Are Digital Marketing Agencies Still Needed in the Age of Automation?

Marketing Marketing Agencies Marketing Automation

Over the last few years, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and other media channels have been gradually shifting to a more “do it yourself” marketing strategy on their online advertising platforms.

This shift has been focused on developing seamless and almost fully automated solutions for online advertisers, even with no experience, so they can easily create digital advertising campaigns by simply providing a website, business goals and some images.

In a nutshell, the online advertising giants are aiming for reaching a state in which any online advertiser can have a thriving and profitable online business with not much more than a website and a chair. Google’s Performance Max Campaign and Facebook Automated Ads are two great recent examples of this automation trend.

This trend has been raising questions as to the necessity of digital advertising/marketing agencies’, which usually work on a hefty commission of your ad spend and by such add significant cost to your business’ overall marketing costs.

Should I cut the middleman?

So, some of the questions you and your business might find yourself asking are: “can I cut the middleman and actually do it myself, or are these agencies still needed?” or “What added value can digital advertising companies still generate to provide my business with that coveted competitive edge to help scale up my digital activity and gain a bigger chunk of the market?”

While it may be tempting to go into the wild all by yourself to save your business from spending those very valuable commission bucks, you should consider what extra value you can gain by engaging with a professional digital agency that is aware and ahead of the “DIY Marketing” curve and has adjusted its offering and tool set accordingly:

Creative is King

leading agencies will have an in-house creative team that will create tailored creatives according to the creative best practices of each online advertising platform (Story, feed, TikTok, RDA, Discovery, and more).

While free creative editing platforms are a dime a dozen, they are no match to what your business can get out of a professional digital marketing-oriented creative team.

Not only that, when this kind of creative team is an integrated part of your digital agency, it works seamlessly with the account managers to create creatives that not only look good from a design perspective but also perform optimally on each media channel – creative and practical!

When your engagement levels, brand lift, conversion rates, and ROAS will reach new heights you never thought were possible, you will understand that hiring a digital advertising agency with an inhouse creative team was a solid investment in your business.

Tech Savvy

while anyone can raise or lower tCPA , tROAS, Cost cap, and other bidding algorithms provided by digital media channels, leading agencies will know how to utilize the best AdTech/MarTech platforms out there that cover larger and necessary ground (such as AI based feed editing technologies or smart actionable analysis tools). In a world where everyone is using the same algorithms to maximize the results of their online advertising campaigns, you need a tech-savvy agency that knows how to use the right AdTech/MarTech solutions to scale up your activity and maximize your business’s online potential.

Even better, find an agency that has developed its own in-house technologies they can leverage for your business’ advantage – services on top of the technologies. A digital advertising agency that can combine the highest level of professionalism while intelligently scaling up your online activity in a data-driven way could end up being invaluable for taking your online activity to the next level.

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Over the last few years, many media channels have been gradually shifting to a more “do it yourself” marketing strategy on their online advertising platforms. So, are digital agencies still needed?

Partner up with the best

The more partnerships an agency has with media channels, the better. These partners have elite access to resources, market-specific insights, hands-on support by dedicated agency teams, the newest BETA’s, and much more. In a data-driven world, any bit of extra data the media channels are willing to share from their “black-box” can give you that extra advantage to beat the competition to the punch and make smart strategic decisions for your business.

While doing it yourself in an automated world might sound easy, the level of support and guidance a small (or even large) business will receive by itself from the media channels is far from ideal, but with a top-notch agency in your corner, you will be covered. So lookout to see if your agency is a Google Premier Partner, Facebook Marketing Partner, Microsoft Ads Partner, or more.

Good and experienced hands helming the machine

From the invention of the wheel, through the industrial revolution, all the way to nowadays’ digital transformation of business (which has been peaking due to COVID-19), there has always been a claim that the human aspect is redundant.

While this might be true to some extent, even the greatest ship needs the best hands at the helm to steer through the everchanging waters. Machines are only as good as the hands operating them and the same goes for digital marketing agencies.

Having access to top-notch advertising technologies, media channel resources, and cutting edge creatives is nice, but has no added value by itself, and a great digital advertising agency will know the best way to utilize these gems to your business’ advantage. There are many instances in which media channels’ recommendations, especially when they are automatically applied, could lead a novice “DIY” marketer down a rabbit hole of non-profitable increased advertising costs.

If you wish to avoid this and find the sweet spot between your business goals being met and optimally leveraging the different algorithms the media channels have to offer, you need a partner that is confident enough to sometimes go astray from the media channels’ best practices with some out-of-the-box daring thinking.

To sum it up

The increased focus digital media channels have been putting on making online marketing more automated, accessible and user-friendly brings to question the necessity of certain traditional aspects of digital advertising agencies’ work.

This in itself doesn’t make your agency obsolete, but it does mean that in order to better serve your business’ best interest they should be actively diversifying their offering and tool kit to be in line with the automated “DIY” online marketing trend.

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