A Media Planning Guide for your Advertising Campaign

Creating a solid online presence in today’s era is the key to any business’ success. Sharing and advertising content on online platforms is the prime way to increase brand awareness, attract potential customers and in turn increase revenue.

However, attracting customers via media requires detailed planning. Learning media planning can be very lucrative in today’s digital era!

This blog tells you everything you need to know about media planning. Let’s first understand what media planning is.

What is Media Planning?

Media Planning refers to selecting the appropriate media outlets to advertise your business to the target audience at the right time and place. In simple words, it is a strategy designed to achieve media objectives and yield optimum results.

Media planning aims to find a combination of media channels that help the marketer to advertise to a large audience at the lowest possible cost. Hence, it controls wasteful advertising, ensuring optimum utilisation of resources.

What does Media Planning Comprise?

Media planning comprises a brief media plan. It helps the advertising in understanding the budget, the goal of the advertising campaign, the market scenarios along the suitable media channels.

Let's now look at the 5Ws of media planning

1. Which: Which is/are the most suitable media channel(s) for the advertising campaign to be able to communicate effectively with the target audience
2. When: When will the advertising campaign be launched? The date, time, month are answered in this question.
3. What: What kind of message is to be communicated to the target audience via the advertising campaign? Is it an informative announcement, a demonstration etc?
4. Whom: Who is the target audience of the advertising campaign? How many people will be targeted? Age and gender are points to be considered while answering this question.
5. Where: Where is the target audience located? Identifying the geographical location of your audience is important while creating a media plan.

Media Planning Vs Media Buying

Media planning and Media Buying are both closely related to one another. Media Buying starts where Media Planning ends.

The basic difference between both terms is that media planning is the developing stage of the advertising campaign and media buying is the execution of the advertising campaign.

While media planning is the strategy of creating and publishing content on media platforms, media buying is the process of buying ad space on the various media channels to target your audience by negotiating with media vendors.

Hence, Media Buying is a sequel to Media Planning. Purchasing ad space and negotiating with distributors, requires a strategy to reach out to your target audience.

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Keep reading to know how you can develop your media plan.

Image ~ DVIO Digital

How to Write a Media Plan?

1. Identify Your Goals

Identifying and setting goals is the first step to implementing any business strategy. Building brand awareness, generating new leads, increasing conversion rates, retargeting are a few probable goals that a media planner can have.

Using the SMART goals criteria is the simplest way to develop any strategy that you want to implement. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

Refer to the 5 questions that you can ask yourself while framing your strategy.

Specific: What needs to be accomplished? How can it be accomplished?
Measurable: Is the goal quantifiable?
Achievable: Is the goal feasible and achievable by the team?
Relevant: How is the goal beneficial to the organization?
Time-Bound: Set a realistic deadline for your plan.

2. Conduct Market Research and Determine the Target Audience

Once you are clear of what you want to achieve through your goals, conduct market research. Conducting market research will help you to create content and formulate a plan according to your target audience.

Creating buyer personas is an effective way to determine your target audience. A Buyer Persona is a detailed description of the people representing your target market. It is created by surveying a predetermined target group.

While determining your target audience, you can consider the following points.

• Determine the Campaign Type - Business to Customer (B2C) or Business to Business (B2B).
• Demographics - Age, Gender. Location, Occupation, Educational Background
• Will they use your product?
• Which media does your target turn to for information?
• How does your product help the target?

Determining target audiences will help you decide the suitable media platforms to launch your ads and share the content on.

3. Implement Your Media Plan

Determining the target audience will easily help you in determining the perfect media mix for your advertising campaign.

Once the combination of the media platforms has been chosen, you can choose your media planning templates. There is a wide range of free downloadable templates available for you. These templates will help you in working efficiently and effectively on your media content. Hubspot, Sprout Social and Google Sheets are simple templates you can use.

Templates provide clarity and enable you to coordinate your content across your media platforms, improve productivity and reach your goals faster.

Source ~ Six Degree SLA

4. Measure Your Performance

After launching the advertising campaign, measure the performance of your plan. Identify glitches and act on them.

Understand which media platform is driving the most engagement and revenue. You can optimize your budget for your existing and future campaigns and track your progress by understanding the following points.

• Which platform is generating the highest revenue?
• Which platform is generating the lowest revenue?
• How can you increase your engagement on the non-performance platform?

Learning Google Analytics and Google Search Console are essential skills for marketers or planners!

To Summarise

Media Planning is an integral part of any business’s success. It is essential for reaching out to the audience by creating appropriate content and collaborating with media vendors to launch advertising campaigns at the right time.

To strategically build a media plan, do not forget to use a suitable media planning template. Follow the above steps and start planning today! And a bonus would be to train in digital marketing professionally to upscale your business ROI even further.

We hope you enjoyed reading the blog! If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments section below.

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