A Day In The Life Of An OSC (Online Strategy Consultant) — by Madeleine Dubé

Originally posted to Medium.

8.30am
It’s Monday morning and you might think I’d ease gently into the work week. A coffee stop while I catch up on the news, perhaps, or a chat with Martin, my colleague, to see whether he made it to the hockey game this weekend. But no! It’s all go around here, because I have my first client meeting at 9am and I want to be ready. In fact, I always need to be ready, because it’s my job to make sure our customers’ needs are being met on an ongoing basis and that I am taking whatever steps necessary to optimize their advertising campaigns every step of the way. I am, you see, an Online Strategy Consultant at TRFFK powered by autoTRADER.ca, and the world of digital advertising doesn’t stop for coffee!

10.30am
By 10.30am we’ve covered my client’s needs and challenges, and established steps that we can take to grow their business. I head back to the office and get to work building a proposal for an effective online strategy along with a recommended budget that would address their business challenges. Meanwhile, a familiar “ping” alerts me that I have a new email. I check to see who it’s from and am happy to see that a client I recently started working with has already approved the banner creative we presented to them, along with their Google Adwords keywords theme strategy. I jump on the phone to our internal technical team to make sure these are fully integrated with the client’s inventory feed. They give me the thumbs up and I dive back into building my proposal. By this point, I can smell the coffee from the kitchenette in the corner of the office. In fact, I see Martin over there and figure that this is the perfect moment to see if he has anything to add to the strategy I have compiled. A little collaboration goes a long way around here. We share some insights and he tells me that he is in the process of testing and running quality control on the dynamic banners and Adwords for a dealer downtown, and needs to head back to his computer to make sure he gets final approval of the banner creative by the client before launch. I still didn’t find out what he got up to this weekend!

11.45am
It’s not even lunchtime and I am getting down to my favorite part of the day — launching a new campaign and letting the client know they are LIVE! It’s so satisfying when all the moving parts come together and you get to show a customer what their brand looks like out in the digital universe. This particular client is fairly digitally savvy, so he has a few more in-depth questions for me before we set a date for our one-week-post-launch check-in call. That’s when I will have some early data on initial results that we can run through together. It’s never too soon to let a customer know how the wheels are turning.

1.00pm
And… lunchtime. I bump into Fatima in the Café downstairs, and after she tells me about the show she went to see on Saturday, we can’t help slipping into business. Fatima is a Digital Strategist and is at the front line of media buying and managing campaign performance. Like all our Digital Strategists, she’s also an expert in Search, Programmatic Display, and Social Marketing, so she is constantly optimizing our clients’ campaigns. She’ll be reaching out to the customer I was just talking to so she can setup the first Performance Review, three weeks after my one week check-in. That’s when they sit down and really dig into the nuts and bolts of the campaign and what the best next steps will be for continued optimization and success. Sometimes that means more of the same if everything is working great, or it can be when we recommend a change of course. We want our customer to know all the opportunities available to them, what their competition is doing, and how they should position themselves in the market based upon the data we are accumulating on the back-end here at TRFFK. It’s also a great time for us to provide insights on which vehicles generate the most Vehicle Detail Page views and what the market response is to their inventory. It sounds like a lot of information but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that digital advertising campaigns are anything but set it and forget it!

2.00pm
It’s time to head back to the office and create custom dashboards for a few customers. We base these on the Key Performance Indicators each customer uses to value their business, and what we recommend they focus on to evaluate performance and results. It also gives us the opportunity to help educate each customers further on all the data we have accumulated, how multi-channel attribution works in their online advertising, and how the various channels used by TRFFK contribute to the final conversions on their website. I’m almost finished, when my phone rings and one of my clients — a dealer from the Brossard district — checks in to see if we can set up a custom campaign for the following weekend.

The weekend? That’s right! It’s time to take 5 and see if I can finally catch up with Martin — I never did find out if he made it to the game or not!