Wyrd Ways Business

Media buying is more complex than a lot of people think at first; which is why a lot of people fail to hit the nail on the head with their media planning efforts. Effective media planning consists of several elements: finding the right media to advertise in, positioning yourself within that advertising media to reach your target market, strong negotiation skills and the ability to monitor and track results and analyze them to fine-tune your campaign.

Does media buying still sound easy? Honestly, it’s not – which is why most businesses don’t try to go it alone with their media planning efforts and go to the professionals. There are advertising agencies and consultants who provide media buying services; people who know advertising media inside and out and can get your company the placements it needs to reach the right audience at the best possible rates.

You could do ahead and try to do this all yourself, but it’s going to take up quite a bit of your time – time which could be much better spent elsewhere. It’s usually a much better idea to leave the media buying to an advertising agency that has a track record of getting results for their clientele. Choose your advertising agency wisely. An agency which does a great job with media buying and other services is a valuable partner to have. Meet with agencies and look through their portfolios until you find an agency that offers the expertise and the services your company needs.

Whether you’re trying to plan a campaign of newspaper advertising, radio advertising, online advertising or all of the above, assess the reach of each type of advertising media has in your target market. The next step in your media planning is to tailor your advertisements to the media used in the campaign. Remember, we warned you it wasn’t necessarily easy!

Advertising costs vary depending on the media you choose. Internet advertising is relatively inexpensive compared to other media, though the total cost depends on whether you’re using banner ads or pay per click (PPC)advertising and how many impressions or clicks your campaign includes and/or how often you want your ads to appear. PPC is easy to monitor, track and fine tune (and you can set the budget to ensure you don’t overspend), making it one of the easier media buying tasks, relatively speaking.

National newspaper advertising and magazine advertisements, among other consumer focused print media are more costly. Magazine and newspaper advertising are great for consumer awareness and as a branding or corporate identity vehicle and as such should be considered in your media planning.

Outdoor advertising, including billboard advertising and mobile billboards can make a big impact, but in terms of media buying is a little more challenging. In depth, longer-term demographic information will be required to get the best results out of your outdoor advertising placements.

The most challenging part of your media buying strategy is broadcast advertising. Radio advertising and television advertising are among the most expensive advertisements to produce and purchase placements for. Radio, however is becoming a more cost effective medium with local stations especially often providing very reasonable rates for packages including the costs of production and planning.

Media buying can be a puzzle; but it doesn’t have to be a conundrum for your business. Media buying is one of the things advertising agencies specialize in. Some things really are best left to the professionals – and placing media buying and planning into the hands of experts ensures more effective campaigns and lets you get back to running your business.

You may have noticed a lot of coverage over the past couple of years about the rapid growth of social networks and how they are changing the way we communicate?

Perhaps, you have also stumbled across one of the many articles professing how to ‘double your sales’ with Twitter or Facebook and maybe feel you have missed the boat with your own marketing?



But, it’s actually worth asking the question as to whether marketing through social media actually works in the first place, and, if it does, how can you make it work for your business?

The Changing Face Of The Web

Many social media web sites have been built on the back of a technical evolution on the Internet – something paraphrased as “Web 2.0”. It’s a term that many marketers talk about with great authority and it is used in many different contexts. But, what exactly is it?

In the early days of the Internet, a website contained words and pictures – like a magazine or brochure – and it wasn’t an interactive environment. But, with the advent of Blogging, Wikis and commenting (to name but a few) we can all get involved with conversations online by writing (and publishing) directly onto web pages.

We can easily create our own Facebook profiles, Blogs and Twitter accounts and share information with people who have similar interests. For this reason, Web 2.0 is often referred to as the read/write web.

Of course, one of the main reasons social networking has become mainstream so quickly is that many of the websites don’t charge – they are free to use.  Companies looking to raise their profile online have taken advantage of this to promote their profile to a whole new audience, often in an inappropriate way.

When it comes to marketing your business through social networks, are people even talking about your brand in the first place? Are they discussing your industry? If so, where are those conversations taking place so you can join in and raise your profile too?

Getting Specific

As with most marketing case studies, many of the success stories you will read about are consumer brands; brands that people want to talk about; brands with a mass market.

