Neo1 – Industry Talk Track: Marketing Use Case
Its all about managing Budgets!
Title: Implementation Framework for:
Target 1: Marketing Departments in Businesses advertising and promoting the products and services they sell / make
Target 2: Marketing & Advertising Agencies providing services to customers.
WHAT: We are targeting the marketing industry sector with our digital advertising, as such we need to be aware of the pressures & needs of these business and how they operate to guide them to the best implementation to drive control, transparency and efficiencies across their employee spend
WHY: Looking at our customer base by industry sector we have a large group of marketing & Advertising businesses, as such we want to learn from and leverage how they are benefiting from Neo1 to expand our value to this sector. Their biggest pressure is controlling spend and managing internal end client budgets for the expenses they incur.
HOW: Like everything we do for our customers our aim is to empower people to be accountable and responsible for the spend they incur to do their job. And we work hard to deliver a digital employee spend management experience, so employees focus their time on doing their job not managing expenses. All while the business improves the control and visibility of that expenditure.
Types of spend:
Travel
- Customer travel: Flights, rail and hotel, meals and entertainment for the purposes of A; Winning New business and B; keeping current customers / accounts happy and healthy
- Internal travel: training, tradeshows, events, team development,
Spend
- Customers spend: to deliver the services to a customer and is typically charged to them, so accurate accounting and processing is very important: digital advertising, content creation, brand designs, website hosting and administration, print, end to end campaigns.
- Internal spend: to ensure the team have the equipment and services they need to do the job such as: WFH headsets, Software licences, training, memberships to industry bodies, notebooks, internet and mobile expenses
Marketing & Advertising Industry Challenges: Let’s get Personal
What are the main challenges for any Small US Based Marketing & Advertising Business/Agency (or Small Marketing team in a larger business) and how can Neo1 Help?
Challenge 1. Budget Constraints & Client Expectations
- Smaller business, tend to do business with other small and mid-sized businesses and everyone has limited marketing budgets, yet when delivring marketing services the customers expect high-quality digital strategies and creative assets from the agencies they work with. The industry is very competative and pressure is on to do more what the people you have and the budgetes you are given.
- Agencies must balance delivering results with cost-effective solutions while justifying ROI to clients, in near real time and this can become complex and time consuming to delvier – taking focus away from doing the job they are expected to delvier on and spending more time delviering the detailed breakdown of where digital and marketeting spend is being used.
Response: That is why our digital advertising is leading with BUDGETS! Our mission is to help businesses just like yours save time, effort and money to ensuer you resources are best used to delvier the services expected of your customers.
Challenge 2. Keeping Up with Digital Marketing Trends / Digital Marketing Overload and Complexity
- The digital landscape evolves rapidly, every changing competation from other marketing business and the constantly evolving digital marketing landscape (SEO, PPC, social media, influencer marketing, etc.) makes it difficult to stay ahead.
- Algorithm changes (Google, Facebook, Instagram) can impact organic reach and ad performance. These changes require a keen focus to stay on top of and impact assess for client performance ongoing—SEO algorithms shift, PPC costs fluctuate, and social media engagement tactics change.
- Further with Apple’s iOS privacy updates and Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies this will impact digital advertising effectiveness – putting even more pressure on marketing budgets and adding complexity.
- Agencies must stay ahead of trends and educate clients on why certain strategies (like short-form video or AI-driven marketing) are crucial. Further making sure client results are delviered, and explaining, showing to customers this value takes time, but this time is well spent and it should not be spend in XLS or pulling data to figure this out.
Response 2: In our world it is hard enough keeping up with technology changes in the Digital tarvel, payments and finance world, and although we work for AMEX GBT a large business we too operate as a small department, keeping up with our product changes and every evolving technology tooling is exciting but takes time, I can only guess that these changes are super charged in the digital marketing landscape. That is why we want to ensuer your team don’t spend time on non value-add expense processing and accounting tasks, yet improve the responsibility, relyability and quality of what money is being spend on what iniative – by automating your expensing tasks more time and effort can be spent keeping up to date with ever shifting landscape of the Digital maretking world and using that time on customer success through the services your provide.
Challenge 3. Client Acquisition & Retention
- With increased competition, standing out as a marketing agency is challenging. Clients have more choices and higher expectations.
- Retaining clients requires consistently proving value, showing measurable results, and adapting strategies to their evolving needs.
