margarita, Author at Localstars

How to understand your customers’ intent to focus on the right leads

November 26, 2019, written by margarita

Media owners continue to face new challenges. As the media landscape evolves, client demands change, and new technology enters the fray, it’s fundamental that media owners are able to do two things extremely well.

The first is to harness the power of this new technology and provide advertisers with access to market-leading solutions that help solve the challenges their business faces, assist with growing revenue and offer tangible metrics to measure performance. The second is an ability to sell these solutions.

Even if you do the first aspect well, there’ll be little chance of locking advertisers into the spend cycle with you if your sales team isn’t firing.

HOW TO UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS’ INTENT TO FOCUS ON THE RIGHT LEADS

1. Qualifying Leads

Marketing and sales need to work in tandem, with prospects only being passed over to the sales team when they are ready. Importantly they need to be qualified through adequate collaboration between the two teams.

This is especially important when sales teams are constrained by head count but have ambitious targets to hit; a very real problem for many media owners.

An agile and streamlined process is essential, with a good lead qualification and scoring model taking in the following elements:

– Explicit criteria is information directly shared by the prospect to illustrate their level of interest

– Implicit criteria is how their level of interest can be deduced from their behaviour

– Demographic scoring is how they match up against your ideal customer

2. Stripped back sales process

Once you’ve qualified your lead and you begin selling to them, the process must be as efficient as possible with the right hands off approach to ensure your sales team can concentrate their time on selling. With a smaller sales team, every second counts. Your team can’t afford to waste time chasing cold leads or taking on unnecessary admin tasks.

Employing the right creative selling techniques is an essential first step to do this.

3. Simple metrics to understand the intent of your prospects

Alongside creative selling techniques, your team simply must understand the leads that are the most engaged and that have the highest chance of converting. Where many sales teams fall down at this stage is by bringing in too many unnecessary sales metrics.

Highly efficient and high-performing teams focus on simple metrics. Specifically they look at analysing the intent of their leads.

The Localstars Sales Automation Engine (SAE) provides you with a stripped back, efficient and straightforward sales process. Initially you have the creative selling techniques to bring your proposition to life for your prospects with essential visualisation. Secondly, you will also be tracking the metrics that matter to help you understand engagement and define the intent of your leads.

You will:Know how many times the proposed ad has been viewed by your prospect

– Understand how long they have spent viewing it

– Be notified when your client is looking at your ad proposal

This gives you the opportunity to rank your prospects in terms of their engagement and begin to target those with the best chance of converting. It’s straightforward and uncomplicated.

4. The difference between interest and intent

At this stage, it’s vital to focus on the difference between interest and intent.

A prospect that is interested may eventually convert, but they aren’t ready yet. For a user that has intent to convert, now is the time to engage with them to get them over the line.

When it comes to viewing your ad proposal, the first couple of views may suggest interest, especially if they are short views. Multiple views for longer durations will imply more of an intent to convert. As will numerous stakeholders from the same advertiser viewing the proposal. These are the leads to focus your energy on.

Additionally, you’ll have insight into the exact time your prospect is viewing their proposed ad, illustrating their intent to engage with it and when they’re ready to talk.

See how Localstars can improve the performance and efficiency of your sales team, get in touch with us today to request a demo.

Reasons why your sales team isn’t performing

November 26, 2019, written by margarita

Running a sales team for a media owner can be difficult and stressful. You’re constantly battling with cost cutting and a reduced headcount in your team. Coupled with ambitious YoY sales targets.

It’s a tough challenge when your team isn’t high-performing. It becomes even more difficult and simply unachievable when your sales team is struggling and under-performing. These are the signs you should look out for when your team isn’t hitting their targets.

Reasons why your sales team isn’t performing

1. Follow ups are being missed

According to a Harvard Business Review study, there was a 400% increase in lead response when a lead was contacted within the first five minutes.

Another study found that just 2% of deals are done when the parties meet in person for the first time. The vast majority of deals (80% in fact) take five follow ups or more to close.

This suggests, it’s essential to follow up with your leads quickly (automation is key) and to keep going with your leads, especially the ones of real value to your business. However, a sales team working with an over complicated and stressful process may well miss these opportunities. It’s therefore crucial to strip things back.

2. Too much time is spent selling (and not listening)

The benefits of automation and sales AI mean that your team should be spending their time selling, rather than taking on unnecessary admin. That’s a given.

