Scaling customized, local advertising campaigns across a growing number of channels is a huge operational challenge for marketers today. The total amount spent on digital ads keeps going up, and new platforms, such as financial media and retail media networks, are popping up.
They are trying to do more with the same number of people and money as before, even though the market is getting more complicated. As an ad ops team, we call this point of no-return “the crisis of capacity.”
For localized advertising efforts, these problems get a lot worse. There are more campaign factors when there are unique custom data points, such as slang phrases or nested geographical areas. If you do these things by hand, you also run the risk of making mistakes with branding and safety.
Because of these problems, automation has become an important way to run operations. Automation has changed how local advertising is managed and carried out. What’s important is to figure out how to best use technology. What steps should we automate to make it profitable to run more specialized campaigns? Here are some tactics that can help you get started.
The new mix of media
The marketing funnel needs a media mix that is locally focused, multichannel, and data-driven. To better connect with hyperlocal audiences, more brands are shifting their spending to programmatic and new media types like TV ads, audio ads, and so on.
Fluency thinks that by 2027, spending on Amazon and other demand-side platforms (DSPs) will have grown by 350%. This big change shows that advertisers want to reach important local audiences on the media sites where people spend most of their time.
Ad teams have to deal with all of this complexity, which is hard. In the past, marketers have tried to scale their efforts in two different ways.
One way to do this is to hire more people. If each team member can only handle 20 to 30 different accounts at a time, the only way to make more room is to hire more people. This method doesn’t help your profits, though, because even the most dedicated and long-term workers have a limit to how much work they can handle. When do you push someone past that point? You’ll stop employees from leaving or getting burned out.
Another way that marketers have grown is through what we like to call “Frankentech.” It takes a lot of time and money to build unique tech to solve siloed problems. Also, if you look at your processes in detail, in-house solutions rarely give you the extra capacity you need. Adding a lot of third-party apps that don’t work with each other makes your tech stack look like a house of cards instead of a solid base for improving workflow.
How to Get Through the Crisis of Capacity
Ad ops need to be looked at as a whole if marketers want to be successful. Automation has been used in advertising for a long time, but many companies only use it in limited ways, like putting automation tools in each newspaper.
But for advertising to really be scalable, a more all-around automation method is needed. This means routinely automating the tasks that require the most resources, like planning, starting campaigns, managing campaigns, and reporting.
Come with me as I go over some ways that automation can make these processes easier.
Budgeting and pacing will be automated to get better returns.
Budgeting is an important part of digital advertising, but it takes a shocking amount of work. Automating budget allocation, pacing, and changes can make spending more efficient while reducing the amount of work that needs to be done by hand.
Based on real-time success data, teams can set up rules and workflows that will change bids and budgets on the fly (and automatically!). We’ve seen people increase the amount they spend from 95% to 98% without going over.
Speeding up marketing launches to reach more people
It’s hard to start campaigns on a large scale, especially for marketers with multiple locations. Using manual processes to make sure you have the right local data funnel to the right ad sets is time-consuming.
Through pre-set configurations, automation can speed up the building and start of localized campaigns. Scalable, automated processes make it possible to start large-scale campaigns instead of making changes and tweaks by hand.
For example, a real estate marketing company cut the time it took to build and run campaigns from two hours or more to ten minutes or less when they started using automation.
Effective campaign management for the best results
Managing campaigns across many platforms needs to be constantly checked on and improved. Having to watch over every effort is the worst thing that can happen to efficiency.
Real-time alerts and proactive warnings can be sent by automated management systems. This makes it possible for planners to actually plan. You don’t have to keep an eye on operations all the time to stay on top of alerts for zero spend or service, budget reallocation suggestions, and ad extensions that have been denied.
The best part is that you and your clients can be sure that every effort is on track and working at its best.
Full reports without any stress
Making insightful reports is necessary to judge the success of a campaign, give clients feedback, and make choices based on data. Building reports, on the other hand, takes a lot of time and effort. It’s more like adding new information to a multi-page deck every month.
One of the best places to use technology is in reporting. Generate unified, customizable dashboards automatically that show success across all channels as a whole. You can use data to make smart choices and keep clients up to date on how well their campaigns are doing.
To engage data at scale, automate workstreams that require a lot of work.
The four processes we talked about above are great places to start automating. All of these steps require a lot of work and a lot of data. They also have a lot of steps that are done over and over again and beg to be turned into rules.
A Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS), like Fluency, can help you deal with the problems of scale and speed while letting you safely use new technologies like AI and automation. You can do the following with a DAOS:
- Optimize multichannel efforts: Run complicated marketing campaigns across multiple platforms more efficiently to get more information faster and make better decisions.
- Turn on dynamic, real-time updates: Make changes to your portfolio automatically to make sure your message is always up-to-date and adaptable.
- Prepare ahead of time: Use ideas generated by AI to improve the performance of your ads and increase conversions.
All of these benefits add up to one main benefit: you save a huge amount of time in a lot of different processes. This gives you more time and energy to give great performance results everywhere.
DAOS has been used by both in-house ad teams and agencies to turn manual processes into well-oiled machines that do everything automatically. As an example, Dealer.com, which is owned by Cox Automotive and is the biggest advertising agency in the car industry, wanted to add Amazon Sponsored Display to its successful multi-channel strategy. With Amazon’s audience data, they could improve their data-driven localized advertising services for tens of thousands of automakers, regional groups, and local franchise stores.
Their old methods, on the other hand, weren’t flexible or efficient enough to handle Amazon Sponsored Display. Launching and optimizing each account cost a lot of money that they wouldn’t be able to get back with their heavy reliance on human tasks. Deal.com wanted their teams to work on strategy and building connections with clients instead of doing tasks.
Dealer.com’s teams used Fluency’s direct API integration with Amazon Sponsored Display to set up and handle more than 1,100 campaigns that were specifically targeted to people in their area. This lets Dealer.com make changes to campaigns automatically and on a large scale in real time, all from a central hub.
With these new automated processes, Dealer.com’s campaign setup time dropped from 60 to 90 minutes per account to a mere 5 minutes. By automating campaign planning, the team saved 1,300 hours!
Their Amazon Sponsored Display effort did really well after it started. The cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) that Dealer.com got on Amazon was 65% less than on other platforms.
Most importantly, using a DAOS (like Fluency) let Dealer.com teams easily add localized Amazon ads to their larger media mix, which included paid search, display channels, and YouTube, without adding more work.
Getting the hyperlocal future going
Advertisers who are thinking ahead can use the expected growth of new media outlets to their advantage. To keep up with these growing trends, though, you’ll need tools to help you grow without putting too much stress on your team or your profits.
Key advertising tasks are being automated. With workstreams, you’ll be able to show ads that are highly targeted and useful at key points in the customer journey. It’s the fastest, simplest, and most complete way to grow in a way that makes money.