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What can startups learn from media auditors?

Business

What can startups learn from media auditors?

As a fledgling new business, you will be carefully managing your expenditures and looking at ways to avoid spending by carrying out work in-house. Marketing, accounting and advertising outsourcing makes sense when you have a large business large and can afford for pay for expertise. But when you’re only a small business, you can greatly more by keeping these tasks within your team.

The main reason to do this is to minimise spend. However, there is also the secondary benefits to this hands-on experience helping you to get a better understanding of how these systems work. This is particularly useful when it comes to analysing your marketing spend. Understanding the value of another person’s work, whether it’s another team member or an agency, will help you to spot where ineffective spending has occurred.

Media is one of the biggest areas of advertising and marketing spend for many businesses. Media audits cover a range of forms including TV spots and newspaper ads, all the way to online interstitials and retargeting ads. You might not be ready to outsource to media auditors, but there is a lot you can learn from how they work.

Here are three of the most valuable takeaways:

Impartiality & objectivity are key in every startup

 Perhaps the biggest difference between doing anything yourself and outsourcing to another team or expert, is that outsourcing lends itself to objectivity. A fresh pair of eyes will always spot issues more effectively, because they haven’t internally reasoned and accepted those common issues.

In 2016, big businesses looked to entrepreneurs to evaluate their strategies. Because the internal teams had been working for so long on the projects, they only knew how to do what they do well. It meant that innovating or evaluating what they were doing was very difficult.

Startups thrive on innovation. Media auditors succeed in helping by taking an objective look at the results of campaigns without judgement of the individuals involved. It might be hard, but you should look at your media audits as ways to evaluate your spending, on the assumption you can do better and that it was worth it for, at the very least, what you learned in these first few attempts.

Media auditors use on market rates and opportunity to improve

Media auditors, Auditstar, cite the importance of looking at market rates when evaluating your marketing and advertising spend. Not only that, you should be looking at the rates at the time of purchase. You might be looking at your spend over months, up to a year before, and trying to make sense of your spend relative to current market rates. This won’t be an effective way of evaluating your work as it puts your spend at odds with the real rates of the time.

Comparative analysis with what you could have done will reveal what your opportunity was at a certain time. For media auditors, and by extension startups, this can teach you how to recognise better (or worse) opportunities next time. For media, this can be shown by your buying rate for ad space being higher than the average at the time. You then have to ask yourself, was this because you didn’t negotiate your cost for fear of losing the space, or was the ad space simply not worth it based on your return on investment?

Startups should aim to carry out audits as soon as possible. Waiting a long time to check in on how you are spending will waste funds and could cause your business to fail. If you can’t be objective because you carried out the work, get a second who can, then discuss and note practical solutions and guides for your next attempt.

Don’t stick to the same opportunities

Media auditors will always advise their clients on where they can make improvements to their campaigns by targeting new media or other opportunities. You will, of course, be reliant on the forms of advertising that work for your brand and targeting. You should not, however, be completely reliant on one route,

Finding new opportunities may seem risky but they can be very cost effective. Facebook ads are still much cheaper that Google Paid Ads and the return on investment can be very good, attracting leads that convert. As a startup, you might want to test your ads and new audiences on the cheaper platform and then scale these campaigns to bigger media once you know what works.

Never be afraid of trying new ways of boosting your brand, just don’t try them all at once.

I am the founder of Startup Today. I am the main writer and have put in many hours of work into creating this blog. If you want to find out more about me then lets get in contact.

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