How Reacher renewed Mittmedias sales
Sellers and advertisers struggle to shift from the old and safe world of print advertising, into one where the best mix of marketing efforts is unique in every case. Reacher is Mittmedias answer to that struggle. A place where a seller can book a number of different campaigns types, get educated, get instant help from experts and where both sellers and customers can follow campaigns performance in real time.
Our process for selling print ads has been honed for over a hundred years. Unfortunately it has been perfected for a world that does no longer exist. Today even some of the tiniest local merchants are working with omnichannel and expect us to do the same. Their marketing isn’t limited to a simple single channel purchase any longer, no matter how much some media houses wish it still was like that. The merchants want to target specific audiences with different messages at multiple places and times.
All statistics tell the same story, print advertising is not the future and generally speaking traditional media have been extremely slow to react. Sellers haven’t been given the right education and old systems haven’t made life easier either. Customers haven’t been able to follow their marketing efforts in a neatly presented way.
Reacher is our ambitious way of tackling these changes.
Batteries included
Reacher was launched in all of Mittmedias regions during 2017. In the dark ages before that a seller had to go into a number of different systems mainly adapted to print advertisement, to book a campaign in several channels.
Reachers interface is a responsive site that the seller can use on any device. All the difficult parts like figuring out the correct price for a specific audience and geography is taken care of. Booking a display campaign only takes about a minute of work now. Using reacher the seller can book display, video, search (adwords), social media (facebook and instagram), and native campaigns all in one place.
That makes it possible to effortlessly give the customers what they want, a marketing mix that reflects the consumers digital every day life.
Reacher is built around transparency, the seller can sit down together with the customer and get a feeling for how different choices affect the campaign during the sales meeting. You’ll know exactly what you get and why when the campaign is booked. As a consumer you expect web sites and services to be polished, work on any device and be fun to use, why should corporate systems be any different?
A change in culture
Just another IT-system thrown at employees won’t solve anything. Change is hard enough as it is, we know, that’s why we made sure to educate our sales staff. We set up a learning platform with online courses covering everything from sales 101 to specific topics like marketing on Instagram.
Formal learning can be great, but at the same time we wanted to make sure that help was close in everyday work life.
Imagine you’re sitting together with a customer and get a question about something that you can’t answer. Earlier that meant emailing or calling support and wait in line. In reacher we integrated both a help center and a chat. Sellers (or customers) can now look most things up themselves or just open a chat and instantly get to speak to the person that can best solve their problem whether it’s related to ad creatives, campaign optimisation or technical issues.
At the same time we began using a tone of voice that urge us to sound like our selves and not like some kind of issue receiving robots.
What do they really need?
As the complexity of campaigns increase, with a mix of channels for instance, the need to really understand the customer becomes more important as well. What challenges do they have, what have they tried so far and how is the industry evolving. We had a form for those interviews before, in yet another system, so of course nobody used it.
The customer assessment in reacher is more lean. The questions are non mandatory, quicker to fill out and makes more sense. Our sellers can now easily sit together with the customer and figure out challenges and opportunities. That builds trust.
Human error
Earlier, handling campaigns meant that you needed a black belt in copy paste and short term memory. Today campaigns are managed within reacher and automatically sent to the different systems that needs to know about them. Less risk of human errors.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Customers can follow their campaigns in real time if they want. Or go through the results together with the seller at the end of the campaign if that suits them better.
How ever they wish to do it they now have the results gathered in one place instead of spread out across a lot of different systems. You don’t have to log into Adwords to try and figure out how that worked out together with your display advertising, just have a look at your customer overview in reacher.
Show me the money
Summarising 2017 we can clearly see that our price levels and revenue have increased both in individual regions and all of Mittmedia.
In December we reached a new all time high in our native sales and January is already looking really good.
With display campaigns things are also looking swell. Since we can target on specific audiences and geographies the ad impressions we deliver are more relevant than earlier. Mittmedia can therefore charge a higher price for the impressions. Our average CPM levels have almost doubled.
Mittmedias total revenue is now increasing. A big part of that is thanks to reacher. Looking at December the growth was nearly 10 %. If we’re only focusing on display advertising we had a growth during Nov/Dec at almost 20 % from already high levels. Naturally there are a number of factors that have contributed to this. Our strategy, our amazing sales force and all the small things we do every day.
Who knows what 2018 will bring.
Have a look yourself
A tour around reacher in form of a screencast:
ENG: https://youtu.be/YJKYs0W3HWg
SV: https://youtu.be/1KMuY-G0ojk
Kristoffer Darj, product owner of Reacher.
