Every company wants to be easy to do business with, yet many aren’t aware that they’re actually creating inconvenience for their customers. In the local media world, we’re talking specifically about the relationships with your advertisers.
As advertisers modernize their ecosystem of ad buys, they expect their partners to keep up with these changes. Unfortunately, technology in the media space has sometimes been slow to adapt, inadvertently making it harder for some to do business with you.
So, how can you evolve your tech stack and processes to be more business-friendly? Let’s look at some key areas to consider.
Do You Make It Easy for Customers to Pay Invoices?
The process of billing advertisers has changed significantly with the digitization of payments. Paper invoices and checks are no longer the standard exchange. The pandemic made electronic payments even more popular for consumers. That trend is now trickling down to how businesses want to pay. Before the pandemic, 42% of B2B payments were by check. In the years since, 73% of companies have transitioned to digital payments. Their favored outgoing payment option is credit cards, with 69% using them.
Thus, it’s critical that you meet your advertisers’ preferences by providing electronic invoices and the ability to remit online. Besides making it easier for your customers, there are more benefits you can realize, including decreasing days outstanding, improving cash flow, and eliminating expenses of mailing invoices and receiving checks.
Setting up such a solution can be overwhelming. Many factors influence your decision, including how it integrates with your traffic system, the rates for processing these transactions and the platform’s security.
We know this has been a pain point for media companies, and we wanted to ease the burden for you. We introduced our new payments solution, PayNow, this year. Many are already implementing it and seeing its value. You’ll appreciate how it streamlines workflows and its transparent pricing.
Are You Losing Digital Deals Because of Process and Technology?
Digital advertising is a critical component of revenue for media companies as a complement to linear and O&O (owned and operated). Local media sellers are becoming savvier about tactics and able to demonstrate to local businesses that they’re advertising experts. While your sellers excel at prospecting and making connections, they may be hitting roadblocks that are making their job harder.
Two key areas in third-party digital advertising platforms define if you’re easy to do business with — proposals and reporting.
How challenging is it for your salespeople to develop a proposal that includes digital and linear? How much time and effort does this take? If it’s a pain point, there may be delays in getting it to the customer. It also might not have all the information a business would want to review about the tactics.
Manually putting together proposals is a drain on sellers’ time. Ideally, your technology should make proposals simple and consistent. It shouldn’t require hours to define a campaign that hits the company’s goals.
Reporting is another aspect of relationships with clients. They want to know how the ads performed and the ROI from them. If your current system has minimal reporting features or is overly complex, your sellers are stuck with documents offering little insight.
You need a solution that allows you to dive deep and look at the metrics that matter to your customers. When you can present a campaign performance report that is easy to understand, concise and impactful, your advertisers will appreciate this and likely renew with you.
You’ll find these features and more with Marketron NXT, a third-party digital platform designed for media companies.
Marketron Empowers You to Be Easy to Do Business With
With our portfolio of solutions, we’re innovating and modernizing the media sales landscape. Our products are designed just for our industry to propel your success and ensure your customers hit no roadblocks in their relationship with you.
If you’d like to demo any of our technology, connect with us today.