But that valuable time selling, shouldn’t just focus on what your product can do.

When engaging with leads, your salespeople need to get to know their prospects’ requirements and tailor their solutions to solve their challenges. If an advertiser can see the value and what it would mean for their business from your product, whether that’s geotargeting, dynamic creative or advanced insights reporting, they’ll be much more likely to sign off on their budget being spent with you.

3. Leads aren’t being qualified properly

It’s one thing filling up your pipeline with potential leads, but for your sales team to perform well and get the right leads over the line it’s crucial that you qualify leads properly.

You need to know which of your leads are the most engaged and which potential products would be best suited to them, as well as those that will bring the right revenue into the business. Again, it’s critical to strip back your sales process and concentrate on defined metrics to understand the engagement of your leads and the potential to convert. Our sales automation engine provides real time data to do exactly that.

4. Your team is too busy and stressed

A confused sales process with a lack of clear direction will result in your sales team being extremely busy, but without the clarity on where they should really be focusing their efforts.

Face to face meetings might once have been an invaluable tactic, but in reality they take too much time. Are cold calls the best way to really engage with digital savvy prospects? Can you afford to rely on your sales team describing your proposition in the hope your potential client understands exactly what they mean?

To really sell digital products, you need to employ the creative selling techniques to enable the proposition to be brought to life for your prospects. That provides essential clarity for all parties and enables faster decision making.

By choosing a hands off approach until the most opportune moment to sell, you give your sales team the time and space to not be blindly chasing leads and to focus their energies on selling when the time is right. You also give your clients the space to make an informed decision.

However, to enable this approach, it’s vital to bring the right tools into your team blending creative selling, with automation and AI. The best tools will simplify your processes and streamline your activity, as well as drive results and enhance the efficiency of your team.

See how Localstars can improve the performance of your sales team, get in touch with us today to request a demo.

Geotargeting & geofencing: Rejuvenate your digital offering for your advertisers

October 8, 2019, written by margarita

What new avenues are you exploring to rejuvenate and re-energise your client revenue? Or are you still plugging away with the same products and offering?

Media owners continue to face difficulties in locking clients into the spend cycle. The industry is changing, and media owners are required to change with it. New products such as Geotargeting & Geofencing need to be offered to provide that additional value for advertisers which is essential.

Traditional media owners offering increased digital services is just the first step. Solving your advertisers’ biggest challenges is where you need to be.

Geotargeting & geofencing: Rejuvenating your digital offering for your advertisers

Ensuring your advertisers can engage with a local audience

How many of your advertisers are speaking to you about the difficulty with connecting to a local audience? What cost-effective solutions are you providing to assist them?

By extending your product portfolio to include both Geotargeting and Geofencing, you’ll provide your advertisers with the opportunity to:

– Connect with their core demographic in a specific local area

– Increase brand awareness

– Improve the performance of their bricks and mortar locations

– Move ahead of their competition

What is geotargeting and geofencing?

Geofencing

Geofencing helps your advertisers solve potentially one of their biggest challenges; how to increase local footfall into their locations.

It works much like retargeting, but in a physical space. The technology provides the capability to draw a digital fence around a defined area. Once users pass into or through the area in real-time, they will have a digital marker placed on them and will be served ads on their mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.

This is how your advertisers can benefit from geofencing:

– Engaging with potential customers when they are close by, or visiting a nearby store with complimentary products

– Pulling previous customers back into the store with a new offer, event or deal

– Drawing a digital fence around a competitor’s location and attracting their customers with an incentive that can’t be missed

– Delivering an omni-channel customer experience in-store by drawing consumers into a location with digital display ads and re-engaging with them through additional ads once they’ve made a purchase

– Securing feedback to improve the customer experience

Geotargeting

Geotargeting works just like other forms of targeting in digital display advertising. It means that ads will be targeted at a specific audience (and only that audience) in a certain geographic area.

For example, a retailer may wish to target women in the 18–25 age bracket within a specific city. This would be done based on criteria including address, zip code or even in line with a defined landmark.

Crucially for your clients, all of their spend will go directly towards targeting that defined demographic. That means no budget will be wasted. It’s super-targeted and ensures that they can get their message out to their target audience in their local area.

