What does a media buyer do?

Most people I talk to don’t seem to have a clear idea of what a media buyer does and why they should enlist the help of one.

A media buyer, at least a good one, is not only responsible for buying media…

Skilled media buyers should be helping you strategically plan your entire campaign.

If a media buyer is doing any less than a marketing director would in strategically planning your campaign then you have the wrong media buyer.

On a typical campaign that I do media buying for, here are just some of the things on my mind:

• Strategically planning the entire campaign.
• Figuring out the targeting down to demographics, behavioral patterns and other details that could pertain to getting the right eyes on the campaign.
• Ensuring that the entire path is efficient enough to begin. This means that I need to look at landing pages and sales processes to make sure that we’re not going to send a bunch of people to sites that aren’t going to convert.
• Ensuring that proper split testing operations are in place. Let’s face it, even the best of us don’t know everything, split testing’s job is to make sure that we are constantly learning new things about our audience and product, and making sure it continues to convert over time. Without split testing, you are at a serious disadvantage.
• Creating the actual media, whether it’s banners, emails, ppc ads, etc. These need to be split tested too.
• Discuss and plan everything with the client or if it’s my own project, a partner.
• A good media buyer should be looking at the stats of a campaign consistently as well as in an overview sense.
• A good media buyer should also be good at negotiating, to get good rates on buys.
• Quite a few other things as well!

As you can see, us media buyers have to have skills in quite a few different areas, and we have to understand how it all works together for the common goal of making the client (or ourselves) more money by spending money, and all of the various elements in between.