What is Digital Media Buying?
Digital media buying is a crucial aspect of today’s advertising world. It involves a business’s/products’ digital advertising, specifically paid advertising across digital platforms like Facebook, Google, Youtube, LinkedIn etc. The main goal of digital media buying is to reach and engage with its target audience at the right time.
In traditional marketing, we deliver a one-way static message to a mass audience in the hope of reaching our target audience. There’s no specific way to measure the success or the ROI (return on investment). Here comes digital media buying as a savior as we can track the data whether it is reaching the right audience at the right time. Digital Media Buying enables interactive and dynamic content delivery with cost efficiency.
What is a Media Buyer?
Digital media buyers typically perform the media buying; they are the people responsible for the digital advertising or digital media buying processes of your business.
Types of Digital Media Buying
Facebook Ads
Among all the platforms, Facebook is the most popular. Facebook ads is highly profitable but sometimes can be overwhelming. You can run different campaigns such as for Lead Generation, Awareness, Conversion etc. Besides, it allows dynamic ads, video ads, collection ads and ads on stories. But while running, be very careful about the Facebook Ads Policies.
Google Ads
With search ads, display ads, and Gmail ads, Google offers a variety of digital media buying options to reach potential customers.
YouTube Ads
This platform offers in-stream (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) ads, Banner ads before or after videos, bumper ads, etc.
TikTok Ads
In TikTok, you can highly engage with the audiences and reach the young generation more easily with in-feed video ads.
LinkedIn
You can also place ads on LinkedIn, or boost your profile to get reach and engagement. Mainly, for targeting professionals and B2B audiences, LinkedIn works best.
Why Digital Media Buying is important?
Here are some reasons why digital media buying is important.
Targeting Abilities
With digital media buying, you can target specific audiences. Let me give you one example for better understanding. Suppose, you want to show your product to married females who are aged between 20 – 40 and live in Dhaka. With digital media buying, you can do this. Hence, targeting the right audience at the right time has been easier than before.
Measurable
Through digital media buying we can collect valuable data and analytics that will allow you to track the performance of the ads. You can also measure ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and make necessary decisions.
Cost-Effective
As in digital media buying, you are only showing your ads to the targeted audiences, it reduces your cost and increases return. You can optimize budgets and allocate resources more efficiently.
Creativity
Digital media buying allows you to do experiments on the ads. You can change your ad content, copy according to your target audience. It gives you the freedom of choice and play with different types of content that boost your business.
Digital Media Buying Vs. Media Planning
While digital media buying refers to the actual process of purchasing the advertising space, media planning includes the process of strategizing.
Here is an example for you.
Suppose, you have a business and want to promote it online. The first task it to strategize the campaign– which is media planning. You must figure out which media you want to promote. Then, strategize the target audience, and their preferences and develop an overall strategy.
A media plan may include–
- Campaign goals and objectives
- Metrics and Key Performance Indicators
- Audience
- Budget
- Timeline etc
After the strategy, you will run ads on your selected media, won’t you? — So, this process of executing the strategies is digital media buying.
Digital Media Buying Process
Identify the goal
The first important step of the digital media buying process is to identify the goal. Ask yourself– What’s the objective of the campaign?
You may want awareness from a particular campaign or to boost your sales. Depending on your goal, the media planning will take shape.
Understand Your Target Audience
You have to figure out and analyze your target audience. Gather insights about them such as age, interests, behavior, education, gender etc. It will help you to target the right audience and increase the performance of the ads
Select Digital Media
In this step, strategically think, about which digital media would align with your goal and target audience and select digital channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Google, TikTok etc for your campaign.
Allocate Budget
The 4th step is to allocate budgets across the platforms. While allocating the budget, you can allocate more budget on the platforms where you are expecting higher reach or return.
Create ad
Now, you are set to create compelling ads on your selected platforms for your identified goal and target audience.
Optimize it
Once you create and run the ad, continuously monitor and optimize it. Make adjustments for better results.
Analyze the result
This step is very crucial. You have to analyze the campaigns on various metrics like Click-Through Rates (CTR), ROI, Cost-Per-Click (CTC) etc. After analyzing, make inferences and see if your campaign is working well or not.
Challenges of Digital Media Buying
Complexity
Because of the different kinds of digital platforms, it can be hard to manage all the platforms at once.
Ad Blocking
There are some paid software that allows a user to block the ad which affects the digital media buying process
Marketing Measurement
It is important for a media buyer to collect the data to understand which campaign is performing well. However, sometimes they struggle to collect accurate data because of glitches or policies.
Competition
The digital media landscape has become competitive, making it challenging for media buyers to get the desired result.
Final Words
Though the field of digital media buying is becoming competitive day by day, there’s no way to deny its effectiveness and opportunities. Hence, we can see potential growth in the career choices as a Media Buyer. You can check out my blog on— How to Become a Successful Media Buyer where I have discussed the ways to start a career as a media buyer from my experience.
See you in another blog!
