The Media Buying process is a set of strategic comprehensive multi-platform ad space purchases, negotiations, and arrangements focused at finding the most advantageous placement at the lowest price for the era. Here, in this article, we are going to discuss everything about Media Buying including what it is, how it works, and the benefits of media buying in digital marketing.
Media Buying comes under the paid media category and usually means the procurement of media space and time showing ad creatives. While buying media, the objective is to find the right place, time, and perspective to deliver the right ads to the target customer and increase conversion rate, brand awareness, and sales. Media buying is time-based, signifying that the buyer is paying for “renting” all the possible placements on all the possible platforms. So, they must be available for the timeslot when it is convenient for the advertiser to place an ad.
Steps in Media Buying in Advertising
Stage one: Pre-launching
Advertising decisions are not made immediately. In fact, the stage of meticulous preparation is the most time-consuming and demands in-depth research and careful planning. In the pre-launch stage, the media buyer considers and makes the right media choices. The focus is to make sure that the chosen media outlets align with marketing objectives.
Finding Target Customers and deciding how to reach them
First, get a clear picture of the present customers, and find out who they are. Distribute your audience into various segments like demographics, behavior, geolocation, and other groups to understand with whom you are buying. After understanding your audience, try to find the similarities and patterns to get an idea of the target audience or people who may like your products or services. After discovering the target group, think about the way using which they can reach those. Where do they go? How do they purchase? Do they purchase online or come directly to the shop? If you plan to do marketing online, then you must think about the different channels to reach potential clients like websites, search engine ads, social network platforms, and blog advertisements. Make sure you know all the platforms and devices that your target audiences use.
Research about competitors
Examine potential competitors and attain a feeling of their media buying strategy. Find where your competitors advertise, who do they target, what worked, and what did not work for them. Learning from the rivals’ experiences will save time and allow you to develop some marketing campaigns from the initial stage.
Design Media Buying Strategy
Choose advertising forms that correspond to your campaign objectives: print ads in magazines and newspapers; video commercials on television, movie theaters, outdoor billboards and indoor posters, text digital media and banner, mobile advertising, radio advertising, and so on. Media buyers may choose to focus on one channel or buy media from various media owners and advertise simultaneously on-line, through radio, and on TV. However, this might be a bit difficult- for every media channel, there must be a personal message that fits that channel. If media buyers prefer to do marketing online, they must understand how programmatic media works and the basics of real-time bidding.
Select Media Outlets and negotiate the price
Whether you cooperate with radio stations or newspaper publishers, it is significant to negotiate the price of the media before. Look for the best deals and ask for bonuses and discounts that media vendors are ready to offer. Compare offers from various publishers, and do not be scared to negotiate the pricing. If you purchase digital media, discuss with the demand-supply platform (DSP) provider about its service costs and fees, and ensure that there are no hidden charges. By setting the monthly or daily limits, adjust the programmatic budget.
Fix a budget and plan the campaign execution
After discovering precisely to whom to advertise, where, and how, it is time to get your hands on it. Fix a target return on investment. Allot a campaign budget as per the results you think to attain (conversions, sales, sign-ups, clicks, etc. Assess expenditures for a certain period, like a day, month, or a quarter budget. Think about how to distribute your marketing budget across different channels- online and offline. Plan each dollar you spend and do not forget to account for unexpected expenses.
Step Two: Campaign Launch
During the launch stage, the main responsibility of the media buyer is to ensure efficient media delivery and repeated monitoring of the campaign performance. At this stage, it is important to check what works and what does not, and depending on those insights, make decisions in the future.
Ensure Media Delivery
As a media buyer, you must ensure that the advertisement appears in the desired place, in front of the target customer, and in the right perspective. Ensure to deliver highly relevant messages that bring value to customers instead of irritation or disturbance. Track growth and customer engagement.
Respond to consumer behavior or competitor activities
Sometimes potential consumers do not interact with the ads as planned, and you do not receive the desired response including clicks, calls, sign-ups, and buys. In such a case, you must be ready to adapt and alter the strategy as per the customer feedback. Also, track the performance of your competitors, and always be cautious of the industry trends.
Attention! Do not be scared to adjust the settings media outlets or budget during the campaign. Fix deadlines for reassessment. Be ready to review periodically throughout the campaign and always re-evaluate the real plan and strategy. If you find that the results are not meeting your objectives, then be flexible and adapt fast.
Step Three: Post-Launch Reflections
The post-campaign stage is a period to reflect and think about the good, bad, and ugly of the advertising campaign in terms of media space, delivery, customer engagement, return on investment, and complete performance.
Evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign
Collect as much data as possible and check the statistics and granular reports to find the strong and weak points of the campaign. Evaluate the effectiveness of the media space and whether it generated any revenue that you expected. Check how the target audience interacted with the product and analyze consumer behavior. Calculate the return on investment and find out mistakes so that those can be avoided in future advertising campaigns.
