It’s the startup era and the number of increasing business is beyond the imagination. Growing number of businesses is a good sign for any nation, but at the same time, it will increase the competition as well.
It is paramount to have a perfect marketing strategy for your business to survive in this throat cutting competition. If you missed a single step, you would have to bear significant losses. Media planning and buying strategy is one of the most important aspects of today’s business models.
Every brand is striving hard to come first into their customer’s mind, whenever they think of their product or services. However, it is not easy for any brand whether they are a multi-million company or a startup.
Every firm into the market has an opportunity to grow wider, given that they employ a comprehensive media planning. The major factor to consider for branding and marketing utilizing media is the budget!!
Managing your media campaigns and preparing buying strategies is what we are going to see next in this post.
Take prudent decisions
The first and foremost rule to follow is “Think thrice (not twice) before you leap.” You need to research properly by all means before you invest in marketing or branding. A correct decision could be taken by researching the current market, your audience and your competitors.
A right thing at the right time can help you get to a maximum number of audiences on a very small budget. Whereas, a wrong decision will surely pull you down. A wrong decision will not only waste your money but will consume a lot of time and other resources as well.
So, taking a perfect decision at the correct time is what you should first focus on.
Find better places to advertise
You may have a great product at half the rates of your competitors, but you put up the hoardings into the Amazon forest, it is of no use!
The same statement as above replicates in the day to day business activities. You need to take care of the place and public where you are advertising. Suppose you are putting up an advertisement of your product in English, where most of the people do not understand that language, your efforts and money are wasted.
You need to find out the best place at the lowest prices, to get to your targeted audience. You can use online portals for buying and selling such banner ads. One of the trending platforms that I came across is GainBuzz. GainBuzz is a marketplace for such hoarding sellers and buyers.
These types of online platforms can help you get the services and hoarding places at an excellent location and at lower prices. Moreover, it creates a pool of buyers and sellers and thus you get all the options at the same place and you can select the one that suits your requirements the best.
Moreover, there are a lot of sellers on the same platform, so everyone will strive to sell their services at the cheapest costs possible. Along with that, the sellers will get exposure to their potential customers, right from this website.
Gain Buzz also helps you manage the service contracts and also helps you with the timeline of the contract. They take care that the hoardings are properly visible till the contract ends and also ensures that none of the parties suffer.
Thus, it is now, very easy to find such services online. It’s time to see how can you prepare efficient media strategies.
Things to consider while working on the media strategy
#1. Targeted audience
While you put your hoardings or advertise your brand in any other manner, you need to be sure that the message is reaching clearly and to your targeted audience. As selling slate and chalks to corporate would never work. Similarly, advertising to the wrong audience will not give proper results.
#2. Market research
While you start planning to prepare your media strategy, you need to take care of what’s going on in the market. Do proper research on what your targeted audience will like to see and only then take a step ahead. Here, you need to make sure that your branding or advertising fashion is according to current trends and you are not using tactics that were useful a decade ago.
#3. Competitive advertising
Having your eyeballs on your competitor’s activities is crucial. Competitive advertising is a concept where you advertise in such a manner that you are not thrown off the ring because of your opponent’s heavy voice.
This is seen in crowded product categories like cell phones, household stuff, etc. The whole media planning and the marketing strategy could vary on the go and you have to be ready for it any point of time.
#4. Media coverage area
Whenever you advertise any of your products or services, the area that it covers is one of the most important aspects of it. Before you start spending hefty amounts on your advertisement hoardings and other stuff, you need to be aware of your DMA – Designated Marketing Area.
If you have a clear idea of the area you need to target, you can save a lot of time, money and other resources.
#5. Balance your exposure to cost ratio
Whatever marketing strategies you develop has to be measurable. One of the finest ways to measure the performance or efficiency is to check out the exposure to cost ratio. You need to control the amount you are paying for getting exposure to a crowd of people.
Moreover, it is always advised to consider the percentage of the target audience in the crowd which is getting the exposure to your brand. If any of this i.e. Exposure to Cost ratio or the proportion of the targeted audience in the crowd is not as per the marks, it is time to redesign your strategy.
This is how you can move step by step to design your strategy and to go for media planning. In this competitive world, sticking to only one marketing strategy is not going to help. Your competitors might be ready to get along with new strategies and so, you need to be!
