What Is Media Buying?
Media buying implies securing media space at the lowest price for a period of time to run ads. It also involves keeping track of the performance of ads and optimizing the strategy as required. The key here is to strategize and negotiate to make the best out of the advertising budget. The person who is responsible to practice media buying is the media buyer. All in all, a media buyer is a person whose job is to communicate your message to the right target audience.
Process of Media Buying
1. Working On Blueprint
Although the major chunk of strategizing goes under media planning, media buying strategy is instrumental for the success of the campaigns. It involves deciding the best direction in order to deliver the desired results. They determine the general mix of media types before taking proper steps.
2. Choosing Media Outlets
As soon as media buyers are done with strategizing, this is the step where they put their planning into action. Now, they’d be required to decide the various platforms they’d like to advertise on, like – digital, print, radio, television, etc. Post this, a proposal will be sent to the respective media outlets.
3. Making The Best Deal
After putting forth the proposal, it’s time for media buyers to put their negotiation skills to practice. Although most of this process is automated, it’s imperative for media buyers to make informed and strategic decisions and not rely completely on the automated process.
4. Launch Campaign & Optimize
Now, it’s time to launch the campaign, this is when your ads will appear on various inventories that were bought by the media buyer. Remember this is not the end. It’s crucial to keep track of the performance and monitor the results. Recognizing the issues at the initial stage and looking for solutions to make it work as desired is crucial.
What is Media Planning?
Media planning on the other hand is a primary step towards successful media buying. It sets the pathway to proceed with the entire process of media buying. Right from deciding the budget to positioning, competitive research, goals, and objectives, media planning covers everything. It also helps in anticipating consumer motivations that may affect the campaign. For a media campaign to work efficiently, both media planning and buying should be used optimally.
Process Of Media Planning
1. Researching
As the name suggests, media planning primarily revolves around a whole lot of research about the target audience. Sometimes companies do have all this data stored, but if not, they need to gather this data on their own. This makes the base of the whole process.
2. Setting Reasonable Goals
After undertaking comprehensive market research, a media planner will go on setting reasonable goals for the campaign. This means, clearly stating what the campaign aims to achieve. It’s important to not set unrealistic goals, the more specific the goals are, the more it’d be easier to set a direction to achieve it.
3. Working Inline With Budget
Budget is a crucial element of the whole process. A media planner must plan things out by adhering to the allotted budget for the campaign. The right budget should be something that the company can bear and at the same time is appropriate to launch the campaign successfully.
4. Monitoring & Optimizing
Although the plan is put to action and media buyers are responsible to track the performance of the campaign, planners too can contribute and help them in putting forth strategies to optimize the campaign as and when needed.
Why Should You Work With a Professional Media Buyer?
1. Expert in Leveraging Analytics
In order to launch successful media campaigns, it’s important to have a firm grasp of statistics. A media buyer is a person who is quick to analyze the performance, comprehend the reports, and thereby suggest some corrective measures based on the same.
2. Skilled At Negotiations
Negotiating for a great deal in media buying can sure look intimidating even if you’re confident. Media buyers spend years fabricating relationships with various publishers and since they buy inventories in bulk, unlike individual advertisers, they possess a greater negotiating power comparatively.
3. Thoroughly Aware About The Placement & Timing
In the advertising world, being in the right place at the right time is of uppermost importance. Media buyers are well aware of the mechanism and understand the uniqueness of each advertising channel with reference to your target audience. They determine the right channel and the placement strategy professionally.
4. Access To Knowledge & Experience
Although you can probably take care of your media buying activities yourself, working with a professional media buyer gives you access to his extensive expertise and along with that contacts which might be beneficial for your business. It helps your campaigns have a proper execution and increases the chances of conversion.
Bottom line: Media buying is certainly not a process that can be overlooked in today’s advertising world and it cannot be undertaken just for the sake of it since it involves a lot of money. It involves a great deal of data-driven decisions, constant look on the performance, timely optimization, awareness about the ever-changing technologies and so much more. But most importantly, it involves a clear and concrete strategy that can be relied upon to launch a successful campaign.
A media buyer is a person who breathes media and is aware of the nuances of the industry. Hence, to implement a successful advertising campaign, it should be well-planned at first. At ZKraft, we believe in professionalism, so we constantly work with a team of highly skilled media buyers. If you’re looking for media buying solutions for your brand, let us know. We love to help business owners make the best out of every dollar spent on advertising efforts.
