10 November 2022
6 min read
Driven by a quest for transparency, control and cost efficiencies, businesses are actively in-sourcing parts of their digital marketing. At the same time, agencies are fundamental to support your creative and campaign strategy. They have teams full of specialists at operational, tactical and strategic level and are familiar with the best industry practices. So what exactly does in-house campaigning entail and what exactly should or shouldn’t you move in-house? We are here to make that process a little easier for you with a short guide to walk you through the essentials.
1. Creative set-up
Keep your agencies for strategy, concepts, and access to “the best practices of the industry”, but automate your operational tasks. These are often lengthy and repetitive tasks, like updating designs for all formats and versions, where you don’t want to spend lots of resources on. Especially if your campaign volume grows, you have to create for multiple markets and languages, different products need different texts, or if ads go live in lots of different formats.
Far better to devote your time to ad design than to the production process. This creative versioning and last minute manual copy or product changes to hundreds of creatives can be automated with the right software, so you can focus on what is actually important.
2. Campaign activation and ad ops processes
How do you ensure that the ads that get into the ad-server or DSP get created, approved, validated, or trafficked efficiently into these ad servers? And at the same time also stay on top of your bid strategies, KPIs, white lists, brand safety, and audience settings?
Ad platforms have a steep learning curve, so usually you either need experts (or a costly but specialized media agency) or devote a lot of time to do it yourself. This, also, can be automated with the right software. Automated ad ops can save you at least 80% of your campaign setup time while decreasing manual errors that impact reporting.
Allow your agencies or in-house media teams to spend their time on performance related things like determining bidding strategies - while technology takes care of the repetitive tasks, fast and error-free. Construct the correct publishing set-up so that your ads are created foolproof and can be sent to the ad-server or DSP according to preset media strategies.
3. Efficient workflow
According to Peach & Colab, more than 70% of digital campaigns start late due to problems activating content. These include hundreds of emails ping ponging back and forth during the campaign with the whole world in CC, last minute changes for translation mistakes, different products to be pushed, pricing dynamics, management wanting to tweak the concept… The list goes on.
With scalable on-brand templates, automated ad ops, and an efficient workflow where everyone is working, approving, and chatting in the same environment, missed opportunities become a thing of the past. Get rid of inefficiencies and get your campaign live in days instead of months. Cape creates custom, intuitive interfaces where all the complicated logic has been developed on the back-end, while the user only sees the most simplified and important options for them. For the creative set-up this means using dynamic and brand-consistent templates that everyone can use. For the publishing set-up this means choosing pre-set templated media strategies instead of creating, approving, validating, or trafficking your ads manually for every new campaign. Modify only the specifics in just a few clicks, instead of having to go through hundreds of details which will be the same for most of your campaigns. Because of this intuitive interface, you no longer have to be an expert at media buying or out-source the operational tasks to media agencies to get successful campaigns live.
And remember: Rome wasn't built in one day. You can move your campaigning gradually in-house. Let your agencies use Cape for their repetitive and operational tasks or start with only automating your “always on” campaigns.
Cape can help you make in-house campaigning easy as a breeze for you! Contact sales@bycape.io to find out how.
