Media Strategy for Agencies: In-House vs. Outsourced
Media execution is becoming an increasingly difficult task for mid-market agencies. Advertising platforms are growing faster than the rest of the world can adapt to. It truly takes a village to keep up with the current trends and optimize digital campaigns. In this article, we are going to go over some of the things it takes to run a successful media team. First, let’s run through a few definitions.
Media Strategy Definitions
Define media execution:
Media execution is strategizing at the digital tactic level, tracking, analytics, bidding techniques, audience identification, optimization, creative trafficking, tagging, pacing, and all other aspects of deploying a successful digital campaign.
Define mid-market agency:
A mid-market agency as an organization with 5 to 100 employees. The majority of Pathlabs’ partner agencies are considered mid-market.
Define in-house media team:
An in-house media team is when an agency tasks its staff with executing media campaigns without outsourcing to a media partner (like Pathlabs).
4 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Media Strategy:
Do we have the resources?
We’re talking about people. As it stands today, media management includes a lot of grunt work. Someone has to do it all.
Successful Media Execution - The Tasks:
Campaign pricing and invoicing
Matching creatives to URLs and appending UTM parameters
Normalizing all channel and platform data (i.e., making it speak apples-to-apples)
Optimizing budgets to hit KPIs
Adjusting creatives if they are not working
Budget and impression pacing
Conversion tracking
In many ways, media professionals are the unsung heroes of the advertising world. They can make or break a campaign and often pull long hours to ensure performance. Can’t manage all of the tasks above in-house? You can always outsource tasks to expert media managers. Otherwise, you need to be realistic about what’s required to attract and develop the talent you need in-house.
Nothing you plan out will matter if you don’t have the human capital required to execute a successful campaign.
You will need people on your team to take on the following roles:
Campaign Analyst: Somebody to pull the levers, find the audience, say go on the campaign, optimize the budget, do the tracking.
Project/Account Manager: Someone to do the reports, manage the project, be the contact point for the client, execute strategy, etc.
Coordinator: Pre-launch campaign building, trafficking, dashboarding, managing data, admin tasks, etc.
What tech stack do we need?
Investing in a tech stack is where budgets can balloon for agencies trying to in-house their media execution. This is where you need to be very intentional about the tools you onboard. You shouldn't be spending more time managing the technology and figuring out how to meet minimums than actually driving performance.
Start by onboarding these, one by one, becoming an expert in each platform, and dialing in your resourcing and processes before moving to the next.
Managing programmatic in-house, for example, could save your client money and boost returns. But, when done improperly it can be a risk to performance, inflate costs, and become a liability to your business.
DECIDE THE TECHNOLOGIES YOU WILL USE FOR:
Media planning
Contract management
Invoicing
Brand safety and verification
Attribution
Ad serving
Monitoring and optimizations
Data management
Analytics, dashboarding, reporting
Programmatic ad buying
Your client’s needs and your team’s capacity should both determine your communication cadence. These are two highly variable factors, you’ll need to budget for adjustments to your communication strategy down the road.
It is important for you to consider the number of technologies you're managing in house, the complexity of the campaigns (more complexity = more work. Think about this as the number of campaigns you're managing in any given ad buying technology), performance expectations (i.e. ROAS = harder than awareness), needs of the customer (daily, weekly, monthly reporting and communication).
One big issue is that the client may not be fully aware of all the nuances that affect campaign performance. Standardized, frequent, and comprehensive reports will go a long way to easing their minds and keeping your team doing what they do best.
What is the right move for our team?
Take a good look at how your media execution strategy (in-house vs. outsourced) will affect your agency. A good start is to define your milestones and implement a plan for measuring and communicating progress.
It needs to make sense for your business, your customers, and your team. You need to make sure all of the costs are producing a return on investment, through incrementally positive results, for your clients - leading to business growth. The team needs to be trained and feel like they can do it, not that this is just one more thing added to their plate.
So, should we have an in-house media execution team or outsource these tasks? It’s really up to your agency’s overall business strategy, but it’s best to start with something attainable within your fiscal year and reassess from there. The nice thing is that none of these decisions are permanent and your team can adapt as time goes.
Media Strategy Example:
If you’re interested in learning more about how Pathlabs partners with agencies, check out our most recent case study.
Pathlabs helps agencies think through their answers to these questions all the time. If you’d like some help thinking through these questions, drop us a line today.
