🌁Behind the Ads ---The Crucial Role of Media Buyers in Digital Marketing
What is Media Buying?
Imagine scrolling through updates from your high school friends via Facebook or searching for cool new recipes on TikTok. You might be thinking that the ads just know exactly what you want.
🙈!Ta-Da!🙉 That is where the Media Buyer comes in—to ensure that their brand's ads find the right space.
💰When a company hopes to grow, it usually requires some money for running a few ads. Part of this budget goes into buying "paid media" that is ad inventory sold by companies operating platforms such as TV, social media platforms, or thousands of billboards. Media buyers are then brought in to set up and manage ad campaigns that promote the client's products or services.
We'll focus on programmatic media supplied by social platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Google ads.
Media Buying vs. Media Planning
Though both media buyer and media planner are very important in advertising, their roles vary widely. Media planners have to understand the audience specifically and then try to find the most effective way to reach them. This is done through research in the market in search of answers on where and how one can reach their target audience.
On the other hand, media buyers take the strategies given by the planners and delve deeper into the actual sources of media. These professionals decide the channels that maximize the company's return on investment through its marketing expenditure.
For instance, if a media planner or buyer decides that the ideal medium is radio, then the media buyer will decide the exact time of the day to run the adverts for optimal impact.
What Does A Media Buyer Do?
📍Strategize
The increasing dynamism of social media platforms is smoothly intertwined with the change in buying media strategies. Good media buyers will attempt to understand the objective of a campaign, what KPIs should be achievable, and what budget they have to play with before ever laying a penny.
Lately, a very critical part of this has been creative strategy, often needed to couple very closely with other team members.
📍Identify Target Audiences
Audience targeting is the core value proposition of modern programmatic advertising platforms. Be it Facebook, Google, or TikTok, avenues exist for distinct ways to limit a target audience. The media buyer would then be mixing and matching different audiences with creatives, landing pages, or more to find the biggest profits among the obtaining combinations.
📍Campaign Setup
Now that is when the actual work starts. Every marketing platform has a backend for campaign creation and campaign deployment. Although every of such platform varies in their unique way, almost all of them come across a nearly similar structure:
Campaign: This is the top-level structure where you'll set your overall objective, target audience, and budget. You can have many ad sets and ads for each campaign.
Ad Set: The second level, where you make your targeting, budget, ad scheduling, and bid strategy. Each Ad Set can have multiple Ads.
Ad: It is what a person sees, the visual content in there. It could be a single image, a video, carousel, or collection. Every Ad is linked to an Ad Set which is linked to a Campaign.
📍Track & Analyze Results
Tracking and optimization of results are very vital. Although Google Analytics is utilized, a more technical media analytics software would be best to make a case for insights. Again, that could also be a shared-in-some-ways role with data scientists or analytics experts depending on the company's KPIs and reporting needs.
📍Creative Testing & Iteration
Nobody hits a home run with their very first campaign. Now, media buyers take the takeaways of first campaigns in order to help improve future campaigns and then take those learned structures to video editors, graphic designers, or UGC creators.
CreatiBI is an amazing tool that leverages its unique tagging system to unlock the true driver of your creative performance. It offers granular data insights on how to better your winning creatives even further.
Essential Skills of Media Buyers in 2024
Analytical Skills: To monitor and study campaign data.
Communication Skills: Communicate and coordinate with internal teams, clients, and media vendors.
Technical Proficiency: Media buying tools and media buying platforms.
Time Management: Run many campaigns at once.
Adaptability: A fast-changing media calls for continuous adaptation.
Critical Thinking: The ability to take information from many sources and understand what it means for the business.
Knowledge of Psychology: Consumer behavior and the different ways in which it impacts buying decisions.
Education Requirements
Do you need a degree to become a media buyer? Definitely not. Sure, some sort of traditional education might be of advantage, especially to more prominent brands or larger agencies, but it's mainly a very performance-based role. Here are some degrees that can complement your skills:
🧑🎓Psychology: To be able to understand customer behavior and the drivers of customer emotions.
🧑🎓Business Studies: Get to understand the changed scope in business because of digital marketing.
🧑🎓Public Relations & Media Studies: To understand the wide marketing setup.
Where to Find Media Buyer Jobs
Whether you're a veteran or new to the game, finding the right media-buying job can be tough. Here are the top places to satisfy your quest:
🔎Company Website: Visit the Careers page on the websites of your favorite brands or agencies.
🔎Marketing Hire : The best marketing oriented job site.
🔎Remotive: Awesome pick to find gigs about remote media buying.
🔎LinkedIn and networking.
💡Media Buyer Salary
This means that when you invest in a media buyer, you're not investing just in their salary or commission. There's an ad spend fundraiser on top of it, together with sourcing and creating high-converting ad creative.
The average salary for a media buyer in the USA is around $ 78,833 annually. However, depending on the industry and whether it's for an agency or an internal team, the ballpark could drop or spike.
Top Performance Marketing YouTube Channels to Follow in 2024
Here are 4 media buying experts whom you need to follow:
Dara Denny: She specializes in how ad creative impacts campaign performance.
Foundr Magazine: A great resource for media professionals with a penchant for entrepreneurship.
Iman Gadzhi: Know how to turn your ad skills into a booming business.
Nick Theriot: Clear insights into what's really working for his agency.