Part 1: Media buying
If you’ve reached a point where you can no longer call yourself an affiliate marketing newbie and are ready to move on to the next level of success, the logical next question to ask yourself is, “Where do I go from here?” We might suggest it’s time to start to think about building your own media buying team. A small team of a few people can double or even triple your power and potential. Now imagine a modest but well-equipped team of maybe ten people. You get the idea and you can see why it might be time to start thinking about gathering your forces to reach that next level. We’ve personally built and worked with a variety of teams of various sizes and as a result, have gained a lot of experience in this area. Today we are going to share that knowledge with you. You will learn what to do, what to avoid and how to keep your team focused, productive and successful.
Media Buyers
Let’s start with the most important members of your team. We are talking about the people that will be on the front line of your campaigns. Creating, managing and uploading your ads to your ad networks and monitoring and optimizing ad performance. Each team will need a leader who will be responsible for setting and developing campaign strategies. In our experience, the most effective and agile media buying teams should be no larger than about five members per leader.
Affiliate marketing is a dynamic and ever-shifting business by its very nature. As such the focus of a media team’s manager is optimal in smaller numbers and can begin to degrade outside of a team with more than about five members. This is partly due to the fact that they must simultaneously be monitoring the shifts in the market while also leading and monitoring the performance of the team.
When once profitable campaigns begin to fizzle out, it’s important for a media buying team manager to react and shift to set the path back on course. This requires procedural restructuring and takes time and money. Keep in mind that during these shifts, salaries are being paid and operational costs continue to chip away budgets until a profitable redirection is discovered. Money is flying out the door and a fast reaction time is essential. A large ship turns slowly, even with the best captain at the helm and this is where keeping those teams small and nimble really pays off.
So how can you scale? The answer is to build a number of these smaller teams under a collection of team managers. This allows for greater reaction times and fluidity as markets change. Decision making and communication among participants become faster. Team leaders are also able to more effectively share their experiences with other managers and learn from each other. This also allows for diversification of other teams to work toward different projects simultaneously and thus allows for more stability in a company’s efforts toward profit.
Since a media buying team is at the core of the media buying company (and ultimately the part that actually brings in money), the rest of the infrastructure should logically be built around it. This is why our main goal is to ensure that media buyers spend as little time as possible on tasks that do not directly bring in money.
This is where Zeustrack delivers a significant advantage. It’s an excellent teamwork solution since the team admin can configure access to various features of the system as is appropriate to the function of that team member. In addition to this, the team admin also has access to media buying reports which allows for in-depth analytics that makes the work of the entire group even more effective.
We will be discussing even more key steps for building a successful media buying team in the future, but you can get started on your Zeustrack free trial now!
