In the past, marketers struggled to find where their audiences were online. Programmatic now allows marketers to leverage different data sources to build audiences and activate them in media, which has taught them much more about consumers’ shopping and content consumption habits. Marketers can now find where their customers and prospects are shopping and engaging online and use that information in their targeting efforts. But what remains a challenge is actually knowing if they’ve reached their best audiences with their media placements. The current supply landscape presents a number of hurdles to achieving this goal:
The 3 biggest challenges in media management
- The complex media ecosystem: Header bidding. Privilege. Fraud. Auctions. The media landscape isn’t easy to navigate without the right expertise to secure the best deals, ensure inventory is clean and overcome technological challenges. This leads to a lot of time and resources being spent in the initial setup phase of media management.
- Misguided content targeting: Media plans are often still created with content instead of audience in mind. By creating content to reach a certain audience instead of using an audience-driven approach, marketers end up not knowing if this is the actual content their target audiences are consuming. This in turn limits the reach marketers are hoping to gain against these users.
- Elusive premium media: Large media buyers get the advantage of having the budget to make large media commitments that provide privileged access and premium media opportunities. It can be hard for smaller companies to compete and, thus, they lose out on the best media to reach their customers where they are consuming content.
How to overcome them
The good news: there are proven ways to reduce the uncertainty and complexity in how you manage media, and to make sure your ads reach the people you actually want to reach.
- Turning content and context on their heads: Content targeting can be useful to target customers—but they might not be the ones you actually want to reach. That’s because content targeting strategies don’t always take into account what your target user is actually consuming. So, you could be trying to target them with content they have zero interest in. Instead, you need to optimize based on an audience-first, not a media-first, strategy, so you can find your best customers and prospects. Before content even comes into question, you need to know who your most high-value audiences are and where to find them.
- Continual access to premium and privilege: The goal when trying to match the right media placement to the right audience is a higher win rate. This has historically been difficult for even medium-sized businesses to achieve when larger companies and agencies seem to have a foothold on premium, privileged access. Working with a technology provider with a large media footprint and the scale to help you successfully negotiate deals and win the inventory you need is key to beating out the media titans.
- Reducing complexity: Don’t try to manage everything in-house. Consider partners with the right expertise to address fraud, header bidding, supply chain hygiene, private deals and more. The supply landscape has gotten too complicated to stay stuck in one strategy. You might traditionally only work in private deals, but you should consider other types of negotiations to ensure you are doing whatever is necessary to get the right media to match your best audiences.
Interested in learning how we help with deal procurement? Get in touch with our team.
Photo from Creative Commons
