Running your business is challenging enough. You've got to ensure that your assembled product is up to par, that orders are fulfilled, that everyone is pulling their weight, and that bills are paid on time. On any given day, you could be thumbing through lease agreements, disciplinary reports, financial projections, loan offers, and production data. While you understand how critical marketing is, you often don't have the time to give it the attention it deserves. Sometimes, you're not entirely clear what the marketing data is telling you, making it hard to tell if you’re actually getting the return on investment you should be getting.
Whether you have in-house marketing staff or are a staff-of-one, working with an experienced media partner can help you understand, assess and improve your marketing performance, as well as increase your marketing ROI. You can immerse yourself in all the other necessary facets of the business, assured that every ad dollar is well-spent, every message is tailored to your target audience, and every effort is ultimately driving sales and revenue.
Expertise Brings Improvement
When you work with a media partner, you're benefiting in several ways. Media partners have deep expertise in their industry. Since media partners work with other firms on an ongoing basis, they usually have a broader perspective of industry trends and best practices than your in-house staff may have.
A large part of marketers’ jobs involves staying on top of what works and what doesn't. In contrast, in-house staff is often deluged with administrative tasks, shifting internal priorities, and other initiatives that may divert their attention from marketing. A media partner, therefore, can provide the perfect complement to your in-house marketing staff. The in-house staff know your business inside and out and can benefit from the strategic and tactical insights a media partner brings to the table from other corners of the industry.
With those insights, media partners also bring a deep capacity to develop and produce high-quality marketing materials. An experienced media partner has worked with a range of vendors, including market research firms, digital marketing and PR agencies, printers and mailing houses, media buyers, and more — more than the typical business has.
A media partner can help you perform the market research necessary to define your target market accurately and determine the best channels and messaging strategy to reach your audience, thereby reducing your ad costs and increasing your revenue. Behind your primary contact at the company is a full staff of experienced media experts, graphic artists, and blog writers stemming from a journalistic background, as well as digital marketing experts and web developers. They can bring their production connections, knowledge, and expertise to develop high-quality content that compels your target audience to action. Their combination of experience allows them to work together and provide the most effective content to help your company advertise.
Higher Quality Production Has Better Returns
If you're reaching out to your audience via radio or television, the quality of your ads is vital. Consumers can easily distinguish low production quality broadcast ads from high-quality ones. They'll be less inclined to buy from you if yours aren't up to par. No matter how enthusiastic you and your marketing team may be about the possibility of going on-air, you should understand that broadcast ad production is a complex process. You have to write a script, hire talent, scout locations, obtain props and wardrobe, shoot the commercial, edit video and audio. Further, depending on how the initial version is received, you may need to reshoot part or all of it.
You'll need to handle all those tasks, plus schedule times for your ad to air. A media partner can take all these tasks off your plate, providing you with scripts, rough cuts of your ad, and scheduling times or developing budgets to approve. At the end of the day, you'll be able to take advantage of high-quality content by boosting your ad creative that will help drive sales.
A Partner Can Create Your Digital Ads
An experienced media partner can also help you increase your marketing ROI by working with you to strengthen your digital marketing efforts. Successful digital marketing plans can help you target specific consumer segments, aid consumers in brand recall, provide a personalized customer marketing experience, and drive sales.
Such digital marketing requires an integrated approach to get more customers using ads that are aligned in style, tone, and message with your social media, your website, and offline ads, such as radio and print collateral. It also requires multiple messaging tactics, triggered by actions that each consumer takes along each stage of the buyer's journey to compel them to become customers. A media partner has the expertise on staff to optimize your ads for each platform you’re using to advertise. You can’t simply reconfigure your traditional ad to fit into a digital landscape, since that’s like using a screwdriver to hammer a nail. Working with a media partner can help you grow and keep up to date in the digital marketing field, which itself continues to evolve rapidly.
No matter what your online plans are, you'll want to work with a partner who has the time and experience to help you develop, create, and distribute on-brand digital ads that are compelling to your target audience.
Track Your Ads for Success
While both broadcast and digital audio or video ads can be time and resource-intensive to produce, digital ads also require continuous, frequent monitoring and adjustment for the best results. You'll want to regularly review digital marketing channels, creative, and targeting to determine what's working so that you can capitalize on those areas.
Similarly, you'll want to assess each for underperformance so that you can determine whether it makes sense to continue to invest in those channels, creative, or consumer segments, and if so, how to improve your performance. By continuously monitoring performance and adjusting as necessary, you can ensure that you remain on a path to meet your marketing objectives. Media partners not only use robust digital ad analytics platforms to track KPIs. They also have the experience to analyze your results and provide concrete insights, recommendations, and action steps.
If you're a marketing team of one and your eyes glaze over when you hear acronyms like PPC, SEO, CPM, CPC, and the like, you'll want to work with a media partner with demonstrated digital expertise. Even if you and your team are familiar with these terms, you should take advantage of the expertise a media partner can bring to bear. Working with one can ensure that your digital ad dollars increase meaningful KPIs, like sales, rather than vanity metrics like Facebook Likes.
Even with the costs of hiring one, an experienced media partner will bring enough value to increase your business's marketing ROI exponentially. By delivering strategic industry insights, helping you define your target audience precisely, crafting and producing high-quality persuasive ads in all formats, and tracking and optimizing your ads, a media partner can help you grow your brand, sales, and market share.
