How I Break Down Barriers To Growth In Paid Media Programs

The traditional paid media professional used to focus their day on building campaigns and managing ad platforms settings. I know because that used to be me. These tasks were time intensive, and required a specialized skill set.

That’s part of why paid media offerings from agencies were so appealing. Their high level of specialization allowed brands to outsource this work in a manner that was typically cost effective. This also started to create some barriers within marketing programs.

Because managing campaigns in Google Ads or Meta (AdWords or Facebook back then) used to be so time consuming, other team members or departments would have to own tangential disciplines like analytics or creative. This dynamic created many siloed organizations that faced operational inefficiencies. More departments and teams meant that coordinating plans naturally became more cumbersome.

To a certain degree, this was this status quo among many clients that I’ve worked with over my agency career. These barriers between teams would prevent growth on many occasions. I’ll illustrate this through two examples:

• Example One: A common barrier was built by separating media and analytics teams. If a client needs ongoing analytics and measurement support, this might be scoped as a separate project with another department at an agency. As a result, it might take a few weeks to talk through the contract expansion before any work is actually started.

• Example Two: Agencies don’t always have access to their client’s CRMs. This can make it difficult for both the agency and client teams to effectively leverage customer insights since each party has a limited view into the data that the other has. This leaves money on the table by limiting potential optimizations.

When paid media work was overly complex and time consuming, these silos could have been justified as a necessary evil. However, the nature of digital advertising is changing.

Big tech companies like Google and Meta have made automation one of their core focuses over the past few years. This recent AI boom has even accelerated the rate at which machines can take over tasks from people. What used to take one person hours in Google Ads, now takes only a few minutes.

The commoditization of ad platform expertise might start to change the perception of the segmentation of responsibilities from a necessary evil, to an operational barrier to growth.

What I Do To Break Down These Barriers To Growth

With the time I get back from automation (as well as templatized processes), I can provide a wider range of services to the clients that I work with. By taking a position of centralized ownership across multiple marketing activities, I can help businesses break down these barriers, and grow their paid media programs more quickly and effectively.

One of the first steps that I take in order to operate this way is to get an understanding of my clients’ businesses. When I write this, I don’t mean just understanding their offering. I also dig into what their goals are as a business (“conversions” don’t mean much these days), what their pricing structure is, what the sales process looks like, and more. Once I have some solid context around what the business is doing and why, I can start to organize my efforts with intention and purpose.

From there, I prioritize getting access to the necessary tools and data related to marketing. This goes beyond ad accounts, and into CRM platforms, and any other tools that contain data which the business uses to measure performance. As I’ve called out before, CRM data can provide unique insights that completely shift paid media strategies. I also conduct some other methods of customer research to get a good feel for how different audiences behave.

By this point, I’ve usually collected enough information across business goals, sales processes, marketing data, and audience research to begin to craft a thoughtful marketing strategy. However, as I’m sure many of you have seen, the best strategy in the world is useless without execution.

This is where a wider skill set comes in handy. It’s fairly simple to get a Google Ads search campaign up and running, but I aim to provide more value to clients by also delivering:

• Measurement methodologies across ad platforms, web analytics solutions (GA4), and CRMs

• Routine data analysis and reporting

• Messaging and creative concepting

• Landing page design and development

• Email marketing

• And more!

It takes time to build out some of these complementary skill sets, and these are areas that I’m still working on improving every week! With that said, linked below are some of my favorite free (or cheap) resources that have helped me learn:

• Google offers a free data analytics certification which can help to work with data coming from different tools

• Stacked Marketer Pro has an ad copy course you can try for $7 that provides an overview of some common writing frameworks

• Demand Curve published a great article on landing page design that can be applied to almost any business

• HubSpot has a lengthy guide on email marketing tips and best practices

Wrapping Up

The historically time consuming nature of paid media has led to operational silos among companies and agencies that can limit growth. However, with recent advances in automation, paid media professionals have more time in their day to break down some of those barriers to growth by offering more holistic marketing services.

I do this by:

• Understanding my clients’ businesses and how they operate

• Getting access to all platforms and tools relevant to marketing activity

• Developing holistic paid media strategies based on multiple sources on information

• Executing across multiple disciplines to reduce the time to activation

I hope that by sharing my approach, you can take any of these pieces and apply it to your day-to-day work as well!

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).