Marcus Richards
Media buying strategy is always focused on knowledge of any given market. Experts spend hours of every day analyzing the markets they need to sell to in order to make sure that their media placement generates clicks, views, and sales. With the growth of technology, has come the development of media buying tools that can greatly assist in product and ad placement. There really is no way these days to do any job in media buying that is not dependent at least partially on buying analysis tools.
These new tools are necessary for a reason. Your competitor’s advertisements, along with customer knowledge of a marketing space as a whole can influence every decision that you and your team need to make in order to maximize the success of your media buying strategy. If you are working with a poor-quality analysis tool, you will likely be working with less than an ideal arsenal of tools to succeed.
If you think you might need to look for a new media buying analysis tool, there are some key factors that any quality tool will need to analyze in order to be truly useful to you. Here are five things that any media buying analysis tool worth its salt will do for you:
1. Brand-Comparison: Side-by-side brand comparison numbers and facts can help you greatly when you are trying to identify areas where your marketing campaign will have maximum impact. You may know who your direct competitors are, but it is often difficult and cumbersome to get an idea of what they are offering for each one of their products as compared with your own. If you have the ability within your media buying analysis tool to see what your competition has on offer to customers, you can easily decide where to improve your strategy to outshine them. A really good tool will also identify newcomers to the market space and help you to keep up with up and comers readily.
2. Measurement Tools: A media buying analysis tool will always offer the most perks in its ability to measure different factors. A good tool will collect data on consumer beliefs, the weekly, monthly and yearly sales behaviors of target audiences and it will also be able to generate predictive reports based on historical data. It does not make sense to place your ads in the wrong locations either, so your media buying analysis tool needs to also identify which sites are getting the most traffic and what the conversion rate of views, clicks and other metrics is. Site traffic data will also help you to pull the plug quickly on campaigns that are not working out so that you can redirect your efforts.
3. Audience Insight and Media-Usage Tools: This is one of the most powerful parts of a good media buying analysis tool. This is the function that allows you to look at the cross-platform impact to specific audiences as well as generate reports about how your targeted market segment responds to media as a whole. This data will allow you to asses which type of ads will work best for your market’s preferences. Using a tool like this will help you to get a much better grasp on audience insights because the tool can calculate reports and predictions for you based on a much larger sample size than you could create through your own personal research. You will also need this type of reporting capability to analyze how your own ads are working once they are placed in front of their target demographic.
4. Leverage Google: Let’s face it, Google is a giant these days and their advertising machine is so large that it will likely intersect with your own ads in every campaign that you are working on. You might be using Google to place ads as part of your campaign, or Google might be helping a competitor’s products get more attention than your product is getting. Many good media buying analysis tools will offer the option to work with Google’s products, or at least to track the outcomes of Google ad campaigns that you are running alongside other ads. If you are not using Google to your advantage, you will find that it will be much more difficult to promote and drive traffic to your products and preferred sites. Being able to analyze campaigns in relation to Google is crucial.
5. Assist With Negotiations: A major part of a media buyer’s job is to negotiate the best prices for their clients. This can be a tall order, however, with all of the different types of advertising that can be used to promote a product today. Using a tool to help you to analyze the costs associated with each type of advertising space can be invaluable to your goals related to the budget. Imagine trying to gather your own individually collected data about the cost of running ads in various locations! Thankfully, a good analysis tool will be able to show you which options cost what amount and it will become very easy to quote the best prices and most ideal budget to your customers. This type of analysis can also help to move advertising from an over-priced option to a more affordable one quickly if your client needs to reduce the budget or wants to regroup.
The media buying analysis tool(s) that you use is often the key deciding factor for your success as a media buyer. The more information that you can collect rapidly about a marketing space, the more likely you are to generate useful and productive campaigns for your clients. If you are doing this work the old-fashioned way, you are essentially working with your hands tied behind your back. If you make sure that any media buying analysis tool that you are working with does these five things, you will see immediate improvements in the effectiveness of your campaigns and the satisfaction of your customers.
