5 Reasons You Should Use a Media Agency

In the era of social media and influencers, even more business owners and CMOs are drawn like moths to the flame of earned media (promotion) or inexpensive digital media. However, when it comes to building a product or service to true scale, paid media — especially traditional media like television or radio — remains unbeaten.

But even when finally convinced to enter this media marketplace, many companies remain reluctant to work with media buying agencies. For many, the belief that keeping those services in-house not only saves money but also allows them to maintain the power of their own vision about their product and its eventual success.

However, the benefits of working with a media agency far outweigh any concerns. Below are just five reasons to enlist a powerful agency partner to buy and manage your media.

• Relationships and Clout. Put simply, it’s highly unlikely that you have the relationships with media outlets, the ability (and willingness) to negotiate with them, and the power of the purse that your new agency partner does. Your agency’s media spend with the outlets goes far beyond your account and gives them better access to a wider variety of opportunities to create the most efficient media plan. In addition, they know — and often enjoy — a negotiating process that can be tedious for inexperience in-house buyers.

• Experience. Media agencies not only understand relationships and negotiation, but also know how to build a strategy, change it on the fly, and optimize it throughout its lifespan. This experience and knowledge likely will more than pay for the added expense of hiring the agency. They’ll get the strategy right the first time and can play on those long-standing relationships with media outlets to tweak your campaign on the fly to maximize ROI.

• Perspective. Often, as the product owner, it’s easy to lose sight of your product’s strengths and weaknesses in the eyes of the consumer. You are so invested in its success, that you simply can’t see how someone wouldn’t buy it. A media agency can help remove that blind spot by bringing a new perspective on your strategy. An understanding of how rates fluctuate, which outlets will best serve your campaign, and what’s worked (and hasn’t) in your vertical before allows your agency partner to expand your vision and minimize your challenges.

• Taking Away Your To-Do List. The day-to-day grind of managing your own media plan is no joke: integrating new data from various platforms into your evolving media plan; traffic; invoicing; reconciling ratings and measuring effectiveness; and more. A media agency will take away these headaches and allow you to focus on the big picture.

• Data and Analysis. Instead of building your own planning process and seeking out data and analysis vendors to assist in maximizing your campaign, hiring a media agency means all of that is in place due to the agency’s existing data and planning expertise — and vendor relationships. Advanced media tools that come through these relationships will lead to media buys that are both methodical and evolving as new information is gleaned.

Many leading media agencies are members of the PDMI. Take a look at our list of member companies today for more information.