Self-Serve Ad Platform in Salesforce for Publishers & Agencies
In today’s market publishers, and agencies of all sizes are struggling with the profitability and efficiency of their ad sales process. Many of the technologies and solutions that sought to address these issues over the past 10 years, such as programmatic advertising, have not had the desired effect on day-to-day productivity and profitability. While also creating new challenges to overcome such as high investment costs, brand safety issues, and fraud.
Sales reps are caught between keeping clients satisfied in order to secure existing revenue, and spending that same time on lead generation to drive future profits. Many publishers and agencies find managing high volumes of low-value customers to be the greatest difficulty. Profit margins with this type of customer are generally thin so sustainability at this end of the market means publishers and agencies must sell at scale which puts sales teams under immense pressure.
ADvendio’s self-service advertising platform can be the out-of-the-box solution to all these problems and more. The Salesforce native solution allows you to simply lower your cost to serve by streamlining ad sales and ad delivery across all media channels. Easily providing lower value clients with the basic requirements they need to book effective campaigns with minimal supervision while also allowing you to offer complex planning options to your larger, more advanced clients, all from the same intuitive process-based platform.
Below we break down the five simple steps that your clients can follow to create their own omnichannel advertising campaigns in Salesforce.
Build A Salesforce-synced Campaign
Booking a campaign in the ADvendio self-serve ad platform is quick and easy. All your clients will need to get started is to pick a name for their campaign, set their budget, timeframe and select the campaign goal, based on what they wish to achieve from their campaign. As standard, users will be offered 3 options: Brand Awareness, Conversion, and Reach. The choice of campaign will help to refine inventory suggestions later in the process. However, this is fully customizable to meet the needs of your business process.
Unlike many other self-serve ad platforms in the past which offered customers an attractive front-end for deal capturing but ultimately no way to automate the booking, inventory management, and other associated data management tasks to make this operationally efficient. Our offering combines an intuitive front-end with comprehensive backend technologies and workflows. This ensures that booked deals are automatically processed and placed, with minimal intervention and effort from the hosting publisher or agency. Clients simply input the key criteria for their campaign by following the guided process within the self-service platform. ADvendio will then automatically take care of processing all of the technical details involved in the creation of a campaign back to your Salesforce organization for processing just like any standard media campaign created in ADvendio.
Selecting The Target Audience
At the heart of any advertising campaign is the intended recipient. Without a clear idea of who your audience is your advertising campaign will struggle to capture the attention of recipients.
Targeting options within ADvendio’s self-serve ad platform allows your users to identify the right type of audience to target with their campaign with just a couple of simple selections. By default this will be set up using targeting groups to match audiences to relevant inventory within your portfolio, however, this is fully customizable to match your needs. This makes the entire process highly intuitive for advertisers who simply need to define the demographic info i.e. gender and age as well as topics of interest associated with their intended audience to be matched with relevant inventory, for example, shopping & fashion, cars, health & wellbeing and many more.
Choose The Most Relevant Inventory
One of the challenges for advertisers when managing a marketing campaign is finding the right mix of media that aligns with the needs of their target customer or market. Generally, they have a good idea of who they wish to target but are not always so confident of how to reach these individuals. ADvendio can help to guide your clients to match their needs with the most applicable inventory options for their campaign by selecting the appropriate inventory and target audience.
The inventory that best matches your clients selected parameters across campaign type, target audience, budget, and timeline will be displayed for adding to the campaign they would like to build. All inventory is guaranteed campaign ready as integrated Ad Server and exclusive inventory checks are performed in the background to exclude any inventory that does not match the defined parameters of the customers’ selected campaign. Products are sorted and displayed by relevance so your clients can book the most effective inventory for their unique needs. Once selected and confirmed ad materials can be uploaded and sent for validation by your internal ad ops teams immediately or skipped and completed at a later date. Once all material is confirmed and signed off this can be pushed directly to the relevant delivery system.
Review Ad Campaign Summary
In the standard process of planning a campaign with direction from a sales representative, clients can often be surprised or overwhelmed by the sum total of their requirements. Being guided through this process over the phone or on a video call may lead the customer to feel they are being oversold or they may need time to confer with their team or a senior manager. Leading to extra time wasted for your reps recreating campaigns and duplicating efforts.
With ADvendio’s self-serve ad platform, as inventory items are selected the summary cart will populate to give an overview of selected products as well as the quantity of each including invoice amounts with accompanying taxes and charges. This helps your clients to craft and optimize their campaigns to best suit their budget by giving a clear estimation of costs and what they are receiving in return. Progress can be paused and data shared internally to ensure all key decision-makers are satisfied before booking. All of this without taking precious time away from your sales reps who can prioritize added value tasks and high-value customers.
Finalize Campaign with Flexible Payment Options
Once the customer is happy with their selection and all aspects of their campaign have been approved by you, the publisher, or agency, the final step is to confirm or action payment.
Payment methods are fully flexible to match the needs of your existing business process. Self-service can work on a pre-payment basis, similar to any eCommerce model. Once items are added to the cart as described above a simple credit card payment gateway can be included to simplify bookings and create a closed-loop for advertisers, allowing them to await the result of a campaign in confidence that finances are locked in. For many cases, this may not be suitable i.e. for flexible pricing-led products or companies that work solely on an invoice basis. With that in mind, ADvendio will gather and push all relevant financial information from the self-serve ad platform to your core ADvendio solution for processing as you would with any direct sale deal.
Can A Self-Serve Ad Platform Work For My Business?
In summary, the self-serve ad platform is easy to use and can bring additional revenue to your company, reduce your cost of sale and drive overall efficiency. The Salesforce native solution will guide your customers through the booking process for their very own omnichannel advertising campaign with ease. Taking advantage of the powerful sales and marketing automation tools available with Salesforce, allowing you to simply sell inventory across all channels, from Digital to Radio and OOH while maintaining customer satisfaction and campaign effectiveness.
ADvendio’s “always-on” solution also allows your clients to book campaigns at times that suit them, not when your sales reps are busy or unavailable. This also affords end-users the freedom to set up and test different campaigns at a high frequency before committing to them, ensuring that they have all the data they need to make the most informed decision.
The Salesforce native Chatter solution allows effective communication between end-users and your internal staff such as sales reps and ad ops teams for rapid query resolution. Ensuring customers don’t feel abandoned or overwhelmed at the prospect of booking their own end-to-end advertising campaign.
Comprehensive approval workflows ensure the highest level of quality assurance throughout the process. Customers using the portal may be restricted from finalizing campaigns until internal ad ops teams have had time to review the finer details such as creative specs, targeting criteria suitability, and much more. Automated processes ensure real-time communication between the self-service UI and your ADvendio org so staff can action approvals as they go about their day-to-day activities in ADvendio.
For more information on how ADvendio can help your business get started with your very own self-serve ad platform for your customers, our reps would be happy to arrange a Demo with you or simply use the Contact Us form to get in touch.
Originally published at https://www.advendio.com on Apr 29, 2021.