From this feedback, companies from all sorts of industries have picked up on the buzz and started Twittering, Blogging and setting up their Facebook fan groups, and, because the cost of entry is virtually zero, it’s not just the big boys. Startups and small businesses have also jumped on the bandwagon.

Move into the business-to-business space and getting your voice heard becomes somewhat harder than the success stories suggested it would be. Who wants to talk about widgets or your bespoke niche service, especially when so many other companies occupy the same space? It’s like exhibiting at a huge trade show with all your competitors setting up a stand right next to you.

Interestingly though, some people do want to talk about the same thing as you and may be interested in hearing what your company has to say. The key is to find out where the most appropriate conversation is taking place and to then to understand how that conversation is taking place.

Conversation Marketing 

With Web 2.0 technology everybody can have a voice. So the way you engage with people through social media works very differently from traditional offline marketing. If you say the wrong thing in the wrong way, people have the right to reply and, in terms of reputation, they may have a lot less to lose than you and potentially a much larger audience listening to them. Treading carefully and mixing with the right people becomes even more important. 

Business marketers in the social space often overlook rules of interaction and social etiquette. They try to sell too quickly and too aggressively without gaining trust, looking to control conversations and relationships. But let’s face it, who wants to stop around and listen to the person controlling the conversation in the real world? Why on earth would we put up with it any more online?

In fact, in the social space we can un-follow, de-friend and block at the click of a button; the relationship gone in a second, along with trust in your brand. It’s happening to a lot of marketers in the social space – no-one is listening to them because they have nothing that people want to hear. 

Creating Trust 

Creating a successful marketing strategy using social networks requires the ability (and patience) to develop trust with people. Like many marketing techniques, it’s a case of creating your pipeline of new relationships and developing them over a period of time – not pushing the sale from the outset.

Gaining initial trust is essential. 

One trust-building strategy for social media marketing – whatever your industry – is to answer the questions that people want (or need) the answers to. If you can engage your audience with relevant information, they will not only buy into you, they will also spread the word – your word. 

Platforms such as Blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to demonstrate your product and industry knowledge in an open forum. Of course, you can also create relevant links to your website through these platforms to drive traffic to your website and increase your brand profile – as long as you are subtle in your approach. 

Developing Relationships 

Then, as people begin to trust your social profile, you can begin to drive them through to the next step in developing the relationship. For instance, why not ask them to subscribe to your e-mail marketing? 

This overcomes audience apathy. If you have developed enough trust in your social relationship, leverage it to a medium whereby the onus is not on your audience to collect the message, rather on you to send a relevant and regular message – the next step in developing further trust, and one step closer to delivering a customer to your sales team. 

But beware. As in any personal relationship, trust can be lost in an instant if you say the wrong thing. Keeping one eye on the end game and never abusing the relationship is an absolute must. 

Where Do You Start? 

Having a strategy for your social profile is often overlooked but is essential to give you focus with your approach. Questioning your objectives is essential: 

Should your profile be you (as a person), your CEO, or your company? Who will gain the most trust and credibility online? Which social platform is the most appropriate to focus on? Where are your existing customers? Why not ask them how they use social media? What are you going to talk about? What do you want to be recognized (and found) for? By sticking to a subject (however niche), you can become an acknowledged expert. How much personality should come through? Is it yours, or your company tone-of-voice? 

Setting up a profile in any of the social networks is a straightforward process and often free. It pays to explore the media to see if the audience is right for your business and be prepared to switch off your efforts if they do not yield any results. 

Summary 

There is no doubt that engaging people on the right social media platform can help you reach a new audience and increase your online profile.

The challenge is to create a focused strategy aimed towards a specific audience and engage them in a conversational dialogue to encourage trust.

Only when you have gained trust can you leverage the relationship and lead the conversation to the next level. Where many marketers want quick wins, social media is much more of an effective marketing medium if you are not pushing too hard. So, you may have to be prepared to wait until trust has developed. 

T
hat said, when your pipeline begins to fulfill itself, social media offers a very sustainable route to generate awareness and, ultimately, potential new sales leads.