Effective media buying goes far beyond the actual transaction of money for ad space. Media buying teams can create impactful relationships with media owners that result in greater reach with less investment. This enables marketing teams to increase conversions and demonstrate high ROI to clients and stakeholders.
As with all marketing initiatives, investing in experienced media buying teams and processes means demonstrating value. To do this, media buying teams need analytical capabilities that allow them to attribute conversions and KPIs back to a specific ad. They also need access to real-time metrics in order to make in-campaign updates to ads that are underperforming. The top challenges when it comes to media buying are:
Media buying is highly nuanced, with a lot of pressure placed on acquiring the optimal ad placement for customer experience and conversion. By staying abreast of top media buying strategies and negotiation tactics, media teams can better optimize spend and strategy.
Successful media buying is all about getting optimum output for your financial input and balancing this relationship will hinge on your negotiation skills. Further complicating the matter will be the number of parties involved, potentially from different factions of the media, but also within the same disciplines.
Data is probably the most important tool in your arsenal of negotiation tactics and strategies. While everyone can make the mistake of overspending on a media placement once, those who track media performance can react and correct their missteps rather quickly. Armed with data insights and measurable ROI, data-driven media buyers have easier time renegotiating their rates and value-adds. Better still, tracking ad performance allows media buyers to spot and seize advertising opportunities that would otherwise be dismissed as too risky or unproven.
Automatic bidding, otherwise known as the ad programmatic digital media buying process, is an automated process of buying and selling ad space. If done in real-time, it is known as real-time bidding (RTB).
A general rule of thumb in media buying is that a professional will make their first bid lower than their target price. It opens the floor up for negotiation and may lead to leftover money in the budget.
Zero-sum negotiations happen when one or both parties cannot compromise on an agreement. It is not a great negotiation style as it can ruin the ongoing relationship with a media buyer and vendor.
The goal of programmatic digital display advertising and all other media buying tactics is to move potential customers through the funnel. Think about the decision/purchase you want them to make. Refer back to your objectives and goals if needed.
SEO is an important media buying tactic because consumers rely heavily on the internet. This technique allows a brand to increase its site position on search engine result pages, the most popular being Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Even though a media planner may deem it necessary to allocate most of the budget to digital marketing tactics, traditional media buying should not be overlooked. TV and radio are still major buying channels.
With an experienced marketer, you can reap all of the benefits and avoid the major challenges that stem from media buying. There are also media buying and planning courses available, especially for beginners.
Note: My experience with media buyers is primarily with trade publications (as is typical with most specialized high-tech products). If a campaign is comprehensive (using trade pubs, consumer press, business press, billboards, add words, television, and radio (especially in multiple markets that must use the top stations in hundreds of markets)), then you should not try to do this yourself, unless you have a trained and certified media in-house buyer who has the resources and know-how to do the necessary research. However, this also applies to finding a properly trained and certified external media buyer (within a media buying or advertising agency).
Although this example is for print ads, many of the negotiation points apply to other media buys. If you do not have an ad agency or a media buying service, and you have a relatively straight-forward trade publication campaign, you will need to know how to negotiate your media placements. Even if you do let someone else negotiate your media buying, you should still know the process and how much you should typically be paying, if anything, so you can estimate for your budgets.
To say that media buying and planning has changed in the past 20 years is an understatement. Technology has changed this essential aspect of advertising and marketing strategy as much as it has the way we shop, work and connect with others.
While media buying has always been integrated across available channels, today the process is integrated across practices into activities that used to be considered separate. Technology has intertwined social media, blogging, PR, communications and branding such that media planning and buying must take all of them into consideration. It has also enabled targeted messaging to custom audiences at a deeper level than in the past.
As you follow up on leads and activate your sales team to close those leads into new customers, media buying and planning can help to keep your brand top of mind. Tactics that deliver value to the customer and educate them on what differentiates your brand will prove to be most successful during this stage. Those tactics may include:
Not every agency is skilled in performing effective media placements in both traditional and digital media. Thankfully, our media buying team has more than three decades of experience executing successful media buying strategy and placements.
All of our marketing services, including social media management and search engine marketing are handled in-house, which is something you want to look for should you decide to engage the services of a firm to help you with your media buying planning and digital media strategy.
All media buying efforts should be focused on increasing your conversion rate and decreasing your cost per conversion. Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely) goals at the start of your campaign to serve as benchmarks for your media buying strategy and to guide the implementation of your tactics.
Paid search campaigns generate the highest click-through rates of any digital marketing tactic, so it only makes sense to include PPC advertising as part of your media buying and planning process. A successful PPC campaign follows a three-step process:
Once your placements are made and your campaign is in full swing, your work is not done. In addition to honing your campaign efforts and making any necessary adjustments, you want to evaluate all of your media invoices and cross-check them against insertion orders to make sure you received everything you were promised during media buying negotiation.
Whether you are a novice that knows nothing about media buying or a business that wants to sharpen its skills in this department, this guide will help you get your media buying strategy on the right track. Here we will take 9 essential steps toward a complete understanding of the media buying process, software, and better campaign optimization.
Essentially, media buying involves purchasing a share of offline or digital media space and time to run advertisements and then monitoring how the ad is doing and making adjustments as needed to optimize the ad's performance. This involves judicious strategizing and negotiating to make the most of the brand's ad budget.
The main objective of both offline and digital media buying is to get a brand's ad creatives out before its target audiences in the right ad formats, at the right times, and in the proper contexts to have a successful campaign.
The media buying process starts from defining a goal that you want to achieve with it. This can be more page views, better conversion rates, and, as the result, more closed leads. Once you know why and for what you may need media buying, you go through the following stages:
What is programmatic media buying, you ask? It uses automated algorithms to optimize media buys on platforms called demand-side platforms and focuses on the ad ad relevance to the audience rather than on where media should be placed.
In programmatic media buying, ad buyers and publishers buy and sell digital ads using automation and this is done through demand-side platforms. Publishers, from their site, use a supply-side platform to list their ads on the ad exchanges. This is how the programmatic media buying process occurs:
As the name suggests, managed service means the media buying campaign is fully managed by a third-party agency that helps launch it. It is obvious managed service leads to decreased transparency, control over money, and efficiencies.
Some of the tactics they use to accomplish this include PPC campaign launch ad platforms such as AdWords, programmatic media buys to find the right ad space for the right consumer profile, and direct buys with specific advertisers.
 38c6e68cf9