MEDIA PLANNING AND HOW TO BUILD A MEDIA PLAN
Learn about the advantages of media planning for businesses and how to create one.
What is media planning?
Marketing professionals use the process of media planning to choose the most effective way to reach an audience. Media planning is examining target demographics, distribution channels, platforms, messaging, and advertisements to identify the most successful marketing strategies for a specific brand or product. You can reach potential customers with the appropriate message at the right time on the right channel with careful media strategy.
Market research is the most effective component of media planners’ planning strategies, according to HubSpot’s 2022 State of Media & Content Planning Research Report, and 22% of them aim to increase their research spending.
What is a media plan?
Now that you are familiar with what media planning is and how the job market will be in 2022, let’s look at how media plans might benefit organizations. A media strategy specifies the target audiences, the distribution channels, and the timing of a marketing message.
You should have the following elements in your media plan:
#1 Objects and KPIs: What do you consider to be an effective advertising campaign?
#2 Budget: How much money can you spend on media and how will you spend it?
#3Targeting your audience: What are the objectives and difficulties of the target audience, and where (and when) do they spend their online time?
#4 Message: What are the primary themes of the media material, and how will these themes influence the kinds of content you produce?
#5 Planning: Based on audience information, how frequently and when will the messaging appear across channels?
#6 What combination of media, including social media platforms, blog material, email marketing, paid advertisements, earned media (news mentions and backlinks), and conventional media, would you utilize to expand your advertising reach based on audience insights?
Advantages of having a media strategy
A business can gain by creating a media plan in a number of ways, including:
Becoming more familiar with your audience
Increasing the effectiveness of your audience communication
Organizing your marketing initiatives
Keeping track of campaign activity
Enhancing campaign effectiveness
Following the newest media trends
Driving overall business objectives, from expanding your clientele to boosting sales
How to draft a media plan.
Writing a media plan is a procedure you’ll need to master as you learn about media planning. To start creating a media plan for your upcoming marketing campaign, follow these steps:
1. Determine your advertising objectives.
Establish your goals for a marketing strategy clearly.
Ensure that your advertising aims line up with your overall company objectives.
Draw on these to help you explain your own.
Boost participation and followers on social media
Produce quality leads
Convert email users into paying consumers.
Knowing your audience will help you deliver the correct message at the right time to have the biggest impact. In addition to obtaining the usual data on goals, difficulties, and demographics (such as age, location, and income), you’ll also need to learn what sorts of advertisements your target market responds to the most. What advertising and messaging strategies are more effective? Which television networks does your audience favor?
3. Improve customer personas.
To improve or develop buyer personas, use data from market research and knowledge of current clients. A buyer persona is a fictionalized portrayal of the ideal client. Buyer personas can help you make more informed marketing choices.
4. Choose your media outlets.
List the channels you will use to reach your target audience in your media plan, along with a brief description of the material that will run on each channel. Focus on the platforms that will likely be used by your audience.
5. Pick media planning software.
Using media planning tools is a crucial step in making the most of your media plan and the advertising activities based on it. Software and templates used in media planning organize the information required to start and run an effective advertising campaign. You must keep track of ad spending, how campaigns are doing across each channel, and the amount of money that can be attributed to specific marketing initiatives.
When choosing media planning tools, consider the cost, ease of setting each up, what each one tracks, and how it presents data. Here are five tools to choose from.
6. Develop a media strategy.
Write your media plan based on the knowledge and suggestions you’ve acquired, then send it to the other stakeholders and members of the marketing team. Include the following:
Objects and KPIs
Budget Schedule
Targeting of audiences
Messaging
Scheduling
mixed media
7. Put your media strategy into action and track the results.
Implement the advertising campaign across channels once the team and stakeholders have discussed the media plan. Set aside time to monitor performance and compare it to your objectives. Adapt the media strategy as necessary.
