Media Buying 854789
De BISAWiki
On the surface, media buying seems simple. Find a media outlet for your message (for B@B advertisers, that is primarily print and online magazine) and purchase the media. But how does one know which media best match your target audience. Ah, thereâs the rub. First things first. The more you know about who represents your target market, the better. This is not something to treat lightly. In most cases, there are multiple influences involved when it comes to who has the approval to purchase your products. Yet, not all of these influences wield the same amount of power. Therefore, the first job is to do an overview of your real audience. Who ultimately do you need to impact with your message and in what doses. Let’s say family sell capital equipment into the machine tool industry. Who influences the purchase? Plant Manager, Manufacturing Engineer, Purchasing, VP of Manufacturing, President and maybe even CEO. Obviously not all of these people have an equal vote. The key is determining the key decision makers and making media buys based on reaching those key decision makers. With smaller ticket items, the list is obviously shorter.
Media Buying, like so many other facets of the marketing world, is one of those tasks that seems, on the surface, to be easy. In fact, it seems so easy for people, before you really dig into it, that a lot of companies think they can just dig right in and start placing ads for a big year-long advertising campaign.
We’ve been doing media buying for our clients for over fifty years, so we can tell you with a high degree of certainty that media buying is more complex than simply telling a publication that you want them to run your ad. With that in mind, we thought we’d start our Five Tips Friday series with five pointers you need to know about placing ads in business publications.
1. Study the circulation – The most important factor in evaluating a publication is its circulation. If the circulation is not a good match to your target audience, end of discussion.
But how can you determine if the circulation is really valid? There are a couple of different ways that a publication can present their circulation. The best way is to have an outside auditing company validate that they are really reaching who they say they are reaching. Since most business publications have a Controlled circulation versus a Paid circulation, this involves understanding how a Controlled circulation works. Unlike a Paid circulation where it is obvious what the circulation is (count the money), a Controlled cir culation publication that is audited must require that recipients answer a series of questions to assure that they represent the audience that the publication is trying to reach. Revenue is generated in this model strictly through advertising.
There are a handful of companies whose owned by people purpose is to audit circulation but for B2B publications, the leader is BPA Worldwide (full disclosure: our president Larry Clayman sits on their board). Other auditing firms include AAM (Alliance for Audited Media) –formerly ABC–Certified Audit Circulation (CAC), Verified Audit Circulation (VAC) and Circulation Verification Council (CVA). When a circulation is audited, the advertiser has full confidence that they are reaching their target audience as long as they have chosen their media wisely.
When a publication chooses not to have its circulation audited, you are left with less desirable choices. The most common is the Sworn Publisher’s Statement. This simply means that the Publisher is asking you to “trust him” that the circulation is valid.
