Road to ROAS: How to Maximize Return on Ad Spend

As the global economy transitions from the post-pandemic era, companies are making important choices about how they will operate and what success will look like in the future. Now, more than ever, profitability is key—retail margins are narrowing as competition goes up, and firms need to be extra-savvy about what they’re offering. Companies can’t just rely on investments. They are expected to build alternate high margin revenue streams - like Digital Advertising offerings.

In fact, major global online marketplaces have seen a significant uptick in their ad sales to the extent of 18% in the second quarter of 2022.

Competition for marketing spends is increasing, especially as more ‘traditional’ brands hop onto the digital bandwagon and compete along with digital natives for the same ad dollars and eyeballs. Providing an advertising platform is no longer limited to enabling just a self-serve technology solution. Leading digital advertising platforms provide not just audience reach but also personalized handholding, insights, and increasingly sophisticated features to maximise ROAS for advertisers. At Accenture, we are partnering with platforms to provide these value-added services to advertisers through the Digital Inside Sales (DIS) offering.

Accenture’s DIS offering helps companies drive ad adoption among their partners through personalized handholding at scale. The engagement model focuses on mutually aligned interests including joint revenue goals. Accenture and the platforms jointly collaborate to build the winning playbook.

This model was successfully deployed at a prominent Indian e-commerce marketplace. While the platform was keen to grow its digital ad sales, its sellers had been cautious about spending on its advertising platform due to unfamiliarity with the concept and poor performance of previous campaigns. Accenture brought in a special team of experts who used a consultative-led selling approach to convince sellers about the benefits of personalised digital ads to handhold them through the ad onboarding and growth process. The result:

The model isn’t just limited to digital natives. A brick and mortar retail conglomerate in the Middle East has partnered with Accenture to launch a digital business unit to monetize its rich customer database and sell multiple insight-driven products to advertisers. These success stories have been made possible through Accenture’s innovative DIS offering. This not only combines automation with advanced AI/ML capabilities but also generates insights for the specialised sales agents to discuss with advertisers.

The DIS model is supported by four key tech pillars, namely:

1. LeadershipHub
   Provides key analytics to track and manage campaign performance
   
2. Smart Data Selection Tool
   Enables better customer targeting
3. OneGlass
   Automates data capture on both buyers and industries across multiple CRMs
4. Mia
   Identifies buyer personas and purchase trends to help salespeople

The DIS offering is being continuously upgraded to reflect emerging needs. For instance, recently, it added WhatsApp integration to facilitate easy chat-based communication with advertisers.

Additionally, Accenture’s acquisition of N3, a B2B sales firm, provided us with a transformative revenue engine that uses anonymized data points to deliver rich, personalized insights on each lead. These insights-driven conversations play an instrumental role in influencing advertisers and improving their platforms metrics.

The core goal, as ever, is to help companies improve their offerings for advertisers and win larger shares of their digital marketing budgets. A data-driven approach, automation on demand, and genuine human connection can make this happen—and Accenture is all set to be at the forefront of this change.