’ve ever been before, and thus margins are eroding. In the past five years the average cost of maintaining an advertising team has grown over 40%. Salary.com is now reporting six-figure salaries for positions that required perhaps $60,000 just a few years ago. With this reality, hiring your way to scale isn’t a short- or long-term solution.
One solution is to simply double the account load across your strategists. However, taking accounts from 35 to 70 per strategist quickly creates an unhealthy work environment and may drive your top talent to resign. This path is also difficult to manage, which puts the quality of your service and the reputation of your business at risk.
Automation, on the other hand, can dramatically reduce these issues, by transforming your team’s capacity, processes and results with your existing staff size and account ratios. This also generates greater profits for your businesses and protects your reputation.
There’s risk in advertising when solely powered by people
Risk management is another area of the business that is consistently challenging for organizations, and for two main reasons: First, it’s a financial risk and a concern from a credit perspective. It’s also a legal one due to outdated ad copy and potential industry-specific compliance issues.
In one example, if your account ratios are out of balance, an overworked employee could miss a Black Friday ad placement running long after Black Friday, costing your business not only goodwill but also money through having to issue credits. With automation, however, you can reduce these types of risks and protect your bottom line so you’re not issuing credits on outdated or deceptive ad copy.
Improved efficiencies and scale
After a turbulent couple of years, ad strategists—and people in general—have felt a magnifying pressure to re-evaluate how they’re spending their time and where they’re spending it. This is also driving agencies and in-house advertising teams to dig deep into where they can streamline their processes, prioritize meaningful, high-cognitive work and create efficiencies.
Our partners that have automated their workflows are exponentially scaling their businesses and increasing their overall value using Fluency's Robotic Process Automation for Advertising (RPA4A) platform, an AI technology platform unique in advertising.
Here’s an example: BH Management Services, one of the largest multifamily property owners and operators in the U.S., decided to move its digital advertising in-house to reduce costs and keep pace with its ever-changing portfolio of properties. But this also presented workload challenges.
Using Fluency’s RPA4A platform, BH gained the ability to quickly shift budgets at the account, campaign and partner levels, focus on more trials and optimizations, and greatly reduce the potential for human error. As a result, measurement and reporting were improved, with the company saving $813,000 in program costs and $500,000 in management fees.
Uncertain market conditions and business challenges will continue to evolve, but when you prioritize a solution—like automation—you’ll put your business in a position to win. For our partners that have already implemented automation, we’re seeing them exponentially scale their businesses, create new efficiencies and prioritize high-cognitive work.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch today to see how automation can help your agency move toward a more sustainable future.
