There’s nothing straightforward about launching a marketing campaign. This process often involves deciding on endless different factors with a lot of room for error. For instance, you have to decide on campaign type, placement, targeting, budget, objective, platform, and more.
One of the best ways to effectively tackle all of these different factors is to employ a media buying strategy alongside trained professionals.
What Is Media Buying?
Media buying is part of the advertising process wherein a company purchases a share of media from an outside channel or platform. The overall goal of the media buying process is to get you the best advertising results possible — whether you’re looking for impressions, conversions, or clicks. A common misconception about media buying is that you need to spend a lot of money in order to be successful.
However, employing a strategic media buying process helps you spend your money wisely and with purpose so that you can achieve the results you desire. Obviously, success in this area is easier said than done, but it’s possible with the right amount of research, effort, and expertise.
What Are the 5 Steps in the Media Buying Process?
You need to take a calculated approach to media buying by following five steps: strategizing, campaign creation, negotiation and buying, campaign launch, and optimizing and scaling. Let’s explore each step in greater detail:
Step 1: Strategizing
The first step in the media buying process involves strategizing. For your media buying initiative to be successful, you cannot randomly run a bunch of different ads in a bunch of different places without a second thought. Instead, you need to be highly strategic with your content and your placements.
After all, you’re likely spending a pretty penny on your media buying. Don’t you want to get the best bang for your buck? You should determine your budget during this stage and think about what types of ads and placements you’d be able to achieve with this budget.
You should also determine your overall goals. Are you a new company that’s trying to establish brand awareness? Do you have a great new product that you’re trying to promote? Or are you trying to increase your conversion rates through tactics like retargeting?
The answers to these questions and others will help you come up with a basic media buying strategy that will guide you through the subsequent steps.
Step 2: Campaign Creation
Now that you have a better idea of what you’re trying to achieve through media buying and the budget you’re working with, it’s time to start delving into your actual campaigns. There’s no limit to the directions that you can take here. For instance, you can go with a video advertising campaign on Facebook. You can go with a filter advertising campaign on Snapchat. If you’re looking for a more traditional approach outside social media, you can go with a billboard campaign.
None of these options are inherently “better” than the others. Instead, you need to consider what your goals are and who your audience is when creating your campaigns. A brand awareness campaign would look quite different from a conversion campaign. Furthermore, an Instagram campaign that targets younger Generation Z or Millennials would look quite different from a Facebook campaign that targets Baby Boomers.
Step 3: Negotiation and Buying
Once you know what your campaign will actually look like, it’s time to move on to the negotiation and buying process. You will likely receive different rates based on timing, location, position, etc. You will need to compare these rates with your budget to achieve the best placements.
In terms of social media and online advertising, the buying process is automated, and you simply set your bids and let the system do the rest of the work. As a result, there’s not much room for negotiation. However, if you’re advertising in other areas and are dealing with actual humans rather than a computer, there may be some room for negotiation.
In any case, make sure that your placements and content make sense for your budget, customers, and advertising goals before you actually complete the purchase.
Step 4: Campaign Launch
Finally, it’s time to launch your campaign. This is where the fun really begins as people are actually seeing the content you’ve been spending so much time on. However, the work doesn’t end when the campaign launches — instead, you need to constantly monitor the results of the campaign to ensure that it’s having its desired effect.
Step 5: Optimizing and Scaling
Even though you’ve put in a ton of work on the front end to ensure a successful advertising campaign, you could still run into issues after launch. For instance, maybe you aren’t targeting the right people or maybe your content isn’t running at the right time. These issues don’t have to be a big deal so long as you recognize them and take the appropriate action.
Having to fine-tune a campaign for the best results is inevitable. Once you learn more about what goes into a successful campaign for your brand, you can continue to scale your content and achieve even better results.
Why You Should Prioritize Strategic Media Buying?
Clearly, a lot of time and effort goes into the media buying process. Is it all worth it? We wholeheartedly believe that prioritizing strategic media buying can help you achieve the best possible results for your business. But don’t just take our word for it; here are some of the reasons why your business should prioritize strategic media buying:
- Maximize your budget: The media buying process allows you to get the best deals and truly maximize your budget. Media buying experts are well-versed in what campaigns should cost and are able to negotiate appropriately. Media buying experts may also maintain industry connections to use for a more favorable negotiation process.
- Improve your placements: The media buying process allows you to improve your campaign placements so that you get the most impressions and click-throughs. Media buyers know what the best placement slots are, and they also know when to avoid certain slots due to events, holidays, etc.
- Boost efficiency: Using media buying experts allows you to boost efficiency. Instead of spending all your time doing painstaking research and making adjustments along the way for inexperience, you can get quick and effective results the first time around. From there, you’re able to focus your time and effort on ventures that are better suited for your unique skill set.
The Rundown on Media Buying
As you can see, there’s a ton of value in working with media buying experts. So before you feel like you have to increase your media budget in order to get the results you’ve been looking for, you should consider keeping your budget the same but consulting with professionals. These highly-trained experts are able to get you the best bang for your buck.
When it comes to media buying experts, there’s none better than Greg Gillman. Greg Gillman specializes in omnichannel growth strategies for direct-to-consumer brands. He has worked with his clients to help them generate more than $4 billion in annual revenue. Although he has worked with big brands like Adidas, Petco, Ring, and Theragun, he’s well-versed in the challenges facing small businesses and is able to help you overcome these challenges.
Sources:
Media Buy Definition – Marketing Essentials | Investopedia
The Importance of Brand Awareness | Small Business Chron
13 Ways to Create an Effective Marketing Campaign on a Tight Budget | Forbes
