Sanoma Ad Manager is an online store for digital advertising, allowing advertisers to make their own campaigns for Sanoma’s advertising network.

We wanted to make it as easy as possible to buy advertising and lower the threshold for experimentation. We took a page from the news media’s consumer marketing playbook: an attractive introductory campaign with a free trial.

A free trial does not directly generate revenue, but can lower the threshold for the first purchase. At the same time, we tested whether the digital advertising sales market functions in the same way as the news media subscriber market.

What we learned

It is definitely worth taking advantage of the lessons learnt from consumer marketing. Over the two-week campaign, we generated as many new customers as we did in all of last year. The number of customers in the first pilot took everyone by surprise, including customer support, whose team had to change its day programme on the fly. 

There has been a lot of discussion within INMA about the offer models of subscriber marketing. The model is to bring in subscribers fast, typically with a discount or free trial, and then convert them into long-term paying customers.

In the self-service channel for digital advertising, this process may be as follows:

• Step 1: Attractive introductory offer (in this case, a free trial).
• Step 2: A light and easy paid extension (for example, promotional tips, a small promotional package, or an automatically recurring monthly fee).
• Step 3: Scaling to larger budgets and more versatile products (display, native advertising, video advertising).
• Step 4: A long customer relationship where the customer regularly buys different products and utilises data-driven advertising optimisation.

Since the number of advertisers does not increase through field sales alone, it must also be possible to test self-directed buying. Can an advertiser learn to buy advertising as “impulsively” as a consumer learns to subscribe to news?

If the answer is yes, Sanoma’s experiments can significantly change the threshold for buying advertising for small and medium-sized companies.

If the Sanoma Ad Manager’s free trial campaigns show that customers behave similarly to subscribers — try cheap first, then commit — we are already close to a real digital advertising online store.

Building its appeal 

A common drawback of offering something for free is that it usually attracts people only once. Yet we have positive signs a share of the customer base is willing to buy again, and the re-purchase rate is already over 20%. It is worth remembering, however, that building a customer relationship is long-term work and percentages develop over time.

Unlike news media subscription sales, the number of potential buyers for digital advertising is relatively small. How can we make the digital advertising model work in such a way that we really attract large numbers of potential customers to test the product?

One answer is practical, long-term marketing at every stage of the customer’s purchase path, from building a company-level brand image and awareness to targeted tactical advertising. In the future, it is also worth considering whether to encourage digital advertising directly on the news media platform: buy this advertising spot here.

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