Media buying moves fast these days. It’s no longer buying print ads months in advance; ads and ad-buying have gone digital. Most paid digital ads get bought via real-time bidding software, at auctions completed in milliseconds.
Buying campaigns on digital channels — whether you want display advertising, paid search ad inventory, or another ad format entirely — requires familiarity with DSP software, targeting parameters and reporting best practices.
Who knows about all that? A new type of media buyer: the programmatic marketer.
This role can execute and scale targeted paid digital campaigns on a host of different channels, from Amazon to CCTV, and measure their results.
Hiring managers can’t get enough of this role, and neither can agencies — understandably. When clients spend seven figures (or more!) on digital display and performance channels, you need a marketer who can target campaigns, keep spending on-pace and handle any technical issues that crop up.
That’s the programmatic marketer. They excel at knowing what they want to buy, and how to buy it through self-serve portals.
It’s their specialty.
Experienced programmatic marketers enable businesses and marketing agencies to scale media buys on DSPs like Trade Desk and Amazon — and they know how to troubleshoot common problems. For example:
Most important: They can resolve the roadblocks they encounter quickly, so your programmatic ads can run like a well-oiled machine.
That’s especially important because DSP software can be expensive, and it’s often priced by the individual user, or “seat.” Someone who can use a DSP autonomously and impact-fully, without too many delays or glitches, makes the price of their seat make sense — and can help an agency’s overall pricing make sense to clients.
Great programmatic marketers can own an entire paid media strategy: They architect campaigns, run them, report performance data, and constantly iterate on their work, optimizing it for peak performance. Here are some of the most important skills they use as they work.
How do you find a programmatic marketer who can lighten your company’s load? Here are a few ways to assess a candidates’ aptitude for this role during the recruiting process:
We’ll be honest, though: It’s tough to recruit programmatic marketers. Search LinkedIn for the title, and you get less than 2,000 results — and it’s hard to know which (if any) of those people have the appropriate background and bandwidth to take on your accounts.
That’s why, at MarketerHire, we have the programmatic marketers on our platform vet candidates before they can join.
A freelance programmatic marketer is a flexible addition to your team. You can work with them on a week-by-week, project-by-project basis — scale their hours up and down, or let them go altogether, with no hard feelings.
An agile programmatic hire just makes sense, especially at agencies — where clients come and go. Someone you need for 40 hours a week for three months could be dead weight the next quarter if a client or two churns.
Freelancers can support your core, full-time programmatic team, making sure campaigns excel and hit goals even during seasons of high demand or employee churn.
They effectively create a moat around your business, insulating it against media-buying platform glitches and unforeseen challenges.
So if you need extra digital media buying bandwidth, fast, try a freelance programmatic marketing consultant. They’re up to date on the latest advancements and automations in the programmatic space, and you can buy as much of their time as your clients’ marketing strategies require — no more, no less.