Automation Will Continue To Disrupt Workflows

Similar to many other professions, digital marketing is rife with buzzwords and jargon. I’ll try to keep my use of these in check, but one in particular that I want to focus on here is automation.

Most of the popular ad platforms offer some sort of automated bidding strategy, dynamic creative option, or machine learning-based targeting solution. The high level concept behind these features is simple, provide Google/Meta/LinkedIn/etc… with the inputs and historical data, then the platform algorithms will take care of the rest. While there is nuance here, (I understand the need for guiding the machines) there’s no question that automation has already changed the daily lives of campaign managers. This is a trend that I don’t expect to slow down moving forward.

The days of building out extensive keywords lists in multiple match types, segmenting campaigns by device, and adjusting fixed bids everyday are well behind us. There aren’t as many variables for humans to control in paid media campaigns, which facilitates consolidation and simplifies management. In most cases, many of these automated features are also improving performance. At the end of the day, paid media practitioners are getting time back as a result of implementing some of these automations.

This doesn’t mean that they have less work to do, but the nature of their work is changing.

Change One: Diversifying Platform Expertise

The setup process for campaigns has become more simple, and management has become less time consuming. These two factors, among many others, make becoming a platform expert much more attainable. With fewer levers to pull, there is a smaller body of material to learn, and less time required to make optimizations on a regular cadence. This presents an opportunity for digital marketers to diversify their skill set, which is almost a requirement in today’s modern attention landscape.

If you think about how many apps you have on your phone, you’ll quickly realize that your attention, particularly your attention dedicated to digital experiences, is quite diverse. People are constantly searching, scrolling, reading, watching, and more across the limitless digital platforms available to them on the internet. This means that a brand has the opportunity to meet potential customers across all of these places. If any brand were to limit its marketing presence to one (or only a few) platforms because of its marketing team’s narrow scope of expertise, that brand would be limiting its potential. The company would be prevented from reaching a majority of its potential customers during those critical moments when those audiences are ready to engage.

In order for advertisers to best support the brands they work with, it’s important for practitioners to have a wide(r) breadth of media expertise. I’m not saying that everyone will need to be proficient in every advertising platform, but focusing on just one would be a disservice to any growing company. Most marketers are familiar with the big three:

• Google Ads

• Meta

• Amazon

While those platforms are certainly a great place to start, it’s important to consider where the audience(s) of the brand(s) that you work with spend most of their time. LinkedIn could be a strong fit for a B2B SaaS company, but not so great for a brand selling fidget spinners. Most, if not all, ad platforms have free courses and certifications that can be completed in a few hours. That investment in learning will pay exponential dividends for advertisers and companies looking to expand their reach.

Change Two: Expanding Beyond The Platform

As ad platforms continue to rely on algorithms and automation across a broader scope of the ad delivery process, influencing campaign inputs is a critical piece in determining campaign outputs (performance). The core components of a paid media professional’s role are centered around campaign setup and management. This means determining the targeting, the ad rotation, bid strategy, budgets, and other familiar settings. However, those components are only a piece of the larger picture when looking at a campaign. Considering the entire picture will be more important than ever in this age of automation for two main reasons:

1. As mentioned previously, campaign managers will gain time back in their days, so they can expand their scope of services

2. Feeding automation low quality inputs will lead to low quality outputs, so optimizing the entire user journey will help to avoid the garbage in, garbage out spiral

Some marketers might already be doing this to an extent by setting up the appropriate level of conversion tracking, and even uploading offline conversions. However, conversion data is still just another piece of a larger pie. The algorithms react to user signals, and these signals are derived from users reactions to campaign components like:

• Ad copy

• Ad creative

• Landing pages

• Checkout experience

• Offers

• Pricing

• Reviews

• Delivery options

• And many more

Paid media managers don’t often control these campaign elements as they might fall to other departments or agency partners. Even if an advertiser isn’t designated with the responsibility to develop ad creative, they should absolutely be partnering with whatever team is owning that process. Each of the above components of the user journey can be optimized to improve campaign performance.

