How to Automate Ad Sales with Salesforce Media Cloud
Before the atomic clock, the quartz clock, or even the pendulum clock, the ancient Greek academic Ctesibius invented one of the first pieces of automation in history: a self-regulatory water clock.
It may sound trivial to modern ears, but this marks the inception of humankind’s perpetual race towards automation. As history went on, we began to automate spinning mills, fire-control systems, navigation, and now, even ad sales.
Salesforce, an industry leader in cloud-based software, takes ad sales automation to the next level with its Media Cloud Sales Advertising Management application. You don’t tell time with a sundial or manually churn butter, so why would you spend your most valuable resource—your time—on managing ad sales when Salesforce Media Cloud can give that time back to you?
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using software platforms to perform routine marketing tasks without the need for human intervention.
In other words, marketing automation is to marketing, what autofill is to form-filling, copy-paste is to word processing, and GPS is to navigating. Marketing automation takes the most labor-intensive parts of ad sales and performs them automatically with minimal effort.
However, while marketing automation replaces hours of tedious, repetitive human labor, that isn’t all it can do. Marketing automation also allows marketers to have a unified marketing platform where efficient analysis and calendar management are available at the click of a button—things that would be impossible without platforms such as Media Cloud.
You don’t have to be an expert in Salesforce Media Cloud to automate your ad sales because Rainmaker has a team of experts who can leverage their knowledge for you. Rainmaker provides Salesforce integration and service management that minimizes the technical complexity so you can spend more time on what matters to you.
How to Automate Ad Sales
As consumers shift towards digital platforms, marketers must understand how to harness the power of their marketing budgets. The digital world is rapidly evolving, and keeping up with the pace of change requires constant innovation, which is why Salesforce Media Cloud is such a powerful tool for automating these dynamic, evolving processes. These are the steps to automating ad sales through Salesforce Media Cloud:
1. Identify Your Marketing Needs
The first step to automating ad sales is identifying your ad needs. Media Cloud helps its users coordinate across many different advertising channels:
- Digital. Did you know that 84% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video? Or that nearly half of social media users use social media to research products? Digital marketing is a rising giant in the marketing world, which is why it is a $460 billion industry, and 63% of businesses have increased their digital marketing budgets in the last year.
- “Linear” means “time-based,” so linear advertising is advertising that takes place over specific periods. Examples of linear advertising are TV ads, webinars, and radio commercials. While TV is still a behemoth in the advertising world, most marketers are combining their linear and digital advertising as Connected TV (CTV) platforms such as Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV and account for increasing percentages of TV viewership.
- While print has fallen behind its younger siblings in television and digital marketing, experts projects print advertising will reach $12.4 billion in 2022 as many marketers still have great success with their print marketing campaigns.
- Out-of-Home. As the name suggests, out-of-home advertising refers to advertising consumers encounter outside their homes. That includes billboards, posters, public transportation ads, etc. and accounts for $38 billion in advertising dollars.
Despite how diverse and eclectic these marketing channels are, Salesforce Media Cloud can automate them all!
2. Coordinate Your Campaign with Attribute-Based Pricing
Salesforce Media Cloud allows users to automate ad sales with media-specific CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote). CPQ is a sales tool that allows companies to generate quotes for complex products. Since CPQ is an automated process based on preprogrammed sets of rules, the pricing is more reliable and efficient than waiting for a quote from a human sales rep.
CPQ and attribute-based pricing are valuable for marketers because they coordinate multiple campaigns across multiple channels with quick and efficient pricing. This eliminates the back-and-forth and time lost to waiting for updated quotes, meaning you can roll out your campaigns swiftly and effortlessly.
3. Select Campaign Attributes
The flexibility and customizability platforms like Salesforce Media Cloud offer are part of the beauty of automating ad sales. After identifying your marketing needs and accessing attribute-based pricing, select attributes such as geography, ad frequency, and day part to fully customize your automation. From there, booking ad sales is automated to match the criteria you’ve selected, saving you hours of busywork.
4. Preview Your Orchestration Plan
Salesforce Media Cloud uses all the information you’ve provided to create an orchestration plan, including a calendar showing a detailed view of your ad campaigns. This is your opportunity to verify your information and ensure that your campaign fits your marketing needs.
The orchestration plan is one of the most time-saving aspects of automating ad sales, as manually creating a plan with the same level of detail would require hours of multi-disciplinary, cumulative labor. With Salesforce Media Cloud, it’s just a click. That is the kind of time savings that money hasn’t always been able to buy.
5. Use Media Cloud’s Built-In Analytics
Once your campaign is finished, use Media Cloud’s built-in analytics to monitor and check the progress of your campaign. Their analytics tools help you compare first-party and third-party data, track spending, view conversions, etc. Like many of their other features, this user-friendly feature saves hours and hours of skilled labor with the click of a button, putting money back in your pocket and time back on your schedule.
Why Salesforce Media Cloud?
Now that you know how to automate ad sales, you may ask, “Why Media Cloud?”
1. Unified Platform
Media Cloud is a unified platform that integrates with your CRM and other software so you can manage your marketing campaigns as efficiently and effortlessly as possible. While other advertising sales management platforms may require you to go back and forth to match your customer’s information, various ad campaigns, and widely diverse marketing channels, Media Cloud allows you to access all these features in one place.
2. Single Source of Truth
Having all your data available in one place is a huge benefit to using Salesforce Media Cloud, but that unified platform is only as good as the data going into it. Media Cloud allows a unified view of your data and presents a single source of truth to mitigate the possibility of human error inherent in coordinating ad campaigns across multiple platforms. Media Cloud keeps all your data in one cohesive platform, so your best data stay undiluted and untainted.
3. Automation
Automation is the path forward for marketers, and Salesforce Media Cloud uses high-quality automation features to manage your ad campaigns, automate analytics, keep track of customer relationships, regulate billing, and more.
4. Holistic Analytics
One of the challenges of data management is mining meaningful insights from decentralized sources of data. One of the biggest benefits of using Media Cloud to automate ad sales is that all your data is accessible from one platform, which means you can analyze every aspect of your marketing campaigns at one stop.
Rainmaker Unlocks Your Digital Potential
Salesforce’s suite of products, such as Media Cloud, includes powerful tools that can elevate your marketing efficiency, and the key to accessing those tools is Rainmaker’s Managed Services.
Rainmaker specializes in minimizing clients’ total cost of ownership by taking the guesswork out of managing their Salesforce integration. You don’t have to be a Salesforce expert to get the most out of your marketing dollars because Rainmaker works hard to maximize positive outcomes for its clients.
If you’re ready to automate your ad sales with Salesforce Media Cloud, see what Rainmaker can do for you and reserve a meeting time with their team of experts today.
