Media Buys

The next big opportunity is one you're already familiar with.

If we had 2 stock picks for you that were going to outpace the market every year for the next five years we’d be on our way to making that elusive “Top Friends” category on your profile. There are no Oracles of Omaha on this team, but we do have two data points that could make you the top marketer at your company. The digital advertising spend category is growing at 9.9% a year while the 2 major components of media buys, Display Advertising and Affiliate Marketing are growing at 14.8% and 16% a year, respectively (eMarketer).

Those growth rates outpace paid search, search engine optimization, and email. If you're already using those three tactics, media buys may be the tactic to scale your digital marketing. When Wall Street asked Google where its next growth phase will come from, Eric Schmidt answered, “display is probably our next huge business” at a recent shareholder meeting. You can also feel Google’s presence more and more each year at the bi-annual Affiliate Summit Marketing Conference.

You can learn more about how to scale with display advertising, little known things about affiliate marketing, and Google's other can't miss marketing opportunities beyond search with our Brown Bag Lunch webinar series and our monthly eBoost newsletter.

The eBoost Way

eBoost Consulting focuses its Media Buys area of practice on direct response advertisers. Branding campaigns bring awards and accolades, but performance driven campaigns make it rain. 100% of the more than $1 million managed monthly by eBoost consultants is focused on scaling efficient conversion generation. The cumulative budgets of our clients and track record of success have given us advantageous relationships with affiliates, affiliate networks, ad networks, and publishers. However, managing media buys is more than skilled negotiations.

As display and affiliate value chains expand and media consumption habits change, a need grows for marketers to methodically minimize critical unknowns and assumptions to create a data-backed media buy strategy. eBoost Consulting has adopted this approach which is often labeled as Discovery Driven Planning, Assumption-Based Planning, Critical Assumption Planning, and Theory Focused Planning. There are numerous options of creatives, placements, networks, tactics, reporting methodologies, data sets to record, audiences to target, offers to promote, etc. Finding what works best within a finite set of resources is the challenge.

eBoost Consulting’s approach to media buys, and every service for that matter, is to plan around a key set of critical unknowns to answer. Once new information is available the plan is subject to change and we plan for the next critical unknown to uncover. Examples of critical unknowns include:

  • What is each new customer worth?
  • Will incentivized affiliate offers deliver an acceptable customer quality?
  • What type of display inventory performs the best?
  • What message has the highest response rate among middle aged women?
  • What is the total opportunity for behavioral retargeting?

Compared to conventional planning methods, eBoost Consulting’s media buy planning and optimization methodologies prioritize answering critical unknowns over how close outcomes come to projections. Projections are constantly refined as more data is available. The result is a practical approach that allows teams to identify, manage, and leverage your company’s media buy opportunities while eliminating unnecessary risks. Our approach is applied to the follow media buy activities:

  • Media planning (research, RFP development, price negotiation)
  • Creative strategy and guidelines
  • Analytics and performance tracking
  • Network and publisher management
  • Performance optimization
  • Reporting

While a cost per action (CPA) yield curve always exists in digital marketing, eBoost Consulting’s goal is to achieve efficiency at business changing scale. We execute this with a clear methodology, valued relationships across the value chain, and cross-functional experience of conversion design, paid search, and other digital marketing areas of practice. The scalability that Media Buys offers could very well make it that next big opportunity that takes your business to the next level.

Next Steps

eBoost Case Studies

Conversion Design Case Study

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eBoost Articles

5 Things You Don’t Know (but will now) About Affiliate Marketing

According to Forrester Research in their "US Affiliate Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014," affiliate marketing will grow from $1.9B industry in 2009 to $4B in 2014. ... read more »

Did You Know?

Display Advertising and Affiliate Marketing are growing at 14.8% and 16% a year, respectively.