Here’s how your advertisers can use geotargeting:

– To create brand awareness on a local level for their target demographic

– To find and engage with new customers and bring them into the top of the purchase funnel, before beginning a retargeting strategy

– To engage with their target audience and incentivise them to visit a bricks and mortar location

What this means for your offering

Your advertisers don’t simply want to be sold the same products and solutions month after month and year after year, they require tailored solutions that help them engage with their required audiences in a cost-effective way.

By listening to your clients’ needs and helping them find new and innovative ways to get in front of their customers and get ahead of the competition, you’ll establish yourself as their go-to provider for their digital display advertising.

That’s just one way you can lock them into the spend cycle with you.

Contact us today to see how Localstars can add more value to your offering to give you a competitive edge.

How to improve your sales process and stop losing leads

October 2, 2019, written by margarita

Is there anything more frustrating than chasing dead leads?

How to improve your sales process and stop losing leads

Your sales team will likely have spent far too much time presenting and chasing up with the view that they’re going to get this one over the line, only for it to simply go cold.

That’s too much time wasted and not enough cash coming in. That becomes even more problematic considering the increased revenue targets and reduced headcount many media owners are dealing with.

So, what’s the root of the problem? Poor sales techniques from an individual? More likely, it’s a poor sales process that struggles to identify the leads that should be pursued and the ones to be left.

Here are four ways you can immediately improve your sales process and instantly enhance your sales figures.

1. Create the best possible opportunity with your prospects

Good selling is all about giving your sales team the best opportunity to close. Prospects that are confused by what you’re selling or don’t have the full picture will be much harder to sell to than those enjoying all-important clarity.

This is where issues can arise if you’re relying on your salespeople simply describing your proposition.

Advertisers want to see what their digital display campaigns will look like when live on one of your sites. They don’t want to have to visualise how their brand will be showcased in their ads. They want to see it. If you employ the right creative selling techniques and illustrate exactly how their ads will look, you make it much easier for them to sign off on their campaigns with you.

Creative selling is high-performing selling.

2. Understand how engaged your prospects are

Being able to sell creatively is great, but it won’t work if you’re still chasing those leads that have no real desire to become a customer. If you do that, you’ll still be wasting valuable time and losing money.

It’s crucial to identify leads that are the most engaged and therefore have the highest chance of converting. And using simple metrics to do so.

Through the Localstars Sales Automation Engine (SAE), you can employ creative selling techniques providing that all-important visualisation for your leads, but you’ll also be tracking the metrics that matter to understand how engaged each target is. Specifically you’ll know how many times the proposed ad has been viewed by your prospect and for how long, ensuring you have the ability to rank your prospects on engagement and target those with the best chance of converting.

3. Know when to engage with your prospects

A call at the wrong time can put off even the hottest of leads. Pushing too hard can also be counterproductive to closing deals.

A high-performing sales process will see your sales team engaging with prospects at the most opportune moment and being hands off the rest of the time. Through the Localstars SAE, your salespeople will know exactly when a prospect is viewing their ad, and potential customers even have the opportunity to request a call back.

Knowing when is the right time to have a conversation with potential clients means more of a chance in closing the deal, less time wasted, and more time spent selling. That’s high-performance and efficiency, two integral requirements for media owners in the current climate.

4.Automate as much as possible

You simply can’t afford for your team to waste time. The last thing anyone in your team wants to do is manually gather information and data that is likely to continually change.

That’s the epitome of a poor sales process.

Not only does the SAE promise creative selling techniques and the ability to target the best possible leads at the right time, the whole process is automated. Cutting out unnecessary admin means that your salespeople can focus on what they do best (and enjoy). Closing deals and signing up new customers.

Remember, in sales and the current competitive media landscape:

“One of the fastest and best ways to separate yourself from the masses is to establish yourself as someone who makes situations better, not worse.”

By simplifying and improving your sales process, you’ll make the situation for your team and targets much better.

To understand how Localstars can improve the performance and efficiency of your sales team, get in touch with us today to request a demo.

Top 5 ways for media owners to enhance efficiency

August 5, 2019, written by margarita

The media landscape is changing.

Media owners need to provide advertisers with a product that drives performance on digital media campaigns and offers long-term value to their businesses.

Being able to implement the best advertising solutions on the market is essential. But to keep your business running as it should, it’s vital that all your teams, from sales, creative and operations are as productive and efficient as possible when doing so.

Production

Are you wasting time, energy and money with creative production?

