A good marketing strategy can make or break a business. But with so many different marketing channels, it can be hard to figure out your media budget, where you should be advertising, and how much you should spend in each media. That’s where media management comes in.
What is media management in marketing?
When used in a marketing context, media management refers to planning, implementing and measuring the impact of marketing via all the different media channels. With a media management strategy, a business can accurately assess the effectiveness and importance of its advertising endeavours across different mediums. From traditional avenues like television, radio, posters and leaflets, to more modern marketing methods such as social media, YouTube spots and paid Google ads, a media management strategy will cover all of these.
Media management in broad strokes can be broken down into three parts: auditing, budgeting and strategy. All of these are strongly interrelated, as a good audit will help a business set a good budget that puts spending in all the right places.
Use media audits to find out how effective your spend is
A key aspect of media management is carrying out audits of your previous marketing campaigns. As leading media management firm Auditstar discuss, auditing your current and past marketing strategies can be hugely insightful, and a great way to help set up or amend your current media budgets.
Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker reportedly said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Thankfully for John, management of media budgets can do a lot to alleviate this commonly-experienced problem.
The information gleaned from a media audit can help you determine which kinds of media are really connecting with your audience (the half of your spending that isn’t wasted) and which kinds of media are not (the half you’re wasting). You might discover a YouTube advert has a proportionately far higher click-through-rate (CTR) than a Google ad, meaning YouTube is clearly the better platform to be placing adverts on.
Through discoveries like this, you will find it much easier to create your media budget for the follow year, meeting your target audience where they are online and offline, without having to take a covering-all-bases scattergun approach. Concentrating your efforts on the areas that you know are effective will help you put that wasted half of your advertising spend to use.
Media management allows you to eliminate wasteful spending
Without marketing management, your media budget will be far less efficient than it could be. But a bad media campaign will cost much more than the money you waste on it. Mounting a campaign that dedicates resources in ineffective places will lead you to miss out on potential customers, clients and sales that you could have secured, had you planned your spending better.
This is especially apparent on the internet. Business Reporter notes that 60% of digital marketing spend is wasted. Even worse, research shows that 54% of online adverts are never even seen by human beings. This is the very definition of a wasted advertising campaign. Media audits may also reveal that no customers are watching those TV adverts you spent so long creating, or following the calls to action on your website.
A better strategy, making use of media management, would never encounter problems like these.
Reinvest your media budget in the most beneficial areas
After carrying out a careful audit and eliminating spending on areas that don’t need it, you will be able to reinvest the rest of the money in your marketing budget into areas that you know will be more effective, be it paid ads, certain forms of media — such as television or newer platforms like YouTube — or even in other areas such as PR events or networking.
Simply put, media management will make it easier to get manage your marketing, which is exceptionally important for entrepreneurs.