5-Step Guide to Your Media Buying Journey

So you have an advertisement, but how can you make sure you’re showing it to the right people? Exactly, you use media buy. With the right advertising strategies, your advertisement for the new smartphone won’t be shown to grandma who’s used the same phone for the last 50 years, or your advertisement for arthritis medication won’t be shown to little Jimmy next door who’d just learnt to read. You probably have some knowledge in media planning and buying, here you can also learn how to build your media buying plan.

Summary of these 5 Steps to guide you to your media buying journey 

• Step 1: Identify  your target audience and the media to reach them
• Step 2: Plan out your media strategies to set your objectives
• Step 3: Plan out your budget
• Step 4: Launch your media campaign
• Step 5: Monitor and optimize result 

What is Media Buying?

Simply put, media buying is purchasing a media space to show the message of your business or campaign to the audience you are targeting, with the objective of effective advertising. There are some jargons or abbreviations commonly used in the field for media buy which you might come across frequently.

CPM: Cost Per Thousand. The “M” here means a thousand in Latin numbers. CPM is the cost of the advertisement for each 1000 impressions served, basically how much you should pay for every 1000 views you have on your ad. 

CPC: Cost Per Click. Like CPM, CPC is also a means of measuring how much an advertising should pay for their advertisement. However, CPC only charges upon each click received on the advertisement.

CPL: Cost Per Lead. This refers to the cost for each potential customer the advertisement receives. A potential customer is counted when someone completes a lead form and submits it. 

CTR: Click Through Rate. The percentage of people who clicks a specific link on the advertisement directed to a website among the total number of views on that advertisement. This is used to measure the success rate of the advertisement.

Impression: This term made a small appearance in the explanation of the term “CPM”. It is counted every time the advertisement appears on the screen of the user, regardless of whether the user interacts with it or not. 

Programmatic Media Buying: Unlike direct media buying, programmatic media buying utilises algorithms to analyse data and optimise the data such as the cost for placing an advertisement and the impression on different platforms. 

DSP: Demand-Side Platform. It is a platform that allows you to buy different ad spaces according to your targeted audience through auctions. Using DSP essentially focuses more on whether the advertisement can target the specific audience than purchasing the ad space itself.

How Does Media Buying Work? 5 Steps to Follow

Before you reach the last step to media purchase, a lot of work for media planning in advertising is required to ensure your advertisement is the most effective. As the title suggests, we have a 5-step guide on media planning and buying for you to follow along easily.

Step 1: Identify  Your Target Audience and the Media to Reach Them

The bottom line of media buying is to show your advertisement to the right people with the least advertising cost. Therefore, the first step must be identifying what your ‘right people’ is before you can proceed in your media buying plan. Determine what age, gender, interests, or geographical location your target audience according to what you want to advertise to them. After you have decided who you want to advertise to, determine which type of media is the best choice to your target audience. From a 2020 Key Findings Report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 81% of people of age 55 or above read the news on TV while 90% of people under the age of 35 read it online, including social media. This reflects the media different age groups use. So, if you want to advertise to a more mature audience you can choose TV advertisements.

Step 2: Plan out Your Media Strategies to Set Your Objectives

Plan out your media strategies to set your objectives. Now that you know which direction your media buy should head towards, you can set some objectives by planning out advertising strategies that are suitable for you so that once you have launched your media campaign, you know what areas to pay attention to. Mark down what you expect to achieve with the media purchase campaign. Don’t know what advertising strategies there are? Don’t worry, here are some common media strategies for media planning in advertising you can reference.

• SWOT Analysis: Analyse the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of your advertising campaign so you can determine how to improve your product.
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP): As the name suggests, it is having something unique about your product which gives you an edge in competition. 
• SMART Goals: While setting the objectives of your campaign, make sure the objectives are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based so that it will be easier for your team to stay grounded and follow the advertising plan. 

Step 3: Plan out Your Budget

This is the time for you to decide how much money you want to put into your media campaign, after all, media purchase is to let you advertise most effectively with the least amount of money. Set a realistic goal on how you expect your campaign to perform and the revenue it would produce. Judging from your expectations, find out what is the minimum cost you need to achieve such goals. Determine the upper limit you will spend on the campaign as well to prevent overspending.

Step 4: Launch your media campaign

After all that media planning in advertising, you can finally launch your media buy campaign. If you are going for traditional media purchase, you will have to locate agents to negotiate your prices and you will place the purchase directly with the salesperson. For programmatic media buy, you could use websites and insert your budget and target audience. It will go through real-time bidding for you to purchase advertisement spaces for you. Your advertisement will start appearing to your target audience at the advertisement spaces you bought after you have launched your campaign. 

Step 5: Monitor and optimize result

This last step for media planning in advertising is all about fine tuning and trial and error. Compare the results you have and the objectives you have set earlier and see if it meets your expectation. Use the advertising strategies you have planned out and determine what you should improve, if you have programmatic media buying, you could immediately be able to tweak your media purchase campaign so you could immediately optimize your media buy. After you do make changes, remember to monitor the result afterwards to establish whether your optimization was successful or not. Keep monitoring and optimizing the result to obtain the most effective media buy. 

Insider tips on Media Buy

After talking briefly about media planning and buying, here are some tips for media buying for you to make the best out of your media purchase campaign.

1. Avoid ad frauds. It is not uncommon for some websites to create bots to generate clicks or create more interaction with the advertisements to gain more money in publishing your advertisement. Although this is a risk to take for using advertising marketing, you can still choose some more reputable websites while making your media purchase such as Google Ads. You can screen the advertisement spaces you will purchase before paying to ensure there is not ad frauds as well.
2. Track your traffic. Analyse the trends and the relevance of your product to determine your advertising strategies. You could learn about the information from the source of traffic to help you optimize your campaign. However, since there are multiple traffic sources, it is important to track your traffic so as not to mix them up. Some people would suggest using traffic-tracking programmes to help you with it.
3. Be more user friendly. Media buy advertises to specific audiences, so you need to know them better than they know themselves. Consider the medium they will view your advertisement on and make your advertisement more user friendly. Make it easy for your audience to read your ad so they would subconsciously feel more comfortable with your campaign or product.

Source: https://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2020/overview-key-findings-2020/