Are your creative teams spending all their time building ads for your advertisers’ digital display campaigns? Is their time spent tweaking and re-sizing ads? Could repetition be killing their creative skills?

If you have a number of digital brands and publications under your umbrella, this can amount to thousands of digital display campaigns every single month. Boosting efficiencies is therefore essential.

Outsource your ad production

Simply by outsourcing the ad creation for the time-consuming smaller projects to Localstars you can efficiently scale and automate digital advertising. Through the Ad Builder, the smaller campaigns will be facilitated through the creation of high-quality, beautiful HTML5 ads across multiple shapes and sizes.

Crucially this reduces the reliance on your internal production team ensuring they can concentrate on bigger more bespoke projects. We’ve previously seen this boost efficiency by 500%.

Sales

Is your sales team meeting their quota?

An efficient sales team is critical for boosting sales and driving revenue for the business. This is especially important when you’re battling the need to reduce the headcount in your team, while still achieving ambitious sales targets.

If your sales team isn’t meeting their quota, the obvious conclusion to make is that they’re not working as hard as they could be. They’re not chasing down leads and identifying the right prospects. Are they even good salespeople?

The problems might not lie with the individuals in the team, however. It could be a department-wide issue in that your sales team isn’t set up properly to be the most efficient that it can be.

Here are some essential ways you can boost the efficiency of your sales team.

Engage with hot leads

Hot leads are what it’s all about. It’s no surprise to learn that 22% of salespeople say qualifying leads is their most challenging aspect of their job. Whilst many great salespeople down the years have followed their gut and acted on hunches, an efficient sales team will base all these decisions on data and the metrics that matter.

Through the Localstars sales automation engine, your team will know which prospects have engaged with your proposal and how many times. You will immediately have a hierarchy of engaged prospects based on a variety of metrics and sales intelligence, enabling you to identify those which have the highest chance of converting. Your team can focus all their efforts on the hottest leads.

Sell Creatively

For many salespeople, technology has made their job harder. With so many tools to choose from and so many options, it’s confusing things. They may know that the tech exists and that they should be using it, but they don’t know how to get the best out of it.

The best ad technology should be simple and easy to use. Importantly, it must benefit your team.

By providing your prospects with an example of one of their ads running live on one of your publications, you immediately ensure that they can visualise exactly what they’re getting from you. Gone are the days of long meetings and presentations without the certainty of whether your prospects understood everything. Through these creative selling techniques, we’re seeing sales teams realise 20-45% conversion rates on their digital sales campaigns.

Engage with prospects at the right time

Remember the days of picking up the phone and hoping it was a good time, or sending an email with a read receipt just to check that your prospect is engaged?

Say goodbye to these inefficient tactics.

Enabling your prospects to view their campaign is just the first step. Your sales agent will also be notified as soon as your prospect views the ad. A prospect can even notify them when they’re ready to talk. Now those are the buying signals an efficient sales team needs.

Operations

Are your workflows as efficient as they can be?

How quickly are you flighting ads and getting campaigns live once they’re signed off by your advertisers?

Your clients will want to move quickly and will look to you to provide an agile solution.

Immediately flight ads once signed off

Once your client is engaged, you can quickly and easily tweak the creative in real-time, dramatically reducing your sign off time. It also means your creative team won’t need to be involved and dedicate resources to making client amends.

After sign off, your client won’t then need to pay for expensive ad creative, as their ads will already be built and ready to go live on your publications.

Crucially, the Localstars platform allows for bespoke integrations, such as integrating the ad builder with an ad server or streamlining the process from ad creation to sales. This ensures your operations team is super-efficient and won’t have to spend their time with manual tasks, driving down your ad operation costs.

If you’re looking to maximise current digital revenue or explore new tactics of digital revenue growth then book a demo with us today to find out more.

Winning advertising sales by visualising Ads

August 2, 2019, written by margarita

How to create and convert opportunity in the digital age

In an increasingly digital world, how do you get your advertisers to commit their advertising sales and media spend? Fundamental to the future of your business will be to lock advertisers into a spending cycle with you. And not your competitors.

But advertisers are savvy. They know the value of their budget and they have increasingly ambitious KPIs to hit. They also understand the channel mix and what it can deliver for their business and are opting for a holistic cross-channel approach.

