Self-service portals are an innovative way to exchange information and successfully communicate with people that are critical to your business operations, such as customers or partners.
We recognize that the communication process involved in selling advertising can frequently slow down the overall workflow. Because of the nature of email communication and creative-based media sales, questions and clarifications can take a significant amount of your sales reps’ time and slow down the entire business process. Investing in human resources is frequently the only viable option to increase the efficiency of these processes, however, this approach has its own complex challenges and is ultimately a costly and temporary solution that cannot ensure scalability.
ADvendio’s Salesforce-based self-service portal provides you with the tools to easily create your own portal for effective communication and information exchange between you and your advertisers and agencies. Save time by planning and managing advertising campaigns within a flexible framework with an easy-to-use user interface while customizing your self-service portal to your customer’s needs, including your own branding and flexible capabilities.
In this article, we’ll run through the top 4 most frequent use cases of ADvendio’s Customer Self-Service Portal:
Top 4 Most Frequent Use Cases of ADvendio’s Customer Self-service Portal
A self-service portal can be used to meet multiple needs, especially reducing the time required to meet customer expectations while replacing manual tasks in the ad booking process. However, it is worth noting that in order to benefit from the self-service features listed below, users must first set up a portal in Salesforce through the “Digital Experiences” feature.
1. Submitting a Brief
Submitting a form to specify the requirements of an advertising campaign can be a tedious task for advertisers, especially when there are multiple aspects to consider. Thanks to our seamless self-service platform, clients can save a significant amount of time meeting with sales reps to collect advertising campaign criteria.
As such, ADvendio’s self-service portal offers your advertisers the ability to forward their requests and possible questions themselves by submitting a new briefing form directly from the portal. This gives your sales reps all the time they need to respond to this request in the blink of an eye with a customized proposal, which can lead to an increase in market share by offering a more time-efficient, lower-cost and scalable approach than traditional sales departments.
This self-service portal form provides the fields you would like to ask your customers about. For example, in the advertising campaign requirements form, you might suggest asking about: budget amount, advertising campaign objective, target audience and campaign end/start date, and more.
2. Creating an Advertising Campaign
When customers have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve with their campaigns, you can save them time by creating a customized campaign for them based on the data they provide you with.
By using the Create a Campaign feature in the self-service portal, clients get access to a simple and easy-to-use campaign booking flow. This offers advertisers and agencies a convenient way to book their campaigns on the fly.
In this case, advertisers and agencies don’t need to know their inventory set-up to book campaigns, but instead, by simply selecting a timeframe, budget and target audience, it is possible to find available products in the inventory and add them to a campaign with a single click.
This simple booking flow has proven to be so effective that even publishers are keen to offer this tool to their own sales reps, as it offers multiple options that can be tailored to meet the user’s needs.
3. Uploading Creative Material
Uploading your advertisers’ material can be time-consuming and also challenging when it has to go through multiple approval circles with clients. Historically, ad sales teams have had to work alongside the ad operations team to ensure that a booked advertisement is successfully placed in the system.
With ADvendio’s self-service portal, these two aspects are automated to work more efficiently by reducing the number of resources required. This allows sales reps to focus on providing full service to larger customers, while the self-service platform takes care of small and medium-sized customers.
Using the portal’s Upload a Creative feature, you can inform your customer about:
- Missing creatives
- Approval status of their upload (e.g., file pending, approved, rejected)
- If any creatives need to be resubmitted
You can also send reminders a few days before deadlines to make sure creatives will be delivered on time. On top of that, with this feature, uploaded creatives are directly linked to your campaigns and your ad ops team can seamlessly submit them to external systems.
Upcoming Developments: External storage support as well as an automated validation process to save even more time while reviewing your clients’ creatives.
4. Downloading Reports and Invoices
Self-service can certainly help improve the advertising process to make it more internally integrated, faster and more efficient through the use of automated technology. Streamlining ad operations processes such as reporting and invoicing.
With data collection capabilities, ADvendio’s self-service platform gives users instant access to up-to-date analytics and historical comparisons of advertising data with customized online dashboards that can be exported or seamlessly integrated into external reporting systems.
Whenever your advertisers need to get frequent updates on campaign performance or download an invoice, they can turn to the reporting feature of their self-service portal. The portal provides clients with real-time updates on their delivery numbers and campaign performance, saving you time in preparing the report and forwarding it to the client. The same process applies to invoices, which can be easily downloaded on demand from the platform.
Conclusion
Self-service customer portals can certainly offer an effective way to manage more customers, media, and campaigns while also freeing up internal resources to speed up your overall business process. Use cases such as the ones mentioned for submitting a brief, creating and booking campaigns, uploading creatives, downloading invoices and accessing real-time analytics offer clients, agencies and partners the ability to self-service while saving you time managing individual clients and accounts.
Whether you are a small, medium or large company, we hope this guide has helped you understand the many benefits that self-service advertising platforms have to offer and encouraged you to take the next step.
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.
