The Challenge

Online advertising is a booming industry. Digital ad spending is forecast to reach $225 billion by 2024, according to eMarketer. How best to spend a digital ad budget is a question many marketers grapple with. Figuring out how much to spend and what campaigns to run can be a challenging process, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

One major internet company wanted to build strong relationships with advertising agencies, who purchase ad space and help create advertising programs for businesses. It lacked the internal resources and expertise for find and engage those agencies, so it partnered with us to acquire and manage the agency relationships.

Our Solutions

We employed 60 sales associates to reach out to an existing base of SMB ad agencies and new agency prospects to offer online advertising services for their clients, including campaign optimization, platform strategy, and sales training, Clients included many types of SMB companies, including food chain franchisees, for example. To accomplish those goals, we implemented tools and technology that assisted our sales associates in understanding the business needs of the clients that an ad agency represents.

One of those tools was “The Smart Calc,” which aggregated and processed advertising data—such as the number of prospects in a campaign, the geographic radius of a campaign, and ad budget thresholds—to allow our sales associates to intelligently pitch ad budgets to agency representatives. We presented prospects with a clear idea of the expenditure needed to drive the desired return on their clients’ advertising investments.

In addition, our sales representatives organized and planned “one-to-many” events that took place via video conferencing. At these events, one of our sales associates gave customized presentations about the value proposition of our client’s services to ad agency leaders and their prospective clients.

A great aspect of the one-to-many events, aside from their scalability, is its cost; the events are inexpensive to produce and conduct. One representative can conduct several one-to-many events in a single day, reaching hundreds of prospective advertisers, making it a very efficient tool for sales.

Once a prospective agency sought our expertise, we became their one-stop shop for strategic ad planning and implementation. We also worked alongside several of our client’s internal employees in a shared space. This allowed us to not only serve as product specialists, but also to get quick answers to questions that an agency client might have about a specific ad product or best practice.

We became a trusted partner with agencies to help them navigate the latest tools, data, and advertising best practices from our internet company client.

The Results

Today in total, we manage $1 billion in agency revenue on behalf of our client, and have acquired $237 million in annual revenue from 3,600 agencies that we support. With our help, our client now has a stronger relationship with SMB agencies and their clients, who in turn have access to a more in-depth understanding of advertising strategies and tactics, making it a win-win situation for all parties involved.