Purchasing media and ads is an important part of marketing. It is crucial to any marketing campaign that you have a strategy in place to determine your buying plan. A major part of marketing is ensuring that the right message gets to the right demographic at the right time, and proper media buying is key to that.
One twist on this old problem is that in the modern era of marketing, there are multiple new forms of media that are competing for your money. Online marketing can take the form of a simple ad in a banner or an interstitial ad, but social media complicates the matter further. Social media ads offer the opportunity to reach a specific and targeted group of people, but there is no guarantee that they will engage with the message. Furthermore, using search ads and social media ads reflect two different approaches. Search ads target people based on what they need. So a search ad could target people looking for products similar to what your brand can offer. On the other hand, a social media ad targets people based on who they are. You don’t know that they need the brand’s services, but by showing them the ad, you show them how the brand might be able to add value for them.
That is only one part of the issues involved with media buying. It involves making many different choices about the channel, time, and length of the ad. Making wrong choices for any of those decisions can make your message far less effective. It makes a big difference- missing your target audience will mean that you have wasted your time and effort. You might reach some of them accidentally, or the people that you do reach might decide to make a purchase, but if your product is targeted correctly, there will be one distinct audience that can benefit most from it. If you fail to make them aware of your brand and its value, then you can’t expect them to buy.
Doing media buying correctly takes a major time investment so that you can learn where to place your message where it will make the biggest impact. This isn’t easy- there are a lot of factors that can affect the best time and space to locate a message, and especially now with so many different options for digital marketing, there is a lot to learn before you can make an informed decision.
That all adds up to mean that marketers need to set aside a lot of time, energy, and resources for media buying. It is a big part of a well-organized media campaign, not just a last-minute logistical consideration. That also means that a marketing team that has not put time and effort into planning out media buying is going to be in trouble when it comes time to make those purchases. They will need to spend more money and time on researching and purchasing the right time slot than a team that is well-prepared.
On top of that, media buying for a campaign that is meant to stretch across multiple channels is even more complicated. The different elements all need to align for the campaign to reach its full potential, and that means coordination among the whole team to ensure that they are all on the same page. The additional layer of complexity makes it harder to plan media buys, but the potential payoff is also correspondingly larger- the brand will benefit from exposure across multiple channels and overlapping audiences.
It should be clear to you by now that media buying is both difficult and important. Getting it right is a major challenge, but also crucial to the success of a marketing campaign. One possible solution is to hand it off to an external agency that can handle the whole process for you. That’s where we come in. DotCom Web Design is an experienced and acclaimed marketing firm with a full array of services. We are equipped to provide guidance on many different parts of the marketing process for a brand, including media buying. We have worked with enough different brands to understand what works, what’s important, and how to get it all done on time and within budget. That means a lot in this industry. Being able to hand off the media buying duties to someone you know you can trust will give you more time to work on the part that matters most to you- crafting your message. On the other hand, taking on strategic marketing tasks is our passion. We love being able to see just how much our efforts have contributed to your campaign’s success. And we do take that seriously- we believe that marketing has the most value when it is directly connected to the business’s bottom line. It is hard to appreciate the payoff from a marketing effort on its own, but in the context of seeing better metrics for the business like revenue and sales, it’s much easier to feel reassured that all that work paid off.
That is what we are all about- helping you see a definite change in the brand’s performance as a direct result of our intervention. It doesn’t need to be media buying- we are a full-stack firm with a lot of different skills in our wheelhouse. Just take a look at our website and see all that we have to offer.