Publisher realizes huge digital revenue stream

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A weekly community publisher in the Southeastern part of the United States came into a huge digital revenue stream with AdCellerant before and during the Coronavirus pandemic. Before partnering with AdCellerant, this publisher leveraged a different digital fulfillment company and was having trouble accomplishing increasing revenue goals because of a lack of scalability, technology and Tier 2 support. Profitability was also lower because its services were costing 60-70% of actualized revenues.

The opportunity

After conducting a thorough cost analysis and review of its current support and digital fulfillment provider compared to AdCellerant, there was an immediate profitability increase of 20% just by switching providers. The added value of better technology from the proposal tool, reporting dashboard and support portal, in addition to the dedicated account management team, customized training, and better campaign execution and performance, solidified the publisher’s decision to move forward with partnering with AdCellerant.

Solution

Even after adding 20% back to its profitability, the publisher and AdCellerant worked closely to develop a plan to start onboarding all five of its markets. AdCellerant deployed five different resources into each market to train sales reps, go on four-legged sales calls, help close business and build a robust pipeline. The initial visit resulted in an immediate $250k in new revenue.

Part two of the plan included a strategy to migrate all campaigns from the previous provider to AdCellerant. The publisher wanted to ensure its client’s interests came first and wanted no disruption to the campaigns. As such, the AdCellerant team initially identified underperforming campaigns to be moved over to AdCellerant at the onset of the partnership. If these campaigns were successful (and they were) the remainder of the campaigns also would be transitioned over to AdCellerant.

Results

This publisher grew its business before and DURING the Coronavirus pandemic by billing more than $20k in September 2020 than in February 2020. This is amazing  considering:

  1. The market’s peak season is from Thanksgiving (November) to Easter (April) and the publisher traditionally sees a huge dropoff in revenue from the beginning of May until the middle of November.
  2. A large majority of the advertisers were in the travel, tourism and hospitality verticals.
  3. This publisher has a large competitor in its market.

 The publisher accomplished this by:

  1. Pivoting to targeting essential businesses.
  2. Collaborating with AdCellerant to host a series of educational webinars on behalf of its advertisers on how to pivot their marketing during and after the pandemic.

This publisher partner did not let the effects of COVID prevent it from overachieving its goal of doing $2.5M in retail revenue with AdCellerant between June 2019 and June 2020. We believe that it had a lot to do with the methodical and deliberate approach the team took to make digital media a main contributor in the product mix.

AdCellerant is a technology and digital advertising company focused on making quality digital marketing accessible to every business. AdCellerant achieves this goal by partnering with local marketers, media companies, agencies and channel sales organizations, helping them leverage AdCellerant’s proprietary advertising software platform, UI.Marketing. For more information or to request a demo, please email info@adcellerant.com.

Ben Bouslog is vice president of business development and can be reached at bbouslog@adcellerant.com.