No matter the size of your marketing business, the chances are that you've already experienced how challenging it can be to find the perfect advertising solutions for every client you work with. While some brands will benefit more from a marketing strategy that focuses entirely on their social presence, others will need to think outside of the box with dynamic creative and video content.

Self-serve advertising helps to reduce the costs and concerns typically associated with finding the right advertising platforms, by allowing clients to take control over every aspect of their marketing scheme. Rather than having to pay out for a sales team to help organize and manage ads from a variety of different marketing approaches, self-serve advertising platforms make establishing a brand name or presence online easier than ever.

If you're a small to medium-sized business, the chances are that you've already learned the frustrations involved with finding advertisers to place advertisements on your website. It can be incredibly costly to maintain and hire a dedicated sales team that are there to organize your ads on your behalf, which is one of the reasons why the self-serve model has emerged into an effective and popular option. Self-serve advertising makes the process of finding advertisers easier, so that you don't have to worry about micro-managing or searching for marketing opportunities yourself. Instead of searching everywhere for opportunities to make money, the advertisers you need can simply serve themselves up to you once you've properly set up the self-service program.

What's more, a bonus of self-serve advertising is that business owners don't have to worry about offering every inch of their ad space to self-service ads. Depending on what works for your company, you can create a combination of self-service advertising solutions, and using your ad sales team for larger and more complex solutions.

Despite the numerous success stories we hear from businesses using it, paid advertising continues to get shunned by many marketers and business owners. Some of the most common reasons ‘why’ include, “it’s too expensive”,or “we won’t have enough control over our campaigns”. 

The truth is online advertising has come a long way since the early days of human-based methods like phone calls, faxes andmanual insertion orders. The arrival of programmatic buying and real-time bidding has automated the buying process, placement and optimization of advertising, andput the power back in the hands of the advertiser.

DSP’s

Advertisers typically use demand-side platforms (DSP’s) to help them decide which ad impressions to buy, and for how much. For the uninitiated, a DSP is a piece of software used to purchase display, video, mobile and search ads, in an automated fashion. As more and more marketers recognize the benefits of programmatic, the number of DSP’s on the market is also increasing; leading marketers to wonder which platform they should choose. Our advice? ExactDrive of course!

This article was originally published by exploreB2B on 11/26.2014.

ExactDrive allows businesses to log onto a self serve advertising platform quickly and manage their entire campaign details from specific online targeting, to placement and inventory. ExactDrive announces its newest milestone of 1,000 worldwide user signups for its online self-serve advertising platform, aiming to give businesses an unprecedented tailored control of their online advertising campaigns.

I recently came across infogr.am, a website that turns creating interactive infographics into an easy task. With a feature set that gives you enough flexibilty to customize and an interface that makes it easy to understand the process, I decided to test it out, especially since ExactDrive will be releasing online advertising industry research reports moving forward, we needed to find an infographic creation software partner.