The benefits of automation are clear: replace the need to manually manage your digital advertising accounts with fulfilling work, such as strategic planning and forward-thinking conversations. Drastically reduce the stress related to a business exclusively powered by people—such as eroding salaries, mass churn and unbalanced account ratios.
While it all sounds great in theory, executives often wonder where to even begin, and how the presumed benefits can become their organization’s reality.
You may be ready to reap the benefits of automation today, but the simple truth is that automation requires dedication, alignment and strategic planning for how automation will be used before deployment. It also requires an understanding and buy-in of the following:
- Defining your strategy
- Documenting your processes
- Change management
Strategy for success
The first step in preparing for automation is to evaluate and document your overall organizational strategy prior to rolling out an automation solution:
- Identify your competitive differentiators in the market.
- Identify your client-facing value proposition.
- Document your approach from end to end.
In short, it is what makes up your organization’s identity—from your services to your audience and the like. These considerations may seem very basic, but being able to articulate them to your future automation partner is important. In addition to getting granular, be open to change. Automation is an opportunity for exponential growth across your business. Being able to articulate your value proposition and then knowing it will ultimately change and evolve—for the better—will help your organization expand and diversify its value and bottom line.
Documenting your processes
Another part of readiness to consider is how your organization is currently operating. Documenting a digital ad agency’s processes means detailing all of its workflows from onboarding through execution. Doing this will create a centralized source for your future automation partner to refer to and streamline for operational efficiency and scalability across the business.
Not sure where to begin? Here’s an easy way to think about this: Consider how you’d explain the workflow for launching ad accounts to a brand-new member of your team. How would you onboard this employee and share with them the critical, day-to-day details, such as:
- How to set ad spending limits
- How to enable notifications
- How to select your campaign’s objective
- How to choose your ad placement
….and so on.
Now that you’ve made it to this step, you’re likely more prepared for automation than perhaps you thought you were. As you look at these details, you can start to uncover where your team can start saving time. For example, if automation will save 80% of your team’s time launching new accounts, where can you start applying this newfound bandwidth? This is where the fun part comes in, where you and your team can start dreaming up impactful strategy and innovation you once didn’t have time for.
Change management
Since automation can dramatically shift your business, it requires energy and buy-in from the top. The most successful agencies that chose automation also chose to embrace change. Trusting in the endless possibilities and benefits of automation and keeping its big vision at the forefront of implementation will put your business in a positive position.
Once you have acceptance and buy-in from your executives, it’s time to move through the rest of the organization. This is where it’s important to share wins and opportunities with your team. Once teams start to see that they’re no longer consumed with low value task work (like building decks and getting bogged down with unrealistic account ratios,) the buy-in starts to increase. Enthusiasm for implementation and an increase in overall morale follows suit once they see that there’s finally time to breathe and dive into strategic planning.
Despite some people’s perceptions, automation isn’t taking jobs away—it’s removing the low-value task work so your team can focus on high-cognitive work that not only excites them but contributes to your competitive advantage. As you move through the various phases of implementation and onboarding, keep sharing wins and future possibilities—it all adds up to embracing change.
Agencies and enterprises choose to implement automation for different reasons, but one thing remains the same: gone are the days your organization used to operate. It’s not a matter of when, it’s how automation will shake up your processes and workflows based on your organization’s short- and long-term goals. But remember, the possibilities are always worth it.
Fluency is your automation partner
Although every digital ad agency faces its own unique challenges, having enough time—to do what you both need AND want to do—is a problem that unites them all together.
Automation implementation is unique to every business—Fluency is an automation partner that will take the time to get to know your unique challenges and make the automation process feel natural. “Our platform is an invitation to take control back, to decide what you want to do with your time,” notes Tomy Szczypiorski, Fluency’s VP of client services. “But it’s also an invitation to change the paradigm of what clients can expect from your agency, and that can help you build and retain your customer base well into the foreseeable future.” Looking for a partner on your automation journey? We look forward to hearing from you about your own agency’s challenges, and discussing how Fluency can help solve them quickly, sustainably, and transformationally, today.