8 Things Publishers Can Learn From Social Media Self-Service

As a publisher, you need to offer advertisers both convenience and results to win and keep their business in today’s competitive media landscape. Nowadays, digital marketers and small business owners alike can launch ad campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn in a matter of a few simple clicks.

Implementing a self-service model in your media organization is a wise choice for publishers who want to make the ad booking process easier for their customers. This model not only enables you to provide a viable alternative, or complement, to Big Tech’s offerings—it also frees up your sales team’s time from data entry to focus on building relationships.

Why You Need to Make it Easy to do Business With You

Top Big Tech players Amazon, Facebook, and Google raked in 67% of worldwide programmatic display ad spend in 2019, according to research published in AdExchanger. While these media giants may be tough to compete with, publishers who leverage their own first-party data, as well as marketing technology, will have the best chance of maintaining or growing their advertising revenue.

Self-service solutions can help you streamline your operations and greatly improve the customer experience you offer your advertisers, which will put you at an advantage to come out on top as the media industry continues to shift. Organizations who prioritize customer experience are 60% more profitable than those who don’t, according to Forbes.

You can start small with self-service—you don’t have to provide all of the features that Facebook’s advertising platform delivers. You can get more advanced as your company grows and your advertisers’ needs evolve. For now, learn about your options and test some ideas. Let’s explore 8 things publishers can learn from social media self-service.

Read Also: 8 Things Every Publisher Must Do to Make it Easy to Do Business

What Makes the Social Media Ad Booking Experience So Simple?

Big Tech does an excellent job of giving customers what they want—fast, easy service. Here are a few elements of the social media ad booking experience that you should consider implementing as a publisher. Combine these offerings with strong customer relationships and specialized knowledge of your market, and you’ll be well positioned for success.

1. User-friendly interface

Facebook in particular is known for its user-friendly ad booking interface, where you can build a target audience for your campaign, as well as add text and imagery. Facebook ads can also be easily e set up to appear on Instagram.

A simple user interface design is important because it helps keep your customers engaged with your platform, resulting in lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates, as well as less contact with your customer support team.

2. Ability to set advertising objectives

One way to help your advertisers create successful campaigns is to offer them the ability to set objectives for their ads in your self-service platform. These goals can include anything from brand awareness to engagement to lead generation to conversions, and provide advertisers with a meaningful benchmark to measure their ad performance against.

3. Various media types

While there’s nothing wrong with a static image ad, you can offer greater value to your advertisers by making different media options available to them, such as carousel ads, video ads, chatbot ads, and even augmented reality ads.

For example, LinkedIn offers sponsored content and sponsored InMail ads, among other types, which work well for professional networking purposes.

4. Robust targeting options

Talking to your advertisers regularly can give you valuable insight into the types of self-service features that would be useful to them, such as packaged offers that enable them to target their primary audiences across multiple platforms. Investing in the right technology will help you ensure that you’re prepared to deliver this feature.

5. Flexible preview options

Advertisers want to see what their finished creative will look like, and you can make this instantaneous by providing this functionality in your self-service portal. Give your advertisers the option to edit their creative before finalizing their ad, and show different preview options such as desktop and mobile so they can ensure their ad looks stellar on all devices.

You can offer another benefit by enabling your customers to view the final proof of their ad before they take their credit card out to pay.

6. Ability to book and pay instantly

The rise of Big Tech means that more people—digital marketing teams and small business owners alike—are used to booking and paying for their ads at the same time with the click of a button. There’s no need to get on the phone with an ad rep to make a purchase.

Self-serve booking and payment are especially helpful features if your customers span various time zones, allowing you to be operational 24/7 so that you never have to ask your advertisers to work around your schedule.

7. Intelligent reporting

Solid results are crucial to keeping your advertisers happy. You need to make sure it’s easy for your customers to monitor the performance of their ads and run reports to compare statistics such as reach and conversions.

During the sales process, you can help your advertisers set objectives for their campaigns. Be sure to keep an eye on their results as well so that you can celebrate wins and address issues quickly.

8. Ability to change ad creative and targeting

The option to examine what’s working and what’s not with an ad campaign is one side of the self-service coin. You should also offer your advertisers the option to pause and edit their campaign if they see that it’s under performing.

Investing in a Self-Service Media Sales Solution

If you’re ready to ramp up your customer experience and your advertising revenue, we can help. Adpoint offers advanced order management functionality and a fully-customizable self-service platform, 'Ad2Order'.