Collect Data and draw understandings
When you have all the data, it is time to use all of them. In online marketing, data is used to create algorithms that help optimize marketing campaigns and offer better targeting. Data is the best friend of a marketer, so have a look at it cautiously. Aggregate the data and have a look for major as well as minor trends. Do not look at singular points, mainly when they change the way. Look for relationships among different variables or connection and dependence patterns that assist in understanding the logic. Ultimately, you must look at the data from various angles. Invite others to check the data and talk about your impressions.
Choose Digital Media
Advertising is much more than generating an attractive commercial or banner. A brand might create the most brilliant ad in the world, but it would be worthless if no one sees it. And you do not just require an old audience to see the ad; you require the people who are interested- your target audience- to see it.
Successful advertising does not depend on what is depicted and how, but also on the place where it is displayed and to whom it is directed. For this reason, media buying is incredibly significant. The location where the ad appears determines the result of the whole advertising campaign and either brings the advertiser desirable revenues or leave him without any money.
At the same point in time, the media buying procedure is time-consuming. Nobody wants to blow their whole marketing budget on something that does not bring any results. Thus, the success of the campaign mainly depends on the spot of ad exposure. While buying media, be clear about your aim, and choose the right channel for your advertising.
These days, more and more advertisers buy digital media as they know that their customers spend most of their time online. The internet is the place where your target customers hang out. Programmatic advertising lets you run highly targeted campaigns and reach audiences across channels and platforms.
Importance of Media Buying
Media buyers are on top of the latest trends in the industry. They have been around long enough to know what works and what are the things that do not work. With your business objectives in mind, they are, thus, able to get you the right path to follow. Their other leverage is their networks, which they have formed with time, which offers them confidence and buying power.
Cost-efficient. As media buyers bring a lot of business to their customers, they can negotiate better deals for you at a low price. Sometimes, they may even attain you a discount or bonus of more time in the media area.
Also, media buyers have the access to all the tools that they need to make the procedure a success.
How Does Media Buying Work?
Digital buying means the procedure of acquiring ad placements on websites, apps, and several other platforms.
Agencies use real-time bidding (RTB) to obtain the marketing space on the website of the publisher.
Real-time bidding lets web owners sell views, i.e. ad impressions. The latter is sold in real-time as it becomes accessible.
This has totally changed the purchasing and selling of display ads in the industry.
Different Components of Real-time Bidding
- Publisher- This is the website that a user visit. It can be anything like a food blog, a new website, or a publication like Facebook.
- If a publisher decides to add an ad space as an income, they add it to the inventory
- The Supply Side Platform (SSP)- It is designed to help publishers sell their inventory and handle them effectively.
- The Ad Exchange-This is a technological platform that lets the buying and selling of accessible ad impressions.
- The Demand-Side Platform- This is the area that displays ads that the publisher would love to apply on their site.
The Real-Time Bidding Procedure
It all starts when an online user visits the web application. The website of a publisher informs the SSP of the accessible impression which then calculates the user’s information, including location, web history, age, gender, and other information. The attained data is then forwarded to the ad exchange.
From here, the info of the user is relayed to the DSP which is utilized for media buying and location-based mobile marketing. The ad exchange then opens a bidding session, where the DSP bid is based on the price of the impression which is further based on the dimensions set by the promoter.
The highest bid is the winner. Then, it is sent to the publisher and displayed to the users.
This procedure goes on every time a user visits the page or refreshes a web page.
Benefits of Media Buying in Digital Marketing
It is a “Fair” price- One of the major benefits of media buying in digital marketing is the fact that the cost is “fair.” First, it is not a single price for everyone; a lot of metrics come into existence ensuring that your bid price for a click is just high enough so that it can
It beats the competition- One of the important benefits of media buying in digital marketing is it helps in beating the competition. If the main bidding price from your competitor is €0.50c per click, the only thing that you need to do is match €0.50c or more.
It considers what competition you are against- Various niches online have various competition values. This means that if you are focusing on a low competition keyword like “yoga shops in London”, this will be cheaper than simply targeting “yoga.”
Fortunately, there are several keywords that will have low competition value. All it needs is some keyword research.
Your score of ad quality will drive your cost decrease- A rightly optimized ad will affect your cost per click directly when doing ad buying, which means that if your ad performs well, the price will drop for you.
Even if your competition is bidding a high price compared to you, technically you can reserve the #1 spot.
A poorly optimized advertisement will increase your costs and you will not be ranking.
Highly targeted opportunities
Compared to the earlier popular advertising mediums like TV and radio, you cannot make an exact prediction of people to whom your prediction is shown. This is one of the major benefits of media buying in digital marketing. With media buying, you can create ads that can run very deep with targeting available.
You can track your metrics
Another awesome benefit of media buying is that we can track, to the accurate number, how many times an ad is seen, clicked on, and which are the ones that led to a conversion.
Again, this is opposite to doing advertisements on radio and television as you cannot measure the effect your ads have on your customer.
With media buying, we can see everything- and that is what makes it so useful.
Speed in application and adjustments
Media buying is quick and easy to set up. You can even edit, boost, or lessen your budget “on the fly” therefore ensuring that you are in total control of your ads, your spending per click, your budget, and even your ROI on ad investment.
With just a few minutes of proper planning, we can develop highly targeted ads focused on highly targeted customers and then adjust in real-time the findings and continue moving forward with a campaign.