Do More, Click Less: How mobile marketers can get ahead with automation

Automation has been widely used within the marketing industry for over a decade. 今天, everyday marketing tasks from scheduling follow up emails to posting on social media are done automatically. Yet there are still some areas where automation technology could be hugely beneficial but isn’t used nearly enough. 安迪•钱德勒 VP, 客户在调整中的成功, explores the possibilities available to mobile marketers and discusses why digital campaign management is the next task that needs to be brought into 2020. 

自动化的理由 
Mobile marketing has never been so complex, with marketers running more campaigns than ever before. 最近的一项调查 委托 调整 found that marketers handle an average of 19 campaigns across approximately 14 advertising networks. That means adjusting over 250 bids and spend limits every day - highlighting the scale and complexity of the average campaign. 

最终，设置和管理活动是一项繁重的工作. Part of the struggle lies in working with so many different networks: launching a campaign means uploading ads one by one across multiple network dashboards. 当涉及到优化时, marketers need to merge and harmonise data from various sources before they can even act on it, and it takes yet more manual work to stop underperforming campaigns and redirect budgets towards better-performing ones. 

这些任务对于成功的广告运营是必不可少的, 但它们通常既乏味又耗时. It’s not surprising then that many marketers find themselves stuck in the weeds, making calculations and correlations that could easily be done by machines, 很少有时间专注于创意或战略决策. 

把他们从卑微的工作中解放出来, automation allows marketers to focus on value-added work - whether that’s A/B testing, 构建更好的LTV模型, 市场细分分析, 或者只是在组织内部建立关系. 机器不仅能更快地完成繁重的工作, 他们还可以做得更好, 没有人为失误的余地.  

自动化工作流:如何从今天开始
One of the easiest and most effective ways automation technology can help is by uploading creatives automatically, instead of uploading them one by one on multiple network dashboards. From there, marketers can quickly iterate on creatives by seeing which perform

best, creating similar concepts to the winning ones, and then uploading again automatically. 这使得品牌能够以更快的速度测试创意, 并且比以前更快地推出表现良好的活动. 

设置规则还可以使整个优化过程自动化. 手动完成, this can take a lot of time: marketers need to navigate between multiple dashboards and look at each line item one by one to determine where and how to optimise campaigns. This process can be automated by building rules to automatically adjust bids and budgets based on performance. 例如, if day 7 retention rates from a certain network are less than 10%, 营销人员可以设定一个规则来暂停活动——或者, 如果第7天ROAS超过40%, 出价提高10%. This moves spend from underperforming campaigns and creatives to those that are driving results. 

在实施投标自动化时, marketers still need to decide what information to feed the system for the best results. 展望未来, we’re excited to see how machine learning models could evolve to the point where marketers don’t even need to set these rules. They could simply set target returns for campaigns - for example, 预计以5万英镑的预算在所有网络上回归4部. The model could then bid accordingly across different channels to achieve the target return set. This gives marketers an amazing opportunity to reach their targets faster, 以最大的利润和最小的努力.

创造公平的竞争环境 
Mobile marketing has never been more complex, and it’s never been more competitive either. But usually it’s the brands with the biggest teams or biggest budgets who win. 

自动化有能力改变这一点, 允许以前不可能的事情发生. By massively increasing the amount of campaigns that one person can manage, we could start to see teams running a thousand different creatives at the same time. Smaller teams will also be able to compete with larger marketing departments, 对于资源紧张的团队来说也是如此, 自动化让他们更有效地使用预算. This means the battle will gradually shift from putting out as much advertising as possible to working as smartly as possible. 

The time saved by automating processes will also help deliver tangible business results. While a strategic optimisation might take 15 minutes to formulate, 它可能需要两个多小时才能生效. 把某些任务自动化每周可以节省几个小时的人力, 让营销人员有更多的时间来提高业绩. 这将有助于公司扩大规模，并迅速扩大规模. 

While automation will dramatically simplify how marketers run campaigns, it’s the potential it has to level the playing field that will really transform and help drive the industry forward.