What is Media Buying?
26. Apr, 2011 
4 Comments
Media buying, according to Wikipedia, is, “. . .the procurement of the best possible placement and price of a piece of Media real-estate within any given media.” Given the massive scope of the media buying industry, which includes TV, radio, print and Internet, for the purposes of this article we are going to narrow our focus to online media buying with the goal of helping you, to get out from under Google’s thumb.
To simplify things at the outset, media buying is any form of paid online advertising. As soon as you start talking about the Internet and advertising in the same sentence, more than likely the discussion is going to begin to center around Google. They might be a major player, but, as veteran media buyer Scott Rewick says, “Google doesn’t own the Internet.” So, media buying is all about discovering and using the thousands of other advertising venues outside of the realm of Google so that you can get your product in front of as many buyers as possible.
Media buying involves working with the following traffic resources:
Ad networks
These are aggregators of media real estate that have benefits both for publishers and for the advertisers looking to purchase ad space in bulk.
Social Networks
Facebook’s 500 million members with profiles that are full of demographic information makes ad targeting so efficient.
Search Engine Marketing
Yes, there are PPC opportunities outside of Google that can send targeted traffic to your websites and your offers.
Mobile Marketing
With the explosion in popularity of smart mobile phones and tablets such as the iPad, mobile marketing is expanding quickly.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still incredibly effective, and with the rise of such programs as Groupon, and other hyper-local email marketing sites there are huge opportunities for ad buys in this space.
When it comes to paying for media buys, you will hear several acronyms being tossed around such as, CPC, CPM, and CPA. Here’s what those terms mean:
CPC: Cost per click. This is fairly self-explanatory. You only pay when a consumer clicks on your ad.
CPM: Cost per thousand. This means that you will pay x amount of money for every thousand impressions your ad receives.
CPA: Cost per action. With CPA, advertisers state what they are willing to pay to get consumers to take a specific action such as filling out and submitting a form, or registering for a program.
If you have been focusing your energy on SEO to get free, organic traffic to your website, you have been bending over backwards to please a fickle taskmaster who can shut you down in the blink of an eye. With media buying you are working with guaranteed traffic not putting all of your eggs in one fragile basket.
You can learn all that you need to know about being an effective media buyer for free by doing your research online reading the blogs and hanging out in the forums. There are so many myths associated with media buying, but the truth is that it’s a low risk, high reward activity, and you can get started for less than you think and scale upwards as you learn more.
To learn more about media buying and other Internet marketing topics, be sure to visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, and subscribe to our RSS feed. You’ll get a ton of information that you can use to make more money in less time and maybe even have some fun doing it.
