If you guessed by the name, you would probably think digital media buying refers to simply purchasing digital advertising. It refers to the entire marketing process leading up to and including the purchase of wholesale digital ads.
Media Buying as a Whole
Those who have hired a marketing firm before know that an immense amount of planning and strategy goes into the decision to purchase advertising. Placement decisions come after copious strategic planning, design, and testing.
Once you decide to place on specific media platforms, you buy wholesale multi-platform ad space. This gets you the biggest bang for your buck and allows you to saturate the market.
Digital Media Buying
When you see digital added to media buying, it refers only to digital channels such as Facebook ads and display advertising on commercial websites like The Balance. The goal of media buying is to identify and procure the appropriate ads space with the appropriate timing and context so reach your target audience and increase conversion rates. Your digital marketing team may also refer to these large-scale purchases as programmatic buying.
We take extra care in helping develop your marketing strategy and making the decision on where to purchase impressions. Here’s the process we use to earn your conversions.
- Pre-Launch Planning
Our process begins with analyzing your customer base. We get to know who they are. You might have developed your initial plan with one target audience in mind, but developed another spontaneously.
Big data collection and analysis tell us who your target audience truly is and helps us determine the most relevant choices for you. It also helps us determine audience segments by geolocation, demographics, and behavior. We determine the pattern each segment takes to purchase. This includes their typical haunts, shopping patterns, and whether they buy online. If they do, we determine where and using what device. This leads us to uncover the best starting points for reaching your advertising objectives. We determine for each segment if you need search engine ads, blog advertisements, website ads, or interstitial video ads, etc.
Next, we research your business competition and the media buying strategy they use. Analyzing their successful methods helps us reduce strategy time and determine what did and did not work for them.
- Designing Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The form your ad takes in part determines your reach. The type of ad you buy, for example, text or interstitial, determines who you reach and how well. Some common digital choices include:
- Pre-roll online video commercials
- Post-roll online video commercials
- Interstitial online video commercials
- Banner ads
- Text ads
- Mobile ads
- Digital radio ads
- Set Your Budget
Typically, your online media buying represents one portion of the total marketing budget. You will keep your public relations budget separate, but you need to determine how much of your advertising will go to digital. This is your paid traffic. This varies by business and your budget allocation depends on your target audience, your existing customer base, and how they view advertising. Set daily or monthly limits to your programmatic budget based on how long you want the ads to run.
- Making Media Choices
While when purchasing one-off ads or a small batch, you purchase at a set price determined by the media platform’s rates, such as the click-through rate, with programmatic or online media buying, you negotiate the price. We take care of this aspect for you as well by procuring discounts or bonuses from media vendors for you after conducting base cost comparisons of multiple publishers. We know the range of options within the demand-supply platform (DSP) providers and who offers the best platform fees and service costs with no hidden fees or additional, surprise charges.
- Setting Your Target Return on Investment (ROI)
Part of the strategy consists of setting your ROI goals also known as your key performance indicators (KPIs). That is plural because you will have a goal for clicks, conversions, completed sales, and mailing list registrations. Based on these goals, we estimate the expenditures for each day, month, or budget quarter. This lets us more effectively allocate your campaign budget.
- Test Phase Campaign Launch
Up to this point, our procedures dovetail with our competitors. Online media buying and its planning and execution have pretty set steps, but we go the extra mile at this point to ensure that your ad dollars stretch further and achieve greater results. We do what every major corporation has its Fifth Avenue advertising firms do with their massive accounts. We test your ads.
When you come to Bake More Pies for marketing help, we run small advertising experiments across dozens of potential marketing channels to learn which performs best for your needs and goals. This process generates low-risk insights that help us accelerate your business’ growth. Once we determine the top marketing resource for your ads, the absolute best channel, we buy that up and focus your ad dollars on it. We apply that to the full spectrum of digital marketing:
- Online media buying
- Email marketing
- Traditional media buying
- SEO/SEM
- PPC
- Local listings
- Launch Digital Advertising and Monitor
Once launched, our media buyers monitor the ads’ media delivery and campaign performance. We constantly analyze performance to drop what does not work and invest more heavily in what does. We also analyze to determine the best options vis a vis:
- Geo-Fencing
- Geo-Targeting
- Behavioral Targeting
- Social Advertising
- Content Marketing
- Retargeting
This monitoring process helps you extend the reach of your paid traffic campaign. That is because most people do not buy a product the first time they see your ad. You must retarget them consistently and monitor their reactions to your spots. For example, have you ever noticed on Facebook that the same display ad appears in your feed each time you visit? Perhaps it is for cat food. You might have wondered how Meow Mix knows you have a cat or thought maybe Facebook is just psychic.
Facebook gathers anonymized data about all of its users, then it lets advertisers customize their target audience based on this data. Meow Mix might choose to target men and women within a specific age range who own at least one cat, purchase from an online pet store, take their pet to the vet at least annually, and live in a specific state. You might live in that state and fit the rest of the description and Meow Mix chose to re-target users who did not click-thru and download a coupon. That means that even if you clicked through to their website, you would still see the ad if you did not download the coupon. Once you download it and use it, the ad goes away.
This is the power of cookies. You never see cookies when you navigate online, but they track your activity. A cookie helps track what posts you make and what you say in them. Facebook’s facial recognition recognizes your friends’ faces in your photos and it knows your cats, too. You do have the option of telling Facebook to not target ads, but you would lose a lot of savings opportunities like the coupon example. The cookies also tell the Facebook advertiser how you reacted to the ad – whether you viewed it, clicked on it, liked it, or shared it, etc. Now, before you growl at Facebook, every website does this. Even your sister‘s WordPress blog or your child’s elementary school uses cookies on its website to track information.
We take the cookie tracking and ad monitoring off your hands, too. We will re-target the right audiences so you can get more people through your sales funnel.
- Post-Campaign Analysis
Eventually, your campaign ends and we meet with you to strategize over the results concerning delivery, media space, ROI, customer engagement such as your click-through rate and overall performance. The power of those cookies is the statistics they provide. The user reaction to the campaign helps you plan future ad campaigns by identifying the strong and weak ad campaign points. We also examine how effective the media space worked for the campaign and whether the overall campaign achieved your KPIs.
Contact Us
Contact us today at Bake More Pies to learn how you can get started with a digital marketing strategy that can send more people through your sales funnel. You can make more sales and we can help you do it with the right ads on the perfect platform in the right number of impressions to re-target until you earn the conversion rate you need to grow your business.
