The average person spends nearly 3 ½ hours online every day, likely seeing dozens and dozens of advertisements in the process.

Whether they remember them is another story.

With a successful media buying campaign, companies position themselves to get the exact attention they’re looking for. 

Working with a top-rated media buying agency, your brand message reaches the right audiences fast, broadening your consumer reach in an instant.

The digital space is a jungle. With a streamlined media buying process and optimized strategy, your advertising campaign can be king.

Media Buying Objectives 

The first step to a successful and seamless media buying process is being on the same page about objectives, first and foremost getting your messaging to your target audiences in just the right formats, in the proper context, and at the correct times.

Successful media buying is measured by a company’s overall goals. Those may include rising overall brand awareness, maximizing search engine optimization integration, or retargeting certain advertisements.

There are several different ways to approach media buying. Direct media buying means buying advertisements directly for placement with a specific publisher or on a certain channel.

The network approach means bidding on and purchasing specific advertising space through supply-side or demand-side platforms. The programmatic approach is buying and selling digital advertising through technology utilization. 

A successful media buying experience begins with defining and being on the same page about top goals. Then the process can begin.

It Starts with a Basic Strategy and Planning Session 

During the early stages of the process, the discussion turns to vital but basic aspects of a campaign. A target audience will be pinpointed, a budget will be agreed upon, and a company will share the metrics it wants to hit to make a media buying campaign a success.

Determining a target audience should be a thorough and meticulous process. Audiences should be divided into certain demographics, such as gender, age, and marital status, as well as location, and other behaviors, like general interests.

Once the target audience for a media buying campaign is determined, there should be a strong effort to think broadly about the best ways to reach them. Does the audience tend to live in a certain area? Are they more likely to see an advertisement online or in person? When and where do they shop?

This first stage also includes a bit of planning, hammering out details of the campaign schedule (including its launch and overall time frame), where ads will be placed, and which creatives the company wants to work closely with. A common question to think about is which media channels would be most effective to pursue.

Should the campaign mainly include ads on search engines? How about on social media networks? Should it only be online or also on TV or radio? 

Be Prepared to Negotiate

Once the right media outlets are targeted, media buyers frequently negotiate with them to settle on the perfect price before buying the ad spaces. While online advertising is usually sold through an automated process so negotiations won’t be traditional, buyers can still use this time to make final plans for the best prices, times, and places for their advertising campaigns.

Data Comes into Play

The media buying process isn’t just a guessing game, even after a campaign launches. The process includes tracking the overall performance of the media buying campaign through detailed reports. This data is carefully analyzed to adjust the campaign approach if necessary.

Tracking such data on ad performances can begin right away, but it’s important to not make quick judgments too early. To get a full picture of a media buying campaign’s success, there should be enough data to paint that picture.

Throughout the campaign, buyers should remain committed to monitoring its results to make sure the optimal results are being achieved. Any problems encountered, whether it’s early, in the middle, or at the end of the process, should be addressed swiftly.

The Bottom Line

Media buyers should be partners in a campaign but also fully skilled in pushing for the best strategies to maximize each campaign they work on.

They should have experience working on q wide variety of channels and publishers — and know all the best practices and approaches to making a media buying process go smoothly and achieve the best results.