Localstars share how to create and convert opportunity in the digital age for advertising sales

TV spend might be down year on year (YoY), but is still a significant £1.4billion, whilst radio is enjoying a resurgence, with a 5% YoY increase. Digital continues to grow with search and online display pulling in almost £12billion in advertising revenue in 2018.

Advertisers are looking for digital solutions to perform in the short-term to supplement any longer-term traditional campaigns. As a media owner, this is your opportunity.

Creating your opportunity

This is your chance to harness the power of the latest technology to give your advertisers the best possible solutions to cater for their needs and goals. If you can also tap into the capabilities of AI, machine learning and automation you can make your own processes slicker, more cost-effective and streamlined.

Here’s how you can create that opportunity.

1.Offer a cost-effective service for digital advertising

Your advertiser may view ad creation as a significant barrier to entry for digital advertising. The upfront costs associated with a creative agency eating into their budget, before they can get any ads live can be off-putting.

The opportunity to build their digital display ads quickly and easily with you, for a much lower cost, is the first step. By offering this added value and additional services, you also create another revenue stream for yourself.

The Localstars ad builder enables beautiful, multi-click, multi-shape and feature-rich digital display ads to be built in minutes. Providing the service as part of your digital display package for your advertisers, means one cost for all of their activity.

2.Help them visualise their ads in a live environment

Your sales tactics need to be streamlined and efficient to convert leads into clients and ensure your advertisers continue to spend with you. Don’t simply rely on your sales team describing what it may look like. Let the client see it; it’s a try before you buy pitch.

The Localstars Sales Automation Engine uses creative selling techniques to illustrate to your prospects exactly what their ads will look like when live, enabling them to view it in their own time. And crucially you’ll get the metrics on how many times they do so and for how long. Your sales team will focus on the most engaged prospects and at the time when they’re the hottest. It’s the ideal way to harness tech to enhance your sales and revenue.

3.Cut down the trafficking time

By ensuring your campaigns can be produced and trafficked quickly, you offer your advertisers a quick route to market to get their ads in front of the customers that matter for their business. The Localstars platform shortens the time required to sell, produce and traffic campaigns, which gives you the opportunity to maximise client retention and increase revenues in the process.

4.Offer your advertisers access to market-leading technology

But not just technology. Technology that will enhance the performance of their digital advertising.

Geolocation technology enables your advertisers to reach local audiences, whether by geo-targeting or by geo-fencing.

Through geo-targeting, your advertisers can target people in a specific location to increase their brand awareness. All of the budget will be focused on that location, meaning no wasted ad spend. Geo-fencing enables ads to be served to people that enter a defined area, retargeting them through mobile advertising, with the aim of boosting conversions in store.

Whatever the objectives of your advertisers, you’re able to offer them a variety of solutions that can be tailored to their needs with your custom-made offering. That’s how you keep them in the spending cycle.

5.Help them to get engage with their customers

Consumers are continuing to be more demanding. They have different needs at varying stages of the buying journey. When online they’ll have contrasting mindsets and needs throughout the day. The same display ad pointing to one landing page at all times simply doesn’t suffice and it won’t drive engagement.

Dynamic ads that change in line with the time of the day, the day of the week, the weather and the language of the user are key. As are multi-click ads with tailored landing pages that cater to each stage of the purchase funnel.

6.Cater to their specific needs

By showing your advertisers you know how they operate and by providing products to cater to their needs, you’ll lock in their ad spend with you.

For advertisers with ever-changing product inventories – think car dealers, travel companies, and gambling websites – they need a solution that ensures their ads are always up-to-date. Whenever their inventory changes, this needs to be updated in their ad. Feed ads provide a simple and straightforward solution to this problem. And they can now get this solution with you.

7.Provide insights and metrics to power future campaigns

It’s important to provide added value for future campaigns as well as feeding into your advertisers’ ongoing strategies. Advanced Insights Reporting helps your advertisers to understand the key metrics around their audience and how best to engage with them. You’ll be providing them with the tools to tailor their future campaigns and drive better results.

There’s never been a better time to get your digital advertising offering up to scratch. By doing away with a scattergun approach and legacy systems and by tapping into the power of the Localstars platform you’ll give your advertisers more bang for their buck and can drive improved revenues in the process.

Book a demo to see how Localstars can add more value to your offering to give you a competitive edge.

How Localstars Integrations can drive down Ad Operation costs and save time

July 30, 2019, written by margarita

In the current media landscape, the role of media owner is changing.

