Building a strong online presence in today’s era is key to any successful business. Sharing and advertising content on online platforms is the primary way to increase brand awareness, attract potential customers and, as a result, increase revenue.
However, attracting customers through the media requires detailed planning. Learning media planning can be very lucrative in today’s digital age!
This blog tells you everything you need to know about media planning. Let’s start by understanding what media planning is.
What is the media plan?
Media planning refers to the selection of appropriate media to advertise your business to the target audience at the right time and in the right place. Simply put, it is a strategy designed to achieve media goals and produce optimal results.
Media planning aims to find a combination of media channels that helps the marketer advertise to a large audience at the lowest possible cost. Therefore, it controls unnecessary advertising, ensuring optimal use of resources.
What does the media plan include?
The media plan includes a brief media plan. It helps advertising understand budget, advertising campaign objective, market scenarios along appropriate media channels.
Now let’s look at the 5 Ws of media planning
- Owho: What is/are the most suitable media channel(s) for the advertising campaign to be able to communicate effectively with the target audience?
- Ochicken: When will the advertising campaign be launched? Date, time, month are answered in this question.
- Ohat: What type of message should be communicated to the target audience via the advertising campaign? Is it an informational announcement, demonstration, etc. ?
- Oman: Who is the target audience for the ad campaign? How many people will be targeted? Age and sex are points to consider in answering this question.
- Ohere: Where is the target audience located? Identifying the geographic location of your audience is important when creating a media plan.
Media planning vs media buying
Media planning and media buying are closely related to each other. Media buying begins where media planning ends.
The basic difference between the two terms is that media planning is the development 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 advertising space on the various media channels to target your audience by negotiating with media providers. media.
Therefore, media buying is a continuation of media planning. Buying advertising space and negotiating with distributors requires a strategy to reach your target audience.
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Keep reading to find out how you can grow your media plan.
How to write a media plan?
1. Identify your goals
Identifying and setting goals is the first step in implementing any business strategy. Building brand awareness, generating new leads, increasing conversion rates, retargeting are some likely goals a media planner may have.
Using the SMART objective criteria is the easiest way to develop any strategy you want to implement. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.
Refer to the 5 questions you can ask yourself when developing your strategy.
Specific: What must be accomplished? How can it be accomplished?
Measurable: Is the objective quantifiable?
Feasible: Is the goal feasible and achievable by the team?
Relevant: How is the goal beneficial to the organization?
Limited in time: Set a realistic deadline for your plan.
2. Conduct market research and determine the target audience
Once you’re clear on what you want to achieve with your goals, do some market research. Conducting market research will help you create content and formulate a plan based on your target audience.
Building 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.
When determining your target audience, you can consider the following points.
- Determine the type of campaign – Business to Customer (B2C) or Business to Business (B2B).
- Demographics – Age, gender. Location, occupation, education
- Will they use your product?
- To which media does your target turn for information?
- How does your product help the target?
Determining target audiences will help you choose the appropriate media platforms to launch your ads and share content.
3. Implement your media plan
Determining the target audience will easily help you determine the perfect media mix for your advertising campaign.
Once you have chosen the combination of media platforms, you can choose your media plan templates. There is a wide range of free downloadable templates available for you. These templates will help you work efficiently on your multimedia content. Hubspot, Sprout Social, and Google Sheets are simple templates you can use.
Templates bring clarity and allow you to coordinate your content across your media platforms, improving productivity and reaching your goals faster.
4. Measure your performance
After launching the advertising campaign, measure the performance of your plan. Identify problems and act accordingly.
Find out which media platform generates 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 generates the highest revenue?
- Which platform generates 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 summarize
Media planning is integral to the success of any business. It is essential to reach audiences by creating appropriate content and collaborating with media providers to launch advertising campaigns at the right time.
To strategically build a media plan, remember to use a suitable media plan template. Follow the steps above and start planning today! And a bonus would be to get professionally trained in digital marketing to increase your business ROI even more.
We hope you enjoyed reading the blog! If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below.
