Oleg TymchyshynSo, you’ve noticed that your business is growing. Should you add more people to the marketing team or do you need to add more sophisticated tools and solutions? Finally, should you outsource some of your campaigns or it would be better to get an in-house white label solution? These are the questions many businesses face. How you answer them often defines the success of your marketing efforts and sometimes even business goals.
In this article, we are going to discuss what are the most important steps in the process of developing a flexible ad stack that will suit growing business needs. We will also explore the essential practices for expanding the growing businesses technically. Plus, we’ll give some hands-on examples of scaling programmatic advertising business with the While Label ad tech platform.
1. Define your strategy
You’ve probably already heard that a thoughtfully developed strategy may be the key to the entire endeavor's success? The same principles work for digital advertising and media-buying. Believe it or not, but even the most powerful and expensive tools won’t boost your business if your marketing strategy is a failure.
Remember that it is all about critical evaluation and defining the purpose of each tool you possess. Create a list to evaluate each tool, its function and the results it gives to your advertising business. Now, create the list of functions that you expect your stack to perform. Compare those lists and find out whether your existing set of tools satisfies your current needs.
Apart from this, you should clearly know what your marketing goals are. As well, you should know your initial position - how far are you now from reaching your goals and what are the shortest paths to them. Some of your tools may have a huge potential, but they all should work really well together in order to make use of this potential to the fullest. Take your time, think about where you are now, where you want to be and whether you have tools at your disposal to make your way as effective as it can be.
2. Choose the right timing
Whatever are the tools you are using today - after some time they will inevitably become outdated. And this is a normal process in the world of never-ending updates. It is essential, however, to keep that in mind when choosing the next tech you are going to adopt. The most important factor? It shouldn’t get outdated too fast - picking the tool which would prove to be useless after a few months would obviously make no sense. You shouldn’t, however, count on one tool to serve you for a decade either.
This problem can be solved, though, if you choose adaptable tools. For example, SmartHub is a white label ad exchange solution based on the cloud (SaaS) technology which means that capacities of it are unfolded at remote servers. This means that technology is constantly supported and upgraded by a professional team of developers, who ensure that the solution is always up-to-date.
3. Be specific about your tech
This goes with precise strategy development - the more specific you are about your tools, the more consistent will be your tactics. Take a close look at the exact action you need to perform and then look for the tool which would serve this specific purpose. For instance, if you want to add programmatic RTB bidding to your business, you’ll need to create your own ad network. But what if you possess neither an appropriate tech nor the experienced teams of developers? In this case, you should get a white label ad tech platform like SmartHub.
Adopting a white-label platform like this, you can customize and adapt it to your business needs. Such technology will sustain a specific set of functions - transact SSP and DSP partners of your choice and ensure price transparency. With the help of SmartHub, you can effectively support effective programmatic media-trading and maximize the profits from partner’s traffic.
4. Keep it simple
“Keep it simple”, “Less is more” - we are bombarded by this type of advice, but what are they really about? And how could they be applied to your specific business goals? The thing is, the simplest solutions are often the best ones. Take, for instance, a business strategy. If it is simple to understand, then it is simple to execute. If it also involves fewer stages, then it takes less time to perform and the plan becomes even more effective. It works the same way with marketing products and software - it is important to review them every once in a while to make sure every process is indispensable and efficient. \
Marketing or ad stack simplification requires choosing tools with broad and yet simple functionality. If we turn back to our example - the media buying process is extremely complicated, so simplicity in navigation is a must. The usage of white label ad exchange is a huge step towards simplicity. With SmartHub you won’t need to spend your time on development, design, and testing - already finished solution will be set up for you.
Moreover, as a SaaS technology, it won’t even require constant support and maintenance. The platform itself has an intuitive interface which is easy to use even for beginners and allows to manage demand partners on one side and supply on the other. Finally, SmartHub is easily adaptable for evolving businesses. The system automatically notifies the owner when the level of incoming QPS exceeds the limit and offers the owner to scale their platform with a new bigger and healthier QPS plan.
5. Document and analyze
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Sir Winston Churchill.
Sometimes the same principles work both for political action and digital advertising. The importance of proper documentation and subsequent analysis is hard to overestimate. It is essential to understand what has been done, how has it been done and what are the results. A clarification of the logic behind one or another process can add huge value for further progress and can significantly save your time.
For programmatic, measurements and analytics are fundamentals of the entire industry, which is why SmartHub has an extensive set of reporting features. Granular statistics and analytics updates every 1.5 sec include incoming and outgoing QPS, server workload, as well as formats effectiveness based on revenue analytics. These insights provide a solid ground for understanding the results of your specific actions which is a key for budget planning and timely adjustments to your marketing strategy.
To conclude
The key to growing a successful business is a tech stack that grows along with it. Essential practices for building ad stack include the creation of an effective and flexible strategy and being specific about your goals, platform functionality, and timing. Apart from this, it is important to document every process in order to pinpoint the right time for changes. White label solutions such as SmartHub help you to ease the process of adapting each element of the system to challenges of the expanding businesses. This SaaS technology is easily adaptable for growing and scaling your programmatic marketplace as it becomes more profitable and strong.
