Advertising is a key contributor to the success of your brand. In 2020, advertisers worldwide spent a combined total of $614.03 billion so that you would buy their products.
If you want to use your advertising dollars efficiently, the solution is strategic media buying. By carefully planning your campaigns with a media strategist, your investments will have a major impact on the success of your company. Don't let personal media habits influence the types of media you purchase.
Questions to Ask Your Media Agency
Working with a media agency means you’re working with the pros — usually. Before you hire a media broker, you should learn more about their process and discover if they are really the right fit for your brand. After that, evaluating numerous types of media and purchasing the best media placements will fall into place.
Here are a list of questions you should ask prospective media agencies about their buying practices:
- What are your media buying practices? How do you keep the process transparent?
- What anti-fraud measures do you take to protect my interests, my secure marketing data and my website? How do I know we’re not experiencing bot activity or fraudulent clicks?
- How will you analyze and optimize your strategies throughout my campaign? How do you manage new trends and threats?
- What metrics do you track during my campaign? How do you measure these results?
By understanding how your media agency plans to purchase media for your campaign and know how they plan to use it, you will feel more confident that you’re investing in the right media.
The Benefits of Media Planning
Prior media planning will help with your campaign strategies, creative process and determine the best ways to reach your ideal audience.
What can evaluating types of media and planning your media strategy help you accomplish?
- You’ll get to know your target audience better and learn how to reach them effectively through your advertisements.
- You’ll plan which channels are the best fit to share your message.
- You’ll determine the best timing and frequency to reach your audience based on research.
- You’ll learn more about the latest media trends and technology and decide if they’re right for your brand.
Evaluating Different Types of Media
Once you have a media plan in place, it’s time to evaluate the dizzying number of media types and media sources. How can you find objectively effective, high-caliber media sources?
- Create a list of the target demographics you want to reach with your brand messaging. You should consider gender, age, income, education levels, and marital and parental status.
- Study media kits to find the media outlets that will reach the most people in your target demographic. Examples can be radio, television, websites, billboards and publications. Consider quality kits over quantity — why pay for 100,000 impressions if only 5,000 of them fit your target demographic?
- Calculate the cost per thousand impressions. This doesn’t necessarily mean the cheapest option!
- Compare each potential medium and evaluate the big picture. Look at the total number of target customers, cost per thousand, total cost, gross impressions, cost based on your budget and the possible number of net impressions.
- Purchase a test run and see how your campaign worked. Then make adjustments as necessary. Use different coupon codes or discount offers for each campaign to track the effectiveness of each one and evaluate which advertising methods work the best.
How MBI Helps You Purchase the Right Media
Our mission at MBI is to connect you to the channels your brand will benefit from the most. Our media strategists specialize in a variety of media, and we collaborate to develop solutions that are tailored to your audience and your brand.
We partner with you to create a smart media approach where the impact for your brand exceeds your media investment.
How do we make this happen? Here’s our process:
- Client Discovery: We’ll work to figure out what makes your brand different as well as what makes your business tick. We’ll learn all about your objectives so we can customize our work to your company.
- Research and Development: Our media strategists pinpoint your target audience and conduct intensive research, so we have clear, specific and actionable buyer personas.
- Planning: Our media strategists seek out the most effective opportunities and the right combination of media that will make your objectives a reality.
- Price Negotiations: We work to maximize your advertising dollars, using the knowledge and connections of our entire team to obtain the lowest price for you.
- Analytics and Optimization: Once your campaign is live, we’ll follow through by evaluating your results and compiling actionable insights, so we can finetune the process.
- Reporting and Verification: We’re transparent with you. We’ll let you know what’s working — and what’s not — so we can make improvements. We’ll conduct air checks, share our reports and send our affidavits, so you know you’re getting exactly what you paid for.
The benefit of this process is that we’ve vetted media companies for you. We’re familiar with their media kits, and we’ll do the legwork for you to determine the best types of media to reach your audience. Perhaps this is the secret to why we have so many success stories; we will bring the full media department to you.
The easiest way to evaluate types of media when you’re purchasing media placements is to leave it to the professionals. Want to discover more about how we can turn your objectives into realities? Contact us today!