This is the third part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.

To run an ad campaign, advertisers (small and large) need to go through the following processes - 

• strategic planning,
• creative development, 
• media planning,
• media buying,
• ad trafficking,
• performance tracking,
• optimization (a/b testing), and
• reporting.

Now, this is how it affects you.

Direct sales only

You may find that you spend up to 6 hours every month liaising with advertisers, handling billing, signing agreements, testing their creatives, booking the campaign, monitoring it, and preparing the reports.

If you've just hired an expensive $80000 sales rep, you really want them laser focused on serving big ticket advertisers e.g. movie studios, big pharma, national retailers etc. They may run just ten campaigns a month but those ten could represent $500,000 in revenue.

Direct sales + Self service

On the flip side, you may have 100 requests from smaller advertisers, each with an average of $1000 to spend.

There just isn't enough time to help every one of them manually but you don't want to leave $100,000 on the table. This is where a self service system comes in handy.

A self service system allows smaller advertisers to book, pay for, and manage their campaigns online, without little or no manual involvement from you.

These systems are not new. To be clear, we are referring to systems that the publisher control (especially of pricing, billing, branding and relationships) and not the ones that operate like ad networks e.g AdSense, Adbrite or BlogAds.

The most notable self service system out there is Facebook Ads. There are other examples like Myspace's My Ads, Reddit, Plenty Of Fish etc.

No self service?

Without one, you are left with just the good old "contact us" form, which turns away more people than you think. If they do contact you, then you have to either turn them away or run a low value campaign manually. 

So do yourself a favour and invest some time in optimizing your sales process.

Action Points

1. Before you go off to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create one, search on Google for off-the-shelf solutions.

Effect

1. Complete optimization of your sales funnel.
2. Increase revenue.
3. Improve advertiser satisfaction while you focus on marketing and building relationships.

Related posts:

1. Crenk.com Feature: Trafficspaces – the Self Service Ad Management Platform
2. Techcrunch Switches to Self-Service Ad Platform and Validates Trafficspaces’ Business Model.
3. Get a Self-Service Ad Manager In Your Local Language