In today's highly-competitive digital landscape, brands are engaged in a constant search for new ways to connect with their target audiences and make a lasting impact.

Whether you're a mid-sized company looking to gain visibility or a major brand looking for the next innovation that will reinvent your marketing efforts, an effective campaign strategy can help you harness the full potential of marketing.

We chatted with Jason Wolbeck, Director of Advertising at Dayta, to learn more about how his role interacts with and shapes our Campaign Services, explore each service’s growth since Dayta’s inception, and gain Jason’s insights on how they will continue to evolve in the future.

Hey Jason! Tell us about your role at Dayta. What does a day in your life look like in your position?

I am the Director of Advertising at Dayta, but I started here as an intern shortly after the company was founded. I was a junior at Saint John’s University at the time and then came on full-time immediately after graduation in 2013. I haven’t looked back since! 

These days, my primary role is overseeing Dayta's campaign services — ensuring our services are providing value to our clients, that we have proper training and efficient processes for our team to execute the services, and expanding into new services and software as needed. I directly manage a group of five specialists who work with our Pods on everything from strategy to execution to reporting. 

My typical day involves a balance between production and strategic thinking. I do a lot of collaboration with my direct team as well as with Pod members. The average day could include attending campaign strategy meetings or one-on-ones, quoting out new campaign services for an Account Manager, or helping to answer an SEO question from a Project Manager. 

Everyone on the leadership team at Dayta jumps in to support accounts as needed, so I also work closely with a group of clients to stay connected with their campaign strategies and provide ongoing support.

What excites you about fulfilling this role for Dayta?

I get to coach an amazing group of specialists, each focused on different areas of our campaign services. I enjoy having ongoing conversations with each team member to understand the areas of their role that they love most and set goals. Each team member is continuously growing their skillset, so our capabilities as a company are ever-expanding. 

The best outcomes are derived when we can bring together a variety of team members’ expertise. For example, we have campaign strategy meetings prior to launching campaign services, which involve at least one Account Manager and Project Manager, plus all relevant campaign team members, so that we can ensure everyone has a concrete understanding of the client and their goals. It's great having each team member provide insight during these meetings, as each role provides a unique perspective. The final outcome is always stronger because of it. 

From a personal growth perspective, my role has evolved a lot. I started out working directly with clients, primarily creating social media content on their behalf. As digital advertising grew, my focus shifted. At one point in my career, I was running all of the advertising campaigns for our clients. I'm very analytical and enjoy having the data available to see how tweaks to a campaign can positively impact business goals. Once our advertising services grew to a large enough level, I was able to start expanding and managing a team. With this shift, I also started overseeing more services such as social media marketing, listings,  reviews and SEO.

Can you give us a bit of background on Dayta's approach to campaign strategy?

Our campaign services have always been rooted in a customer’s overall marketing and business strategy, and we’ve continued to grow in our ability to connect business objectives to both online and offline campaign tactics. The addition of our consulting services has allowed us to understand our clients' businesses at a much deeper level, which in turn allows us to create much more strategic campaign strategies.

All of Dayta’s campaign services are focused on getting the right (read: on-brand) messaging in front of the right audiences, and ensuring proper tracking is in place so we can analyze which campaigns are producing the best results to recommend optimizations and future investment. 

These services are the backbone of the “Grow” stage of our “Define, Defend & Grow” approach. Once we've worked with a client to define who their business is and built up the proper foundation to defend their brand, campaign services step in to help the business grow through awareness and lead generation.

Can you break down each of Dayta’s campaign services and describe how they’ve developed over time?  

Social media marketing used to be our bread and butter at Dayta. Many of the more senior team members will remember our Snap, Crackle, Pop social media marketing packages. Today, social media marketing is a much smaller part of our business, though we still utilize it as a tool to support clients’ overall digital strategies. 

Advertising is our largest campaign service and has grown the most out of all our offerings. We now have three specialists focused on advertising. The service started out being much heavier in social media advertising, but today, around 75% of all ad spend for our clients is going to Google. Out of the remaining spend, about 20% goes toward social media advertising. We introduced programmatic advertising services in the last few years, which currently account for the final 5% of total ad spend. Programmatic advertising is an exciting, opportunity-rich area that we are looking to expand and grow moving forward. 

Listings and reviews is a campaign service that has remained pretty consistent for us. We’ve upgraded our software so we can continue providing both proactive and reactive solutions effectively. Similarly, our attribution services are a consistent focus. The major upgrades there were CallRail and TapCicks. CallRail allowed us to gain a deeper understanding and better visualization of what drives results for our clients. Our move to TapClicks allowed us to build fully customized dashboards and reports and integrate with Daylight. No matter how our campaign services change in the future, we will be set up to provide comprehensive reporting for all services.

Finally, Search Engine Optimization is our newest campaign service. About two years ago, we identified SEO as a gap in our overall service offerings. It was exciting to see the team work together to bridge that gap and start delivering quality SEO services to our clients. Our SEO process will certainly continue to evolve over time, but I’m proud of where we are today having built the service from the ground up in just a couple of years.

As you look to the future of our services, what capabilities, skill sets, trends or industry changes do you predict will have a major impact? 

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to hear that AI is my top prediction for tech that will have a major influence on our industry. Every platform, whether its primary function is advertising or review generation, will continue to roll out new AI tools that streamline its use. We’re already beginning to see this happen, and it will undoubtedly continue to pick up speed. This year’s Google Marketing Live  was almost entirely focused on the AI advancements that will be launched in the near future. 

But no matter how technology evolves, having a top team of specialists who own their areas of Dayta's campaign services will always be the most important factor in supporting clients with their campaign strategy. Digital platforms — and AI’s influence therein — are changing rapidly. Our clients benefit from having Dayta’s campaign services working proactively to stay on top of this rapid evolution, ensuring they receive the best results possible.