Effective Media Buying: Your Key to Smart Advertising

You may already know what paid and sponsored Ads can do for your brand. If not, the following statistics will paint you a happy picture.

Paid advertisements have a 200% ROI. They can increase brand awareness by a whopping 80%, and generate twice the number of visitors compared to SEO. It’s clear how important and influential paid Ads are for every brand’s marketing arsenal.

However, in today’s Ad-eats-Ad world, where viewers are bombarded with irrelevant Advertisements from left and right, how do you find a place for your brand? How do you ensure you’re getting the Ad impressions worth your marketing budget? That’s the real challenge and the chasm keeping your audience away from your products/services.

But the solution is just as simple: effective media buying. If you have mapped out a suitable strategy for buying Ad spots, you can get your brand in front of your target audience and get the conversations going.

Why Effective Media Buying Is So Important

Well, you may have guessed it already.

How else do you make sure your brand messages reach the right audience at the right time? Even if you have the most influential and persuasive creatives to put on display, they are null and void if your targeted audience doesn’t see them. But that’s not all.

You also have to stay on top of the market trends to identify and recommend emerging media opportunities for different campaigns. That’s the only way you can keep pace with your competitors.

With the right media buy, you can place and play your Ads to potential customers and boost conversions.

Besides, as technology for media, analytics, and Ads gets more advanced, you will have a host of opportunities and challenges to tackle with every campaign launch. So effective media buying becomes all the more crucial.

Now, the question is – how? How can you buy media to make the most of every dollar spent?

How to Get Your Advertising Right

Here are some actionable tips to make sure your media buys work favorably in your marketplace.

Understand your target audience intimately

This goes without saying. But before you launch any Ad campaign, you should know your audience like the back of your hand. Otherwise, you’ll just be shooting in the dark.

Learn everything you can about your audience’s behavior online. Where do they hang out? Which websites are they visiting? Where do they shop? At what time do they watch TV at home? Are they subscribed to a particular YouTube channel? Some of these questions will help you identify relevant media channels for Ad placements and get the bang for your buck.

After all, what’s the point of a highly persuasive Ad if your audience doesn’t see it? Or sees it at the wrong time? Intelligent media buying can save you from this heartbreak.

Competitive analysis will take you places

Remember the old age — keep your friends close, but enemies closer? That’s sound advice for competing in the advertising space. But only if you’re privy to quality competitive intelligence, and not useless information.

Use competitor data to take clues about what they are doing well. Ask questions such as:

Where is your competition advertising? Is it working?
Which media are they buying? And how?
What type of trends are they following?
What motivates them to spend in a specific vertical?
What type of audience are they targeting?

Once you answer the above questions, you’ll naturally know how to buy media and Ad spaces more effectively.

To excel at media buying, however, you need to follow in your competitor’s footsteps. You only need to do the job better: test more, experiment more, optimize faster, become the first one to identify trends, etc. And eventually, you’ll attract the traffic you desire.

Only pay for what you get

It doesn’t matter if you’re advertising on a big media channel or a small one. You can always negotiate the price. But for that, you’ll need to do some homework.

To begin with, know the average market price different publishers are charging for standard Ad placements. Take time to research the display sizes, Ads, devices, etc., that perform well on particular sites. You can also prioritize specific media channels where you don’t mind spending more to get a premium spot.

Based on your findings, develop a reasonable budget and strategy for media buying.

However, you may get the shorter end of the stick when negotiating price or placement. In such cases, it’s best to have a backup plan and additional options to see your intended plan through. The bottom line is to always have a plan A and a plan B.

Also, don’t hesitate to ask for any value-additions like extra placement time for a YouTube Ad. This way, you can make the most of your Ad spend and get some extra exposure.

Test once, optimize, then test once again

Last but not least, keep testing your Ad campaigns.

If you are putting your money on the line, you want to get the most from every penny spent. However, you cannot achieve this in a single go. The idea is to keep rolling out campaigns and testing to see what works and what doesn’t.

So once your Ads go live, you want to make sure the media delivery is playing out the way you initially planned. But if the results are contrary to your expectations, don’t despair. You can always learn from your mistakes and make the necessary changes.

Just keep tracking and tweaking the Ad content depending on how your audience responds, connects, and engages with it. Just focus on optimizing the creatives based on the metrics, and you’ll start to notice ROIs worth your time and money.

It Takes Time

Media buying is a highly intricate exchange. But if you can understand the ins and outs of different media formats and how they can serve your goals, the results will be favorable. However, effective media buying won’t get you the ROIs alone.

You must support every media buy with a sound digital marketing strategy and dedicated performance management to reap long-term benefits.

References

Effective Media Buying: Your Key to Smart Advertising

Suresh Thomas

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