How Localstars Integrations can drive down Ad Operations costs and save time

It’s imperative to offer your clients innovative digital solutions for their advertising campaigns and to ensure that they can engage with the audiences that really matter for their businesses.

To lock advertisers into the spend cycle, they’ll need to be provided with added value through actionable insights for their future campaigns, as well as their ongoing strategies.

But that’s just with a focus on the clients. To safeguard the future of your business, you also need to ensure you can drive down operation costs and save time.

The problem of inefficient systems and processes

Your sales team are likely operating under more and more constraints. They’ll have ambitious sales targets to hit with less headcount in the team. To keep sales processes efficient and your sales team high-performing, it’s essential to tap into the right creative selling techniques blended with automation to give them time to do what they do best; sell.

That’s the sales process ticked off. What happens when campaigns are signed off?

What could then be holding your business back is inefficient legacy systems for ad approval, flighting and post-flight changes. Without changing them up, you’ll waste both time and money.

Whilst a complete revamp and overhaul of processes, procedures and systems might not be possible in the short-term, the solution comes with adapting the ways you currently work to enhance and streamline your existing processes.

The Localstars Platform

At Localstars, we’re able to get under the skin of your business and fully understand how you currently work. More than that, we pride ourselves on our workflow and integration skills to ensure we can get your operation running smoothly and seamlessly.

First and foremost we focus on the needs of your business and create a tailored solution to tackle inefficiencies. We then utilise your own workflows and ad booking systems and integrate the platform. This will ensure your process is optimised from start to finish.

The Ad Approval Process

How much time is your team spending checking ads are correct and securing approval before they go live? How much money are you wasting on the man hours?

With integration to our platform, as soon as your ads are developed in our ad builder, they will automatically be sent on for approval from your client. Once the client approves them, they will also be automatically sent onto the ad server. There’s no need to spend time checking your end.

And the fact that our ad builder creates multi-shape, omni-channel ads, means your team won’t need to check multiple variations of the same ad. Each and every variation is created off the same tag, meaning that changes in one will reflect in them all.

Updating live campaigns

Once a campaign is live, any post-flight changes can be managed seamlessly and smoothly. That means that any updates to the creative, campaign duration, or click-through URL for example can be implemented without any changes to the ad-tags. Everything is optimised and crucially it means that there’s no additional labour costs and time spent updating ads.

The benefits to your business

Simply by tapping into the capabilities of the Localstars platform, your business will enjoy the following benefits:

Time savings
Stronger asset management
Increased accuracy
Reduction in errors
Fewer touchpoints from approval to flighting

Most-importantly, you’ll enjoy a streamlined workflow across all of the publications in your portfolio.

The unique nature of your operation

These are the benefits that all media owners can enjoy, simply from integrating the platform into how you already work.

But to cope with changes to the industry, new disruptors on the market and the increased demands of consumers, media owners need to change the way their businesses work. We recently worked with a marketplace that expanded their business by buying an additional brand, thereby inheriting a wide range of third party suppliers that covered everything from ad buying to ad serving.

We were able to create a tailored and bespoke workflow solution from sale to ad flight. Importantly, identifying where savings could be made by integrating the ad builder with the ad server, enabling ad serving to be done in-house. This meant fewer resources were required and the cost associated from using a third party was trimmed.

Workflows were changed, optimised and enhanced in just 24 hours.

Book a demo today to see how Localstars can help you drive down operation costs and save time with your business.

Advertiser Retention: Give your advertisers long-term value as well as short-term performance

July 30, 2019, written by margarita

Your advertisers will be facing significant challenges.

First and foremost, performance against short-term objectives will be high on their agenda. Lowering the cost of acquisition, increasing click-thru rates and delivering a market-leading conversion rate will be essential. As will be the need to trim costs as and where they can.

Localstars shares an Advertiser Retention Guide - Give advertisers longterm value as well as shortterm performance

But these short-term goals shouldn’t detract from the long-term vision of the business either.

In the current climate, many consumers lack trust in advertising, but expect a consistent and valuable customer experience from the brands they engage with. Brand is still hugely important.

It’s a delicate balancing act.

Short-term performance

Typically, performance in the short-term focuses on reaching the right audience.

Through the ad extension capabilities of the Localstars platform, your clients will have the ability to reach new audiences, simply by increasing your available ad space to hundreds of websites outside your portfolio of publications.

