Companies are currently bracing for a potential economic downturn, and many are searching for a solution to their current woes. Increases in labor costs over the past few years, an abrupt churn of employees and clients, looming difficult business decisions and keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of new and emerging technology solutions are all compiling realities in today’s climate—causing further complexities for businesses today.

So where do you turn? AI tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can mitigate many of these fears and create real efficiency and opportunity for your business. Creative solutions like ChatGPT are already a reality for digital advertisers. So what’s next for AI in the industry—and more importantly, how can the industry leverage them to reap their direct benefits, such as increased efficiency, productivity and efficiency?

Using AI to create new business opportunities

Savvy digital advertisers are already using AI tools—like ChatGPT—to support creative tasks like writing content (email copy, outlines for long-form content, etc.), generating keywords and code, and creating images with just a few simple prompts. And this is only the beginning. As variations of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots continue to advance, users will be able to ease on the prompts they give and, in turn, have to modify even less.

Where else will we see AI in digital advertising? Customer support is one area where AI can learn from unique data points of your customers like commonly asked questions, and reply to them as they arise again.

Generative language is also emerging in videos; users can quickly generate and deliver important messages via web portals, email and the like—at scale—to unlock critical time savings. Consider the multi-family industry: with this form of AI, users can quickly upload a few images which AI can use to create a video of their available properties in seconds. It’s these types of forward-thinking solutions that will drive efficiency throughout the industry.

Why it’s time to get on board with automation

What do emerging AI technologies have in common with navigating economic headwinds? It’s simple: automation can create vast efficiencies within your organization. The need to hire 20 additional strategists to support the grunt work is no longer a necessity; instead, you can automate those repetitive—yet critical tasks—and focus the staff you have on the more strategic side of your business.

One of the most straightforward ways to understand how automation can create these efficiencies within your organization is to look at the salary of one of your digital advertising strategists. On average, strategists bring in around $80-$85,000 annually. So imagine if they’re spending half of their time each day on tasks that could be automated, like account launches and budget management. That’s virtually $40-$45,000 per year per strategist you’re spending on taskwork. Multiply that by a team of 10 strategists, and at the very least, that’s $400,000 a year you’re spending on tasks that simply could have been automated. Automating task work also transforms the time it takes to do it—think days down to seconds.

Once you start reducing the time your employees spend on taskwork, you can put them on more forward-thinking efforts. Creating more productive hours for your team also decreases the number of strategists needed to complete taskwork. That’s the power of automation: It creates benefits for both the business from a revenue perspective and employees from a sentiment standpoint. Both outcomes are important— and both parties come out on top.

Don’t take your hand off the wheel

AI is taking form in the industry, whether organizations are ready or not. The question is, will you adopt it and stay afloat, or better yet, get ahead? Or will you continue to resist it and get left behind by an organization that can cater to the rising demands of this technology? If you don’t know where to start, begin by thinking of AI as an assistant or alternative solution to hiring.

Despite the promises of automation, AI in digital advertising is still very much like the notion of a self-driving car. Sure, it’s extremely convenient and impressive, but it shouldn’t be left to its own devices. The same rings true for automation. You can’t eliminate the need for creatives—to do it right, you’ll still need a team of strategists pulling the levers and supporting the more strategic side of the business, but the need to fully staff a team for the grunt work is in the rearview mirror.

How fluency leverages AI to create opportunities for scale

One of the ways Fluency—an enterprise-level ad automation platform—creates opportunities for scale is through Blueprints—a Fluency-exclusive benefit of the platform. Think of Blueprints as an advertising strategy plan that uses data to build and apply changes to advertising accounts at scale. Why is this important to your advertising strategy? Blueprints offers the ability to create the backbone of your advertising strategy and launch against it with selected accounts for large-scale control. Where it used to take your staff countless hours to launch accounts, Blueprints use dynamic data points, like inventory feeds, to inform advertising account structures and all of the elements contained in them, like campaigns, settings, targeting, keywords, creative and pretty much everything else.

The result? Quality increases, capacity is limitless, and success is sustainable. These are just a few of the many ways partners of Fluency can take advantage of automation to create a meaningful ripple effect across the organization where the work is strategic and engaging.

Explore Fluency’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform.

The post How AI can recession-proof your business appeared first on MarTech.

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.

The post Digital advertising automation is here: Are you ready? appeared first on MarTech.