What Makes A Great Media Buyer?
At Crux Media, we have extensive experience on both the buying and selling sides of the media industry and we take great pride in possessing a strong combination of experience, intelligence, intuition, transparency, commitment, strong relationships, hard-work, proven results, contemplation, and integrity. We will tirelessly work through every step of your campaign as though your business was our own, becoming a committed, transparent, and trusted part of your internal marketing team. We align ourselves to your business goals and objectives, using our buying power to leverage your marketing dollars, improve your ROI, and reduce the waste of your time, energy, and money! We’ll work with you from start to finish to ensure every aspect of your media buy is optimized for your target audience, and then help gather the results and insights after to shape your future marketing efforts.
While our commitment and transparency to you starts here by explaining our process in detail, please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have . . . we love what we do!
Our Process:
In part, we’ll gain a strong understanding of, ‘what are we marketing including its strengths, challenges, and financial concepts?’; ‘What makes it different from similar items on the market?’; ‘How, when, and where will it likely be used?’; ‘Who will most likely use it?’; and ‘What need or desire can it solve?’. Armed with your marketing goals and this in-depth knowledge of your products, services, and industry, we’ll be better able to define your target audience and match with the ones that need what you're selling with as little waste of your marketing dollar as possible.
The first step we take in defining your target audience is to first understand who your target market is by demographically (such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income level, and geographic location) examining your existing customers. Once we have this information, we delve into their psychographic characteristics (such as interests, hobbies, personality traits, beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyle preferences) looking for patterns that we can group together to determine the different target audiences that exist within your target market, and which of those groups will most likely really want or need what you’re offering. As we gather the data about your customers and their characteristics, which we repeatedly consider against what we discovered within the competitor and marketing analyses, we get an increasingly accurate understanding of who your target audience should be, and what makes them ‘tick’!
By whittling down your target market into a well-defined target audience, your advertisements will ultimately be seen by fewer people within your target market, but that the ones who do see it will be the ‘right people’! In doing so, we will be able to both reduce the waste of your marketing dollars as well as improve your campaign’s ROI. Further, by having a well-defined target audience, we’ll be better equipped to identify the best venues in which to place media and your campaign’s creative will be more relevant, coincide with the interests and values of those who are most likely to purchase, and be able to be tailored to connect with the target audience on a much deeper level.
With our vast background in all types of traditional and new media, we consider how the proposals add up (both individually and together) and what combinations will reach the largest amount of your target audience with a frequency that will catch their attention and be effective. Optimizing the media mix requires intelligence, experience, intuition, a great working relationship with these media vendors, and most of all, a whole lot of tinkering with the schedules and placements. We work within the proposals and adjust the target audience and media objectives as additional opportunities and challenges present themselves. As the finetuning for optimization progresses, the campaign’s budget, timing, media channels, schedules, placements, and creative that will be required begin to solidify and media buying strategy takes shape.
As we finalize these media selections, we look beyond simply securing the best rates and schedules for your campaign. We also heavily negotiate the placement of where your advertisements will be seen and heard to maximize your target audience’s exposure. Finally, we leverage our relationships along with your media buy, to negotiate for added value such as bonus weight, space available opportunities, cross-placements, and sponsorships in order to improve the both the performance and the ROI of your campaign without any additional spend.
Once the creative is delivered, we verify receipt and have each company again confirm that it meets spec and presents well. About a week prior to launch, we again go over the marketing goals and media objectives to ensure that campaign’s success is always front-of-mind, and then set up a schedule to regularly review the campaign’s progress against its objectives and to adjust as needed.
Throughout the campaign cycle, we work closely with you to monitor your results and make changes accordingly to fluctuations in performance. We further compare those results against the media strategy and objectives to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign so that we can not only adjust the strategy itself along the way, but also improve the performance of your future campaigns.
We also compile a complete overview of placements by media, type, and timing for your records, including an evaluation of the campaign’s performance, audience insights, and options for future campaign improvement. In this process, we examine how the target audience responded to your campaign and highlight any elements that may require further testing or refinement before any meaningful conclusions can be made.
