We often talk about optimizing your out-of-home sales, but what exactly does that mean, and how complicated is it?
Recently, our own Cécile Roney, Product Owner and Thomas Okeke, Sales Director, hosted a webinar laying out the many ways you can evolve your sales process and empower sales teams to work smarter and more efficiently than ever before – all while generating more revenue options.
It’s a big topic with a lot to cover, but it’s luckily all very manageable, and there’s no better time than the start of the year to equip your sales team with the right tools to maximize revenue.
Here’s a look at some of the main challenges and solutions that were covered, all in bite-sized chunks.
Selling to more OOH media buyers
Challenge: Keep up with the competition and sell to more media buyers
One OOH media owner’s needs are going to be different from another’s. Network size plays into this, as does the nature of the assets up for sale (digital or traditional) and the markets in which the owner operates.
And then there are the customers. What the customers demand is going to have a big impact on what any OOH media owner needs to do and prioritize. Unfortunately, though, different customers often want very different things. That means a “one size fits all” sales model can make it harder to expand beyond the regulars and attract new customers. If your business has limitations on how its inventory can be sold, new buyers with different needs will just go to competitors flexible enough to do things their way.
Solution: Offer variety in your product packaging
By diversifying your product offering, you open the door to new types of media buyers. Take a look at some of the ways you can diversify your product offering in the snippet below:
To summarize, media owners should broaden their product offering to attract all types of media buyers by:
- Speaking your customer’s language through different types of OOH buys – such as impression based, frequency or audience based
- Accommodating all types of media budgets, even if that means day-parting, strategic packaging, or offering “half spots” that reach a smaller target audience
- Showcasing your network’s competitive edge – things like take-over capabilities, the power to run real-time dynamic content or audience screen interactivity should be highlighted and at the forefront of your media kits
Improving efficiency with automation
Challenge: Selling out-of-home media is time consuming and labor intensive
Without an automated OOH sales tool to help schedule campaigns and sell inventory, you’re looking at lots of manual work, which is extremely time consuming and can result in errors or obsolete information (we’re looking at you, spreadsheets and faxes).
Some media owners today still use spreadsheets to manage their inventory because it offers a modular way of managing products and flight duration. Spreadsheets, however, are not a scalable solution. They are also not tools designed for inventory management – even less so for OOH inventory.
As an alternative, some businesses build their own in-house tool. But because software development takes resources and time and isn’t a media owner’s core business, it’s pretty costly to keep these solutions up-to-date, and the difficulty in scaling with these solutions can hinder business growth.
Solution: Adopt a turn-key OOH sales software that does the work for you
This is where an automated sales tool that is specifically designed for OOH comes into play. Using OOH sales software managed externally, by a vendor, allows a business to dedicate its resources to focus on selling. You can also rely on the vendor to maintain and innovate on your behalf so that the solution grows as you do.
Here’s what you should look for in an ad sales tool:
To summarize, look for a tool that:
- Provides access to real-time updates on inventory availability and audience calculations
- Enables multiple team members to work simultaneously to maximize productivity, especially for those who are putting in holds, creating bookings and checking availability
- Grows with you and allows you to scale without any limitations
- Works harmoniously with your existing CRMs, such as Salesforce or Boostr, and your content management system
Increasing your OOH network’s yield
Challenge: Yield optimization is complex and a constant challenge
Increasing your network’s yield can seem daunting, and there are certain roadblocks that prevent media owners from getting the full value out of their network.
Booking visibility
It’s difficult to adapt offerings accordingly when you don’t know where your occupancy levels are their highest. In order to efficiently balance inventory occupancy, you need to have the right data in front of you to be able to reschedule or readjust bookings.
Pricing complexity
Each customer has a different budget, different audience and a unique set of campaign goals, making it almost impossible for humans to manually figure out the very best screens or faces to add to a proposal.
Solution: Automate your inventory management
OOH is no longer about filling spots within a loop. It’s important that your sales tools give you the right data and enable you to define clear objectives. Using an automated inventory management system removes the guesswork, allowing sales to provide the best proposal meeting their customer’s campaign goals.
Cécile dives into the details in the following snippet:
To summarize, look for an automated inventory management system to help you:
- Define clear business objectives and prioritize them according to your market and competitive landscape
- Automate your sales process as much as possible to remove the guesswork for your sales team and other departments
- Tackle more complex business models without worrying about how to maintain them
How does Broadsign Direct solve these problems?
Flexible and adaptable business models
Broadsign Direct supports a wide (and growing) range of buying options for all types of media buyers. Plus, it’s one system for both traditional and digital networks, streamlining the creation of cross-channel campaign proposals.
Improve sales efficiency
With real-time visibility into how your network is operating, you can quickly identify the best available inventory options to meet your buyer’s campaign criteria and close deals.
Support business growth
We believe that software should never limit your business growth, which is why we built an ad sales tool that grows with you. With Broadsign Direct, you can scale your business vertically or horizontally. Increase performance and cross-department collaboration by allowing complementary departments to connect to one solution.
Want to invest in new assets to expand your network? Direct can handle multiple users simultaneously searching your inventory database – no matter how big your network.
Connect campaign bookings with automated scheduling
Broadsign Direct is fully integrated with Broadsign Control, our content management system. Giving sales and operations access to the same live data fills the communication and information gap. When you remove the manual work in syncing campaign bookings and campaign scheduling, it’ll result in speedier transactions.
Your trusted OOH technology partner
If there’s one thing we at Broadsign know, it’s out-of-home. Working with us, you can trust in our team to do the hard work of innovating for you, further developing the tools and workflows that can help drive your business’ growth.
An intelligent optimization engine
Sometimes there are some things that computers can do better than humans, which is where Broadsign Direct’s optimization engine comes into the picture. There are two ways our optimization engine works: it will minimize your yield loss and maximize the use of your inventory.
How does Broadsign Direct minimize yield loss?
The system will automatically rebalance campaigns that are over or under-delivering by readjusting the campaign play rates to ensure the campaign goals are properly met in a pragmatic manner.
Take a closer look at this functionality in the snippet below:
And how does it maximize inventory?
Think Tetris blocks – every time inventory availability is checked, Broadsign Direct will calculate the most optimal way it can make room for a new campaign. That means our system is smart enough to create wiggle room and squeeze in a new campaign by moving other campaigns around while still meeting campaign objectives.
Check out a few example use cases:
Broadsign Direct not only helps sales teams work faster, smarter and more efficiently, but it secures real-time inventory and generates proposals to make deals more quickly – all while the solution automatically optimizes bookings and revenue.
Want more detail? You can watch the entire Out-of-Home from Home webinar recording right here.
And if you want to see Broadsign Direct in action, book your personalized demo today!
