How to Plan a Successful Media Buying Strategy

Once you have a marketing and advertising campaign ready to go out into the wild, where do you go next? What’s your media buying strategy? Will you go with traditional or digital media? Your strategy should already include your goals, campaign specifications and which media channels (TV, billboard, radio, etc.) will work best to meet that. Your next step is vendor coordination.

Plan Your Budget

Often, what seems most confusing in a media buy is coordinating all the offers each vendor presents to you. Do they meet your needs for the campaign? Are the cost-effective to your budget? For each channel, you need to asses exactly what they will be offering you and how closely their offerings match up to your goals. You may find that one vendor suites all your needs – or a host of vendors fill different gaps in your strategy. Once selected, though, more decisions arise.

Ask Vendors Lots of Questions

For each media vendor you select, you must then:

• Negotiate: You must work with the vendor to find what spaces you will receive and aligning your budget with optimal slots.
• Artwork & Media: Once you have your slots, you need to finalize your campaign media. Each video, graphic or other media item needs to fit the corresponding sizes each vendor requires for their slots.
• Production: Your completed artwork should be then produced into actual creatives (videos, billboard posters, etc.).
• Project Operations Management: Final creatives should be dispersed to different vendors and each should have clear specifications of format, posting instructions, dates, times and other vital information. Ensure you give enough time for production to mature into display – while digital advertising may work out more quickly, billboard coordination requires more physical action that could take longer.
• Proofs of posting: Be patient, your proof of postings from vendors can take time to return to you. Consistently and politely follow up with vendors.
• Correction of any errors: If the media postings that you requested are not correctly done, you will need to fight for some sort of resolution with your vendors.

Understanding media placement strategies, as well as developing creative ads, are essential to ensuring high frequency with your media buys. The process can be daunting. In addition to the steps above, you’ll be considering:

• How do we track results?
• Should we use custom URLs?
• Do we need a vanity number?
• Should we integrate our traditional and digital campaigns?
• Will this meet our overall business goals?

If this seems to much for your business now – never fear! There are myriad of options online to help you get started. Whether you need to talk to a vanity number expert or coordinate your digital integrations, there are experts out there to help you.