Marketers are relying now more than ever on ad giants such as Google and Facebook to deliver personalized ads at the optimal moment online. But setting up these campaigns is easier said than done.

It often takes agencies up to a week to get a campaign off the ground, leaving insufficient time to make the most of the client’s budget by focusing on competitive differentiators such as creative, analytics, and strategy.

To deliver on the promise of digital today, agencies need more efficient and scalable digital ad workflows. To get there, let’s review why money gets left on the table in the first place, what automated solutions are helping marketers boost efficiency, and how agencies can make the most of campaign automation to deliver the best possible results for their clients.

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‍Why money gets left on the table

Digital marketing is time-intensive work, and agencies tend to rely on one or more experts to lead the charge. These mid- to high-level managers know how to optimize campaigns across verticals thanks to their familiarity with major platforms such as Google and Facebook. It’s up to them to figure out how to leverage these platforms to secure new accounts and coordinate campaigns.

Because these skilled employees might be juggling dozens of campaigns at any given moment, they’re often left feeling exhausted. These issues trickle down to junior staff, who are regularly tasked with picking up the slack and operating above their pay grade and bandwidth. This presents a further drain on managers’ time, as they need to train talent before they can delegate set-up protocols and tasks for campaign upkeep.

The inefficiency that comes as a result throws a wrench in workflows. At the beginning of a digital campaign’s lifecycle, ads take too long to go live, reducing marketers’ ability to get creative on clients’ behalf. Instead of maximizing spend, money is left on the table and campaign potential goes unrealized. These tendencies, which result in fewer eyes on ads and unhappy employees, negatively impact agency value.

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‍Why marketers are turning to automation

In response, many agencies are pursuing automated solutions. The hope here is that automation can offer added flexibility for pushing campaigns live more quickly. Upper-level operatives, for instance, might write scripts to free up time that would otherwise be spent training and retraining junior staff.

The problem here is that such an approach overlooks how quickly platforms like Google and Facebook evolve. These companies are consistently rolling out new products and ad formats. And that’s not all—larger industry trends, such as shifting privacy policies or the death of third-party cookies, constantly disrupt the digital marketing landscape.

Because of this, when agencies go it alone with automation, pipe dreams of optimization become costly liabilities. Due to the speed at which advertising platforms evolve, more senior managers have the daunting task of adapting automated solutions to the whims of larger companies’ strategies. Instead of saving time and money, automation becomes another task that has to be handled manually and that, however counterintuitively, contributes further to employee frustration.

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‍How to get the most out of campaign automation

So, how can marketers break the cycle? Agencies need to tap into technology that will evolve alongside major platforms. With the right automation tools, for example, it’s possible to create entire campaigns in a single click with intuitive templates.

These repeatable automated models speed up delivery by empowering senior and junior talent to scale and optimize workflow together—rather than wasting valuable time whenever a new feature or policy pops up. Here, automation acts to support the core of every agency: its human intelligence and creative drive.  

With the right approach to campaign automation, marketers can streamline client onboarding and maximize ROI. By saving time and money with an automation-smart strategy, agencies can dedicate themselves to discovering other, more innovative avenues for their customers’ digital ad journeys. Plus, the daily work of advertising can get a whole lot more fulfilling.