What Is Media Planning?
As we all know, successful digital marketing all comes down to planning. As the old saying goes, all those who fail to plan, plan to fail. While this saying often draws raised eyebrows and sighs, it’s still integral to the marketing world. Today, we want to talk specifically about media planning. What can you expect from this area and how does it differ from media buying?
Before buying ad space and launching advertising campaigns, you need to plan the whole process…and this is essentially the foundation of media planning. Where will you advertise? When will you advertise? How will you advertise? How often will you run advertisements? You’ll need to answer all these questions to optimize ROI and engagement.
If you go about your day endlessly creating arbitrary ad campaigns, they might enjoy small moments of success alone. However, they will never contribute to anything larger. In other words, you won’t have a cohesive strategy and you’ll notice segmentation within the strategy.
At this stage, you might still ask why media planning is necessary. Can’t you just plan in your head? Well, the whole point of media planning is that you end up with a physical, tangible document that guides the advertising strategy.
You’ll be glad to know that media planning isn’t a waste of time (hooray!). Instead, you’ll enjoy a wealth of different benefits. Firstly, you cannot underestimate the power of having a guide and an organized mind. You might think that everything is working with a loose plan in your head, but you don’t know the impact of media planning if you’ve always avoided it. Like tracks for a train, it will guide the marketing team and contribute towards sensible decision-making.
Over time, media planning also makes it easier to set a campaign budget; not only will you set a budget, but you’ll find it easier sticking to it. Suddenly, you aren’t having awkward meetings with the accounting team because campaigns have overspent again.
With media planning, you keep a closer eye on what competitors are doing. How do they manage their digital marketing strategies? Is their strategy working? What can you learn from their successes and failures? On the topic of keeping a close eye, media planning assists your marketing team. Everybody should have a clear idea of what’s expected of them not only in the long term but also on a day-to-day basis.
Next, you’ll give the business opportunities to compare against past performance. Every time that you update the media plan, you can compare actual performance to expected performance. If you aren’t comparing performance from one point in time to the next, what’s the point in marketing at all? You will only ever experience sub-par performance rather than actively pushing toward your goals.
Finally, we may convince you by explaining the benefits that media planning has for audience understanding. With the research that you’ll carry out for media planning, you’ll learn more about your audience. Of course, this reflects in your targeting and campaigns are inherently more effective.
Difference Between Media Planning and Media Buying
We know that some people reading this will have a confused look on their faces as they think about media planning and media buying. While media planning covers the initial stages of the process, media buying is what happens as you put the plan into action. While media planning lays out the guidelines, media buying works within the parameters to obtain the right platforms and channels for the strategy to thrive.
With media buying, you’ll discover various ad types, audiences, media channels, and more. Naturally, you’ll then purchase the ads that help to move the business closer to its goals, laid out in the media plan. In many cases, you’ll find businesses working with media buying companies to purchase the right advertising media.
Difference Between Paid Media and Unpaid Media
Furthermore, we should clear up another question that new marketers have, and it regards unpaid and paid media. Often, businesses will use both in their marketing strategy. Firstly, unpaid media is any type of content that you can produce and upload for no cost. The most common example is a blog post or article on your website since you only need to invest time. Aside from time, you don’t need to pay anything to write an article and upload it.
On the other hand, paid media includes a cost somewhere in the process. While most people think of paid advertising on social media and the like, we can look back to the traditional marketing environment to find examples too with TV and radio. Unlike unpaid media, there’s no way to get your content onto TV or radio without paying something. Likewise, you’ll need to pay for ad space on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms.
With this, you’re ready to discover more about the media planning process. How do you create a media plan? In our experience, it’s important to follow four steps, and we’ve laid them out below.
1. Research
If you’re doing everything you can to avoid research this year, the sad news is that you’re probably in the wrong industry. Research underpins everything that you do in marketing, and the same is true with media planning. You need to learn about your audience, previous campaigns and strategies, market segments, competitors, and more.
At this stage, we recommend gathering as much information and data as possible because it could all help later in the process. See this as an opportunity to become an expert in your industry.
2. KPIs and Marketing Objectives
Next, what do you want to achieve from this process? It might sound obvious, but vocalizing your aims provides everybody with goals toward which they will work. Unfortunately, you can’t just assume that everybody is on the same wavelength as you because, well, they probably aren’t. By vocalizing goals, you ensure that all employees work in tandem.
Additionally, keep your main business objectives in mind and the KPIs pertinent to your strategy. For example, this could include social media metrics, conversion rates, cost per click, and others.
Now, you’re ready to think about how you’re going to achieve your objectives. You have the destination in mind…how will you get there? We recommend considering the following:
- Important messages
- Ideal media for your goals
- Worst media for your goals
- Budget
- CTA
- Timeline
- Specifications
- Value of unpaid and paid media
4. Implementation and Measurement
After putting in lots of hard work and getting to this stage, you’re now ready to implement your strategy to achieve your objectives and put all that research to good use. Despite all the research and effort before launching campaigns, be aware that not everything works on the first attempt. Speak to a marketer with decades of experience and they’ll tell you that success comes with adjustments, fine-tuning, and learning from both good and bad performance.
With this in mind, remember to monitor campaigns and provide them with the environment they need to succeed. What’s working? What isn’t working? Don’t forget A/B testing; over time, you’ll keep what works while removing what doesn’t work. Play around with headlines, images, CTAs, and other components of your ads, for example.
Over the coming months, measure performance and constantly consider your position in relation to your goals. Sometimes, marketers spend so long scrutinizing their ads that they forget what the campaign was supposed to achieve. While they might have an effective ad, it doesn’t contribute to the goals in mind.
Template for a Media Plan
Here’s a template that you can use for a media plan in 2022. Depending on your industry, the information that you include may differ. Therefore, see this template as a loose guide rather than sticking with it religiously. For example, you may want to add a sub-section so that the plan better meets your needs.
Stage 1 — Research
- Geography and location
- Audience
- Background
- Stakeholders
- Lessons from previous strategies
- Past results
- Competitors
Stage 2 — KPIs and Marketing Objectives
- KPIs (key performance indicators)
- Objectives (both as a business and for this strategy)
Stage 3 — Media Strategy
- Preferred media
- Media to avoid
- Budget
- CTAs
- Critical messages
- Assets and deliverables
- Visual specifications
- Timeline
Stage 4 — Implementation and Measurement
- Launch
- Measurement
- Optimization
- Campaign end
So long as you cover these topics in your media plan, you won’t stray too far from a solid strategy. With this, we bring the article to a close and hope that you’ve found some value from the information. To summarize, media planning is the process of creating an advertising guide to maximize return on investment (ROI) and advertising efficacy.
Rather than shooting in the dark and creating ads in isolation, a media plan provides a path to follow, a path that should lead to your marketing objectives. Why not get started with a media plan today?
