Spend On Buying Ad Space Or Invest In Building Your Own Digital Assets?

Buzzfactory
Buzzfactory is a social media & digital agency.

Marketing is the lifeblood for growth. If you need to grow, you need to reach out to more prospective customers and the quickest way to do this is advertising.

Identify your target audience

Identify where you can find these people

Get in front of them by purchasing their attention in the form of an advertisement

On offline media you search for spaces for print ads, magazines, television, hoardings wherever the right audiences gather and online it’s much the same with display advertisements, search marketing, banner space purchases and more. You find the right space that reaches the right audiences and you pay for it. The next month, you find the right space, that reaches the right audiences and you pay for it…again!

Marketing spend is a perpetual ongoing kind of spend that continues as long as you need to reach communities that others have built.

The key words here being – that others have built. 

Since you don’t own the community and the media / property (whether it’s a magazine, website, billboard) where these audiences gather, you have to keep paying as long as you want to reach out to them. One of the biggest game changers, social media, blogging, web content and online publishing have brought about is giving nearly anybody the opportunity to “build their own communities or digital media properties on the web so that they can own those communities”. With the right expertise, investment in time, resources and determination to deliver great content, you can actually publish and develop your own digital assets, build audiences based on your target areas and eventually keep those audiences rather than have to pay each time you need to reach out to them.

A baking products brand could spend $2500 per month a month renting a 300×300 banner space on a cooking and baking blog that receives 50,000 visitors and approximately 150,000 page-views each month.

The banner could result in some amount of awareness, about 200 clicks and a small percentage of sales that can be attributed to the banner. The next month they would have to shell out another $2500 and the month after to sustain the same results. Alternatively, they could invest in developing a cooking & baking blog of their own. For the first several months, they may have very little traffic and it would take time to even reach the first 1000 visitors. However with time and a consistent daily effort, they could develop a blog which also has 50,000 unique visitors a month and 150,000 pageviews.

Another six months later they could have 100,000 visitors and keep increasing their reach. The initial investment may be higher but as time goes, the costs don’t increase but the benefits do since you own that community, all the space around it and it works as a marketing asset to your business. You reap the rewards long after!

With time a lot of businesses have woken up to the fact that building your own online media assets, communities, publications and web properties is a viable option to constantly relying on third party sites to reach your audiences. We’ve actively helped build some of these for our own clients and seen the long term advantages of owning your digital assets as opposed to shelling out marketing budgets month after month renting space on other’s online properties.

While media buying and advertising remain the quickest way to seeing results, if you have some time and the will to invest in developing your own digital assets, we’d say go for it! There’s no better time to start…than now!

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