SocialFlow for Agencies launches to bring ad buying back into the fold

An increasing number of agencies are outsourcing work such as paid search, display advertising, and search engine optimization to third parties. While farming out business is not a new concept, there are a number of possible pitfalls ahead if agencies get the balance between external and internal resources wrong.

With these potential problems in mind, SocialFlow has today released a new platform, SocialFlow for Agencies. I asked the company’s CEO, Jim Anderson, to give me a guided tour of the product via Skype.

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I started by asking Anderson why SocialFlow has brought this product to market.

“Agencies have essentially been outsourcing, in increasing numbers, their social and paid media buying to other agencies and freelancers,” Anderson said.

Anderson is right. A recent study by Econsultancy showed that around 30 percent of agencies are outsourcing paid search and display advertising tasks, an increase on previous studies in this area.

“There is nothing essentially wrong with outsourcing, except that many of them don’t realize that’s what they’re actually doing,” Anderson said.

I asked him to expand on these concerns.

“The issue is that, over time, agencies are potentially creating their competition,” Anderson said. Although I suspect that prediction may take time to come to fruition, there are other issues in constantly outsourcing important work.

Keeping a balance between the use of external and internal resources is one of those problems. The other is one of ownership.

As Latitude’s Managing Director, Richard Gregory, comments in the Econsultancy study cited above, “Any decent agency will put their own necks on the line to deliver a performance-based model where the risk all lies with them.”

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“There are other issues too,” Anderson said. “The reality is that the company that is handling your paid media is, most likely, wrapping in a huge amount of services on top of a thin layer of technology.”

What Anderson proceeded to show me is a SaaS product that gives agencies control over their paid media buying. Anderson is quick to explain that this is not a managed service — it is a technology that agency employees can use directly, bringing ownership back into the business.

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The SocialFlow for Agencies solution allows agency staff to see data-driven targeting recommendations, from keyword searches and through analyzing the best-performing segments from previous campaigns.

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Adding a keyword within the audience builder brought up a list of suggestions from the SocialFlow platform, each designed to help target the right potential customers.

“When creating your updates and choosing which audience to send it to, you can see the effect choices such as keywords, location, and more have on your potential audience size in real time,” Anderson explained.

But the audience builder will still require a level of understanding and knowledge on the part of the user.

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“We are by no means suggesting that our keyword tool is replacing the skill of ad buying with a software solution,” Anderson said. “Rather, it makes the task of selecting the right keywords and audiences, and [assessing] audience size, budget, and bid data fast and easy.”

Most importantly for a platform that is trying to bring the work in-house, the product allows agency staff to create and deliver Facebook and Twitter ads directly from the product.

During the demonstration, I found the reporting tools particularly useful. Users can see all their campaigns on one screen with detailed statistics on spend, budget, impressions, engagement, clicks, and more.

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And that, for me, is one of the biggest benefits of this kind of technology for agencies. Outsourcing might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances, but whenever you introduce a third party into the mix, getting access to unfiltered, accurate data and insights can be an issue.

While not a perfect solution — SocialFlow for Agencies is good for promoted posts and tweets rather than Facebook sidebar ads or Twitter Cards at present, although Anderson tells me the latter is coming soon — the solution certainly shows much promise.

SocialFlow for Agencies is available now for existing SocialFlow customers and will be rolled out to new clients from November onward.