As both an engineer and a father, I find myself trying to discover unique ways to make it easier to do the right thing in both of my roles. One thing that always stands out to me in the latter one is the simple task of putting the dishes away—but this is not for any old reason.
When my girls were little, I got in the habit of reshuffling and stacking their cups in collections of two. The reason being… I wanted to make it easier for one of them looking for a cup to also get one for their sister. Simply put, I wanted to promote the concept of doing the right thing in our household. Fast forward way too many years and both girls naturally always account for each other when they are getting things for themselves.
Automation is the parallel in this concept. At Fluency, we believe automating essential parts of your business makes it easier to do the right thing. For one, automation reduces a variety of risks and concerns across your business: from the increasing expenses of your staff to human error and employee burnout, all of these tasks can be reduced or eliminated altogether.
If you’re looking to automate your business, but need to put a use case together to help your executive team understand the benefits, there’s a few key things to keep in mind.
Automation Makes It Easier to Do the Right Thing Across Your Organization
Today’s business challenges continue to hinder organizations relying on outdated processes and manual entry from reaching their fullest potential. Zoom in on those realities and you’ll find businesses grappling with high turnover rates—which result in a new need to acquire brand new talent. Rising salaries are also becoming a burden—where salaries for ad management roles used to be at $65,000, they’re now commanding six figures in a lot of cases.
Challenges aren’t isolated to hiring and salaries, either. Audiences are also becoming more complex and sophisticated across the industry. Tracking is more and more difficult. Settings of well-performing campaigns are only getting bigger and more expansive. Lastly, your clients know more than they did before, so they naturally have higher expectations. As a result, businesses now need technical experts for areas they used to rely on junior roles. These challenges can quickly put your planning, processes, and procedures at a deficit.
At Fluency, we believe the solution isn’t hiring more people, overburdening your existing staff with unmanageable account loads, or adjusting what your business is comfortable with in regard to salaries. Instead, you should enable your existing staff to be more successful and empowered in what they do..
If you want to picture how automation can benefit your team, think about a shovel compared to an excavator. Regardless of how skilled your team may be, if they’re all using shovels, you would need a lot more people to get the job done. Put them in excavators, however, and they can quickly move more earth even with fewer people. This is what we see automation being for your business's future. When we boil this all down, the business case is predicated on the fact that you’ll reap labor savings across your business, while maintaining the same quality—or better—in service.
Automation Revolutionizes Risk Management
Another ongoing disruption to businesses is risk management. When you lose people, accounts can experience some chaos and change. Information hand-off may be incomplete, your clients may feel the pain of the reset, and some important things can get lost in the shuffle.
What we at Fluency have heard time and again are stories of overspending because there’s a missed request for a budget reduction or critical special that needs to run.
Errors aren’t out of the ordinary when budget management is performed manually, and they can quickly cost your business upwards of tens of thousands of dollars in credits if they fall by the wayside. One example of this is running expired campaign messaging—such as a Black Friday special far past Black Friday. You as the consumer may not think too much of it, but you as a director or vice president know this is the wrong message. As a result, your client may ask you to check the spend on the creative and credit them back.
Errors and issues are rarely mistakes among the team or because of gross negligence; it's typically the lack of time and ability to spend that extra human capital of investment in checking accounts. As a result, your team is rushed from account to account just to satisfy the list of tasks they have in front of them. Simplifying that and reducing that is key to everyone’s success.
Requests for ad copy changes, adjustments in spend, and managing time based messaging are all essential parts of an ad campaign, but quickly become a burden for your team to manage. Automation software does these checks and balances for you, by eliminating those manual mistakes—ultimately making the business use case an easy one.
Ready to Take the Next Step? Investment from Your Organization Is Key
Another consideration for your use case is the investment from your organization. In other words, what it’s like to be truly ready for automation from our side. It comes with two things: One, to be able to articulate your philosophy for how you advertise: what makes you different, what’s your specific value prop and approach and the other key things about your business? This is something VPs should be ready and able to do.
The second part is being able to understand the data that you have access to: the organization of the data, how it’s structured, where it comes from and how prevalent it is from each of your advertisers. Understanding where in the customer lifecycle you have access to that data so you can make an informed decision in your advertising automation is critical. If you can do all this, you’re in a really good position to make a use case for automation. Need a little assistance? As we have mentioned before, this is about readiness, not eligibility. The right automation partner can assist you along the way. If not, they’re not the right partner.
A Figure You Can’t Ignore
Need an additional boost for your use case? Here’s a life-changing figure to consider: when comparing the average monthly spend per client, just prior to taking the leap into automation, compared to those same clients after 5 months of automation assisted execution, we see an average of 150 percent growth.
Fluency Is Your Partner for Automation
Hiring the right people, retaining your existing staff, meeting the demands of rising salaries, and controlling your risk management are just some of the complexities businesses are navigating today—but with the right automation solution, they don’t need to hinder your competitive advantage.
Fluency can empower your business to do more with the resources it has today. If you’re ready to make a use case for automation—and need an automation partner to take your business to the next level—get in touch with our team today.