Response 3: To achieve this making sure your spend management processes are optimised and efficient is key to your competitive positioning. Leting us work to help streamline your spend and simplify your processes while keeping the people that are driving these customer programs accountable for performance is key, all withought adding to their day to day administrative tasks.
Challenge 4. Content Production & Scalability
- Clients need high-quality content (videos, graphics, blogs, social media posts) at a fast pace.
- Agencies often struggle with scaling content production while maintaining quality, especially when working with lean teams or freelancers.
Response 4: Many agencies engage freelancers to develop content – yet keeping track of these expenses for projects in an efficient fast paced world can be complex – being able to set “Open Budgets” to cover all client or campaign expenses and track them and establish detailed project based and customer charging finance fields can be of great benefit to empower client managers to own the tracking and allocation of costs to do the job
Challenge 5. Proving ROI & Analytics Challenges
- Clients demand clear performance metrics and ROI for their marketing spend.
- Attribution modeling can be complex, making it difficult to show which campaigns directly drive conversions. Agencies need robust reporting and data analysis skills.
Response 5: By spending a bit of time together setting up your finance fields we can drive a lot of complexity out of your data challenges – attributing spend to Clients, Campaigns, by spend or Service type is easily done in Neo1.
Challenge 6. Talent Acquisition & Skill Development
- Finding skilled marketers, designers, and strategists who understand both creative and data-driven approaches is competitive.
- Agencies must invest in ongoing training to keep their teams updated on new tools and techniques, and this time should be limited to understanding internal processes i.e. focus on the job not the administration.
Response 6: By empowering your team to be accountable for managing spend, issuing them the right payment methods and having 1 place to go to A: Book a trip for a Customer Design Review to B: attributing Meta paid search spend a lot of complexity is removed from the various systems and tools and processes you may have in place today.
Marketing & Advertising Implementation Framework: Configuration Use Cases
Use Case 1: Travel / Expense / Payment method (Physical Cards AMEX GL1025 / MasterCard*)
Critical: Establish a valuable Finance Field configuration including parent / child relationships between Client>SOW(Project)>Campaign
Critical: Connect Data from Card provider
Optional: Establish Open Budgets to set overall Client / project-based budget expectations across the team.
Finance Field Configuration:
Department | Account | Agency | Billable | Client | Project (SOW) | Campaign (Work Package) |
Their organisation structure | Expense Types / Account Codes | Vendors / 3rd party Agencies that provide services to the Agency | If the expense is chargeable or not | List of Customers with Active Signed SOW's | List of projects under each Customer | The individual Campaign being managed for a project for a customer |
001 - Finance | 200 - Travel | Yes | Neo1 | 001 - Neo1,2,3 | Paid Search | |
002 - Operations | 300 - Hotel | Meta | No | Creatives | ||
003 - Sales | 500 - Marketing | 002 - All-In-One | Paid Search | |||
004 - Digital Advertising | 600 - Printing | Fi Pictures | Creatives | |||
005 - Creative Design | 700 - Agency Fees | One Create Studio | 005 - Travel | Paid Search | ||
006 - Web Site Hosting | Creatives | |||||
007 - Graphics & Animation | 010 - Rebrand | Domain Change | ||||
010 - Video Production | Egencia | |||||
011 - Photography | Select | |||||
012 - Social media | Meetings & Events | |||||
Use Case 2: Travel / Expense / Payment method (AMEX Virtual Cards)
Critical: Establish a valuable Finance Field configuration including parent / child relationships between E.G. Client>SOW(Project)>Campaign
Critical: Enrol / Connect AMEX and Issue Virtual Cards
Critical: Establish Stacked Budgets to Fund activities on the Virtual Card
Budgets are created and adjusted as new spending activities / projects are needed
Critical: Establish if expenses for the target spend is managed by A: Client or B: Type of spend as this influences how the Virtual Cards are to be issued and administered
E.G.
- An individual is responsible for managing Spend for a Client or Group of Clients
- Here VC budgets would be created and amended as the scope of client work is approved for them to manage expenses for Stacking Budget Approvals
- An individual is responsible for managing all Paid Search Spend for all clients
- Here a VC budgets would be typically created for a period set to the total exposure the agency wished to take on financially on behalf of customers i.e. 500,000 per month on Paid Search these could be a “blanket” budget by period or a Stacked Budget
Speak to Neil.