That’s the first step in ensuring they can get their message out there.

To generate higher Click-Thru Rates (CTRs) and lower the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), campaigns must be tailored to their specific audience demographics with dynamic creative that change in line with their customer’s mindset. It’s crucial to ensure your creative, messaging and targeting are relevant to their needs through retargeting for example.

Geo-targeting enables campaigns to be tailored on a local level, while geo fencing will assist them with driving footfall in store.

By working with your advertisers and understanding their business objectives for the short-term, you can implement a tailored and bespoke strategy to perform against their core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

That’s the short-term covered.

Cutting costs and driving efficiencies

Return on Investment (RoI) will always be a focus in Boardrooms. Shareholders will want to see value in the short-term, putting pressure on Marketing Directors and Managers.

Key to locking clients into the spend cycle with you will be an ability to help them cut costs where necessary and improve the efficiency of their business.

Feed ads streamline day to day operations when dealing with a vast and ever-changing inventory, whereas functionality provided by the ad builder will save time and money when it comes to ad creation. Importantly, you can help free up creative teams by removing the need for them to take on repetitive reformatting and tweaking of ads.

Long-term value and the customer experience

While your advertisers might be chasing short-term growth and focusing on the KPIs that matter immediately, it’s crucial for your business to assist them in keeping one eye on their brand positioning and customer experience.

Our advanced insights reporting is a key tool to do just that.

By providing your advertisers with actionable insights and reporting on the following metrics, you’re helping them to learn as much as they can about their customers to include:-

Age
Income
Interests
Gender
Demographic
Marital Status

With these insights at hand, all parties are better able to modify upcoming campaigns and drive the best results in the short-term and keep advertiser retention.

With such data as an input, the type of deal, offer, creative or message will better resonate with a specific audience. Not only does this enable Advertisers to build key personas and demographics for each of their products and services, it assists in the definition of an improved customer experience.

That’s the essential long-term planning they’re after.

Finding the balance

Central to your role as a media owner will be to offer advertisers the most appropriate solution to drive essential performance in the short-term but to balance this with illustrating long-term value. You’ll achieve advertiser retention, your clients will keep coming back as you have evolved to be a trusted value added partner and they will be more than happy to lock into the spend cycle with you.

Book a demo with us today to see how Localstars can add more value to your offering to give you a competitive edge.

5 ways to enhance the efficiency of your sales team

July 30, 2019, written by margarita

What is the efficiency of your sales team right now?

What is your sales team doing? Are they chasing the hottest leads? Do they know the best possible product to position to their prospects? Are they drowning in new leads with no way of differentiating between potential deals or claiming there is no pipeline to contend with at all?

The latter is an easy situation to fall into.

Especially considering the constraints you’re likely working under. Are those sales targets continuing to increase? Is the headcount in your team reducing as we speak?

Despite those constraints, an efficient and high performing sales team is within reach.

LOCALSTARS SHARE 5 WAYS TO ENHANCE THE EFFICIENCY OF YOUR SALES TEAM

Automating your approach to sales

The Localstars Sales Automation Engine uses creative selling techniques to showcase your proposition and bring it to life right in front of your advertisers. Through tracking the metrics that matter, identifying your hottest prospects and clarifying the best time to engage with them, your sales team will become super-efficient and more importantly high performing.

Here’s how you can provide your Sales Team with a platform for success.

1.Give them the tools to convert

Your sales agents no longer need to rely on their individual approach to bring your proposition to life for your advertisers. They don’t need to be experts in body language to read what their prospects really think.

By automating the production of ads in advance of a sale, advertisers will see exactly how their ads will appear in context when live on one of your publications. The ad will already have been built, with your contact having the opportunity to view it as and when they want. You also don’t need to rely on them relaying the message internally within their business. Anyone that needs to see the ad can. Visualisation is key to ensuring your team secures campaign sign off, turning leads into sales.

Using this technique, we’ve seen between 25% – 45% conversion rates with advertisers.

2. Help them to engage with the hottest prospects

The tracking available through the Sales Automation Engine helps your sales team to understand the engagement of your prospects. They will know which prospects have viewed their ad, how many times it has been viewed and for how long.

Simple analysis using these metrics will enable your sales agents to prioritise their prospects and engage with those that have the highest chance of converting.