These observations, recommendations, and considerations not only help to examine how the current campaign performed, they also guide the development of future campaigns and help us to fine-tune our methodologies and insights within an ever-changing and evolving market. We know and appreciate that is only by striving to plan, execute, and analyze your media buy as though your company were our own, that can we ensure our mutual growth and success together!
We’ve mentioned ‘ROI’ and variations of ‘reducing the waste of your marketing dollar’ quite a bit in our process above because it is always at the forethought of every action we take. Media planning, strategy, and buying is a continual challenge of intelligence, instinct, and relationships – and we love it! We do what we do for our relationships, the pride in our results, and to be quite honest, the thrill of the chase . . . we work hard to get you the highest ROI with the least amount of wasted marketing dollars possible. That is our commitment to you!
Why Choose Crux Media to Plan and Buy Your Media?
As your consumers become increasingly difficult and costly to reach, there is no substitute for a dedicated media buyer who transparently works with the singular focus of optimizing every aspect of your campaign to perform to achieve the best results possible. By leveraging our buying power with your marketing dollar, we’re able to secure deeper discounts, better placements, bonus inventory, and a higher return on your investment. Combined with our experience, knowledge, intuition, integrity, and media relationships, we’re not only able to save you time, energy, and money . . . we’re able to cover our involvement several times over!
- We Listen to You – Perhaps the single most important part of our process, and why we do our job so well, is that we truly listen. We listen to your business goals, needs, and objectives without thinking about how we can solve your problems, or what we’ll say next. It is through active listening that we’re able to gather more in-depth information and better insight into your business model and needs, which in turn always leads to better outcomes!
- We Fully Learn Your Products and Services – After we know exactly what we need to accomplish through your marketing campaign, we dedicate ourselves to thoroughly learning your products, services, and industry. Although this can be quite time-consuming, we absolutely love it! It’s exciting to learn, and the better we understand the nuances of what you’re marketing, the better we’ll able to both align the creative and media to connect with the right prospect at just the right time.
- We Do A Marketing Analysis – Once we have a thorough understanding of your business and marketing goals, combined along with what you’re selling, we’ll perform a market analysis to determine your industry’s current climate and trends. This analysis will help us to understand any opportunities and challenges that exist as they relate to the strengths and weaknesses of your business, as well as project costs and determine the right media opportunities available your campaign. By examining the data from others in your industry, we’ll better be able to use the metrics discovered to better define your target audience and build a media buying strategy that has the best chance for meeting and exceeding your marketing goals!
- We Research Your Competitors – We investigate the products and services that your competitors advertise, whom they’ve targeted, where and when they’ve advertised, and what has and hasn’t worked for them in order to get a feel for their media buying strategies. By doing this we can uncover their strengths and weaknesses, find opportunities and overlooked areas in the market, and concentrate our media buying strategy to align with your business goals and objectives. By developing a thorough competitive analysis, we’re not only able to save time and take some of the guesswork out of the media planning, we’re also able to anticipate how your competitors may react or how the industry may trend during your campaign; that way we’ll be prepared to adjust quickly as needed, optimize your ROI, and reduce the waste of your marketing dollars. Understanding your competitors’ positioning strategies is crucial in determining which media vendors to consider, the best times to advertise, the reach and frequency needed to compete, and the demands and expectations of individual markets considered.
- We Identify and Research Your Target Audience – We religiously save defining the target audience as the last step before building the media goals and buying strategy to avoid accidentally forming any assumptions that could hurt the campaign’s ultimate level of success. Defining and segmenting the target audience prior to any media planning begins is absolutely essential in determining what creative messaging that will resonate with them and pinpoint which media channels they prefer to use. Accurately defining the target audience (who they are, what they want, why they want it, and what makes them react) will define every marketing strategy that we’ll execute!
