Social Media & Marketing

What is Media Buying and Why is It So Relevant to Successful Marketing Today?

Successful Marketing

Media buying is one of the most essential steps for running optimized marketing campaigns. If you have a business that you wish to promote, it’s necessary for you to know what buying media means in modern marketing and how it can help your campaign succeed. This post will cover the information business owners need to be properly introduced to media buying.

What is Media Buying?

In marketing, media buys refer to the purchasing of advertising/marketing spots on one or more relevant media channels across broadcast television, movies, radio, newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, search engines, and social media sites to name a few. The media channels and the advertising spots are chosen based on their relevance to the marketing campaign’s target audience.

What are the Different Types of Media Buying?

There are three primary types in which media buying processes can be divided based on mode of operation.

  1. Direct Media Buying – Direct media buying is when a brand or their marketer directly interacts with their choice of media channels and buys advertising spots from them after negotiation.
  2. Ad Space Bidding – Bidding for relevant and popular ad spaces on media channels via an online ad platform.
  3. Automated Media Buying – Smart marketing software is used to automatically identify, bid, and even buy the best media spots for a specific campaign.

Experienced marketing agencies will generally use all three as needed to create and then optimize the best media buying strategy possible for the respective client.

What is Budget Optimization in Media Buying?

Smaller companies have small marketing budgets, while larger companies have large marketing budgets. It’s a media buying expert’s job to plan and strategize in such a way that their client’s media buying budget is best utilized in extracting the maximum return on investment from it. Whether you have a thousand or ten thousand dollars to spend on buying media for a specific campaign, partnering with an expert like Growth Foundry will ensure that money is invested in buying media spots that are the most relevant and potent for reaching your target audience.

An optimized media buying budget will always deliver the best possible returns from the chosen media channels and spots, but that ROI will be in proportion to the amount invested. Higher budgets can yield significantly better results if we are comparing two well optimized budgets under similar circumstances. On the other hand, a lower, but fully optimized media buying budget will deliver better returns than a much larger media buying budget that’s being used generically, without a multifaceted analyzed plan.

What is the Role of Negotiations in Media Buys?

There may not be any need or scope for negotiations when it comes to small-scale media campaigns. Marketers generally automate the media buying processes when dealing with fixed pricing. However, negotiations do play a huge role in budget optimization for large scale media marketing campaigns.

After a media buying strategy has been properly planned, simulated, and finalized between the marketer and the brand, it’s time to put that plan into execution. This is when the negotiations start between the media channels of choice and the marketer/brand. From the brand’s and the marketer’s perspective, the goal is to purchase the chosen media spots at the lowest price possible.

The results will vary widely depending on multiple factors such as who is negotiating with whom, relevant business connections, ad content, popularity of the desired media spots, length of the campaign, and more. If a negotiation does not work out and the marketer believes the asking price is much higher than what the budget permits, one or both of the following will happen.

  1. The marketer will consult with their client to discuss a budget boost, but only if they consider the media company’s final price to be worth it.
  2. The marketer will find another media partner to suit their client’s media buying budget.

Why is Media Buying So Important for Successful Marketing Campaigns?

As things are right now, media buying as a whole is absolutely essential for every brand across all spheres of marketing because it enables them to reach a wider range of relevant audience than anything else. To better explain the idea, let’s go back to the early days of modern marketing. How did companies reach their audience and brand themselves back in the old days? They ran ad campaigns through magazines, newspapers, radio channels, and TV channels primarily.

Massive budgets were invested in buying the most popular newspaper, TV, and radio spots because each of those media outlets allowed their brands and products to reach a much wider range of potential customers than any offline ad campaign ever could.

Media marketing soon became the default priority for all successful brands in general because the returns were considerably higher in comparison to offline marketing, even in the early days of media marketing. Today, however, media buying has become a much more accessible option for even small business, thanks to the internet.

Which are the Most Important Media Buying Outlets Today?

Not much has changed even today, but that’s only as far as the importance of media marketing is concerned. Everything else from the media marketing channels to the ads themselves have changed drastically since then. For example, social media, web content, and search engine optimization (SEO) are the three most important medium to consider while devising almost any media buying strategy these days.

That is not to say that legacy media ads do not have their place as well, because they certainly do. The difference is that they are no longer on the priority list for a majority of the business world today. The fact is that the internet in general is by far the leading media marketing outlet today.

Over 63% of all ad and marketing expenditure was spent on digital marketing in 2022 (US). Over 90% of all operating businesses in the US have an active digital content marketing strategy running via internet media outlets. Down the line, media outlets related to the internet will only become even more relevant for media buyers.

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