3.Time things just right

They’ve creating their order of priority. That’s the first step, but when’s the right time to sell? The data provided by the solution details exactly when your prospect is viewing the ad, providing your sales team with the key knowledge of the perfect moment to make contact.

The ad will be fresh in their mind. They’ll be excited at the potential of what it will do for their advertising strategy and they’ll be ready to talk. Now’s the time to close.

And the fact that the prospect can even request a call back themselves, means that your team will be completely hands off until the opportune moment to sell. Now that’s an efficient approach to sales.

4.Close the highest value deals

A sales team that works efficiently is highly desirable, but to make everything work as hard as it can, they need to be closing the highest value deals. That’s how you can smash those sales targets and drive even more sales revenue per employee.

Through machine learning the solution delivers the capability to recommend the best products and packages to position to your prospects. This will be based on thousands of data indicators that will provide you and your sales managers with easily actionable insights, to get in front of your prospects with the solutions that will best cater to their needs.

5.Make everything as easy as possible for your prospects

What they see is truly what they get. Once they sign off on a campaign with you, there’s no need for them to then go out and source expensive creative. The ad they see in the sales process is the ad that will go live, as it’s already built.

That means everything is turned around much faster and speeds up the process of reacting to changes in market dynamics. It also means cost-efficiencies for your clients and the potential for more available budget to spend on campaigns rather than creative.

If you’re looking to smash sales targets year on year by maximising current digital revenue, or exploring new tactics for acquiring new digital revenue growth then book a demo today to find out more.

Why customer experience matters to your advertisers

July 24, 2019, written by margarita

The modern day consumer is extremely demanding, self-aware, and at times, difficult to advertise to.

They understand when they’re being targeted, they lack trust in some traditional forms of advertising, they are very aware of the value of their personal data and they know what good customer experiences look like.

Why customer experience matters to your advertisers

While this may seem like a negative for brands and specifically for your advertisers, there are still plenty of positives to be taken from the modern consumer. Specifically for the brands that they value, and most-importantly that they feel value from.

The importance of customer experience

We know that 41% of consumers have switched from one brand to another because the former didn’t take the time to learn about them and reflect this in their interactions with them.

By helping your clients to understand who their customers are and learn more about them, you’ll help them stay ahead of the competition.

Their existing customer experience

They may believe that they are already catering to the needs of their customers and providing them with the experience that they crave. In most instances this probably isn’t the case.

In fact, 80% of companies feel that they are already delivering super experiences for their customers. The reality is that just 8% of customers think this is the case.

There’s clearly a gap.

As a media owner in an ever-changing landscape, you have the opportunity to help your advertisers fill it and continue to provide additional value to your clients.

Helping them to learn about their customers

Simply by reporting on the usual metrics of click-through rate and impressions, you’re not providing sufficient value for your clients. How can you help to learn what really resonates with their customers?

It’s crucial to dig a little deeper to analyse more about the users that engage with their ads. Important metrics include the following:

Age
Income
Interests
Gender
Demographic
Marital Status
Device Type
Time Breakdown
Keyword Breakdown

In the short-term this helps to illustrate where future spend should be allocated in line with the types of deal, offer or creative that resonate with a particular audience.

Taking time to understand these variables will improve the customer experience when building and flighting their digital display campaigns with you.

The additional value that the above metrics provide lie in the ability to build key personas and customer profiles for each of their products and services.

By knowing the age, gender and income of their audience, they are beginning to better understand the needs and desires of their customers. This will impact their brand messaging, the creative they use in all of their advertising and where they advertise.

An understanding of the devices their audience are using, when and where they are spending their time online and the keywords they’re using to search, will give a detailed picture of the habits of their customers, their changing mindset and their core interests.

That means a much more tailored knowledge of their users.

These learnings are then applied to the ongoing customer experience across all their brand touchpoints, creating a deeper connection with their customers and a valuable interaction for both sides.

Provide a personal touch to their digital display campaigns

Offering your advertisers insight into their consumers is just one way to ensure that they provide a better customer experience.

Through the products that you offer as part of your digital display advertising packages you can also ensure that their campaigns are tailored and personalised for their audience through the right use of feed ads, dynamic creative, and retargeting.

The more the ads are personalised and the better they cater to the needs of the individual, the stronger they will perform for your clients.

Book a demo today to learn more about the Localstars offering and how you can help your advertisers focus on customer experience to give them a competitive edge.