- We Set The Media Objectives – With your target audience, competitors, and markets in mind, we begin to translate your marketing objectives into clear, concise, and attainable media objectives that will become the foundation for your marketing strategy and ultimately, the media buy. In creating media objectives, we use the SMART method, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based objectives. The purpose of these objectives is to determine the exact audience and markets we will initially target, what creative will resonate and engage them best, and what methods or tradeoffs between reach and frequency will generate the best ROI within a budget tailored to your business goals.
- We Design the Media Buying Strategy and Plan – Once we’ve completed the media objectives, we broadly outline how we’ll accomplish each objective while keeping the target audience and goals in mind. We start by determining your priorities between brand awareness, education, and direct response and then with no bias towards one medium or another, we delve deeply into what a typical day looks like for the target audience, what media is important to them, where they spend the most time, and which media are they most influenced by. By identifying how they consume media and which companies are available in your target markets, we join channels together to create a “media-mix” and then reach out to those media outlets and request proposals for consideration. Often, we include the outlets in our reasons for consideration, and share the campaign’s media objectives in order to leverage our buying power and our relationship in order to vest them into your campaign’s success.
- We Develop and Evolve Campaign and Creative Concepts - The campaign and creative must seamlessly work together to get your message in front of your target audience, create awareness, feelings of desire, and ultimately influence their behavior in order to achieve your marketing goals and objectives. Additionally, creative always needs to be tailored to how your target audience uses and is influenced by each media channel that is utilized. While great creative can make an advertisement more memorable, work with less frequency, and improve your ROI, great creative will never overcome poor media planning! A great media strategy needs to shape the creative around the campaign’s goals and objectives, and then evolve and refine itself around the resulting creative. Through creative direction, collaboration, and/or creation, we make sure that each advertisement’s design and copy are optimized and tailored for every media channel utilized, and that they connect with your target audience’s cultural preferences and triggers according to their geographic markets. When built in conjunction with your media buy, your creative will be more memorable, build your brand’s awareness faster, last longer, and work with less of an overall media spend!
- We Negotiate Price, Placements, and Finalize Media Selections – With the creative and campaign strategy determined, we begin to negotiate the purchase of the ad space. As much as our success comes from our skills, it equally comes from the relationships we’ve developed with national and regional media outlets. We’re known to be tough negotiators, but we’re also respected for our successful campaigns, hard-work, honesty, and unwavering integrity. While we use your media goals and our experience to guide the media vendors, we vest them into your campaign and continue to work together to ensure that your schedules and positioning is maximized for your target audience and to set you apart from your competitors. Aside from our buying leverage, it’s the strength of our media relationships and our ability to work together with a singular common goal of making sure that you meet and surpass your media goals that helps secure the incredible media buys that we do!
- We Prepare for the Campaign’s Launch – With the media buy contracted and the campaign launch date finalized, we now set deadlines for the creative to be completed and delivered to each of the media partners involved. Throughout this process, we thoroughly test and verify that all creative meets spec and concept, is free from errors that might undermine audience confidence, test to ensure that landing pages, phone numbers, and any embedded links all function properly, and manage the production and delivery of the creative from outside sources to ensure it arrives to our partners by the deadline set.
- We Monitor the Campaign and Optimize Ad Performance – During the course of the campaign, we verify that each of your ads appear where scheduled and that they are being optimized, by randomly spot-checking them for quality, context, and accuracy. Regularly, we request and review post-logs and proof-of-performance reports to ensure that the ad formats and rates are adhering to the schedule, and negotiate make-goods, added-value, and/or credits depending on the campaign’s needs when issues arise.
- We Analyze the Campaign, Gather Insights, and Report – Once a campaign has run its full course, and all advertisements have left the marketplace (including bonus, added-value, and overage), we pull final reports from the media vendors and compare that data from different angles against the original buy and strategy to determine the campaign’s overall successes, opportunities, and weaknesses. We then break those results down by channel and combine them with your internal reporting numbers like sales, revenue, market-share, growth, and engagement to help you tighten your target audience definitions and triggers, improve future campaign strategies, and identify major and minor market trends that may create or change the products and services that you offer in the future.