There isn’t a setting in Google Ads that will allow a marketer to change the checkout experience on a landing page to improve conversion rate, yet the campaigns in that account still might be taking the checkout experience into consideration when optimizing toward completed purchases. With that knowledge, it’s important for advertisers to have an understanding of multi-disciplinary concepts. They don’t need to know how to optimize a checkout page, but they need to understand how to analyze data to uncover where issues exist, and what teams need to be brought in to make adjustments.

Understanding the different pieces that make up a brand’s user journey will be just as critical as developing strong working relationships with the team members owning each component of that journey.

Change Three: Thinking Like A Consultant

Building on the same concept that automation:

1. Gives campaign managers time back

2. Requires management of all inputs to deliver quality outputs

It will be important for advertisers to use some of that free time to further guide campaign inputs by understanding the economy and markets where the brands they support operate. No business exists in a vacuum, so evaluating the context of an offering within the current economic climate will help to paint a more holistic picture of the opportunities that lie ahead of an organization. This can be done in many different ways.

A solid first step is to understand what industry you’re competing in. This may seem obvious, but sometimes acknowledging the obvious can be surprisingly enlightening. Let’s paint a picture using an example to tie some of these concepts together.

In this example, we’ll position you as an account manager at a paid media agency. One of your clients is a large mortgage lender. Yes, your client is in the mortgage industry, but that industry is also adjacent to the housing market. So what does this mean?

It means that you’ll need to understand how rate hikes from the federal reserve impact the pool of eligible buyers in the market. If the Fed is projecting to increase rates next quarter, you might want to make adjustments to the ad copy in your ads to promote a sense of urgency. Buying that dream home now might not be as affordable in two or three months.

Carrying on with this hypothetical example, if the world were to be in the midst of a pandemic that kept people inside more than normal, geographic real estate patterns could begin to change. Consumers might be looking to move out of big cities and into more rural areas. Therefore, you should align your campaign messaging and targeting to reflect this. For example:

• You can feature images on a suburban house with a big yard in your ad creative

• You can change your geo targeting to focus more heavily on cities where consumer might be active buyers while they’re looking to leave

• You can build contextual audiences based on people visiting sites that feature products for first time home owners taking care of their garden

In many ways, the above exercise is a continuation of the concept in Change Two. This example simply highlights how you can use the context from macroeconomic changes to influence the inputs to your campaigns. Sure, if you’re working at an agency the client team will be doing some of this research, but if you can proactively provide these strategic recommendations you’ll be able to provide significantly more value as a partner.

Change Four: Adjusting Expectations With Supporting Teams

Whether you work in-house, or at an agency, you’ll be working alongside other marketing team members and supporting departments that all have a hand in driving growth and revenue. Since you’ll be working closely with these teams, you should be clear on what they can expect from you.

Educating supporting team members at a high level on how automation benefits the business and changes the way you plan to work (you can use the three examples above) will help to structure the conversations you have in a more productive manner. Once you do this:

• The creative team should begin including you in their planning and brainstorming sessions so that you can let them know what types of assets are performing well.

• The web team should be asking you what pages you’re using for landing pages, and how you’re building retargeting audiences.

• You should be working more closely with the data team to build durable data solutions that pass additional data points around customer activity back into ad platforms.

Similar to the point I made in a previous post around measurement changes requiring teams to break down silos, automation will require teams to communicate more frequently and leverage more collaborative planning processes. It takes organizational buy-in to succeed in the age of automation.

Wrapping Up

Automation has proven that it’s not just a phase, and ad platforms will only continue to develop more robust features rooted in machine learning. This will impact the day-to-day of paid media professionals by requiring them to:

• Develop expertise in more than one ad platform

• Expand their degree of influence outside of the platforms themselves to other components of the user journey

• Conduct industry research to provide strategic recommendations based on macroeconomic factors

• Leverage longer planning processes that include multiple teams and departments within a brand’s organization

As much as automation acts and feels like a futuristic technology, in many ways it’s forcing digital marketers to take on a more traditional mindset. Focusing on a holistic customer experience and product-market fit will be just as important to campaign success as understanding when to use max conversions vs tCPA.

Many of us are familiar with automation to some degree, so adopting these changes shouldn’t be too uncomfortable. However, in my next piece I’ll dive into the changes that privacy policies are bringing, and this landscape shift is relatively new to the paid media world.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).