Benefits of media planning and how to create a media planning strategy (2023)

Media planning is the process by which marketers determine when, where and how often to show an ad to increase engagement and ROI. The media plan can split advertising spend and resources between different offline and online resources such as print, broadcast, video ads, native content or paid ads. Here we'll discuss everything about media planning, including how media planning vs.media buying, benefits of media planning, etc.

In today's competitive marketplace, marketers need to serve customers with the right message, at the right time, in the right channel to see engagement happen. In media planning, marketers decide what these “rights” are.

An effective media plan offers a range of advertising opportunities that target a specific audience and align it with the company's marketing budget. When creating a media plan, marketers often consider the following factors:

• Audience the ad needs to reach
• market budget
• conversion goals
• message frequency
• message reach
• How can you describe success?

Media planning is mostly done by media planners in digital marketing agencies. Media planners need to work with media buyers and the business to develop a strategy to increase the ROI of media spend. Media planners must have a solid understanding of the company's brand and target audience, different media platforms and media trend-setting.

What is media planning?

Media planning is more concerned with developing a strategy, evaluating its effectiveness and adapting it, whereas buying is strategy implementation. A media planner calculates the brand and audience to determine the right mix of messages and media mix to advertise to effectively and positively reach customers.

Importance of the media planning process in advertising

Today's modern marketing often requires marketers to leverage different forms of media. A media plan gives marketers centralized information across all platforms. This helps streamline messages and campaigns and streamline the campaign review process.

Comparison between media planning and media buying

Media buying is the process of buying advertising space on different platforms and channels according to agreed media plans and reviewing ongoing campaigns. This means evaluating platform formats and rates to ensure they align with the plan, negotiating pricing, tracking media trends, and building relationships with counterparties across different channels and platforms. Media buying usually uses one of these strategies:

• manual bids
• provide real time
• programmatic purchases
• Direct Purchases

Media planning challenges

Media planning can be challenging as there are many factors to consider and many believe that marketing has not changed media planning processes and strategies.

Some of the challenges include:

Customer Level Targeting – The media plan needs to understand customers at a high level to find out what kind of message is relevant to them, which requires in-depth marketing analysis.

Platform Preference – Brands also need to understand the different platforms and channels that audience members are interacting with and at what times. This allows them to choose the right mediums in which to run campaigns. All of this must be done with a strict budget and media spending in mind.

Strong focus on budget – Media planning continues to revolve around budget rather than customer retention. There is limited flexibility with a budget and plan to allow marketers to correct course as campaigns run and new insights are found. Modern media planning needs the flexibility to allocate budget to different channels when they are successful.

Incorporating Measurements – With so many offline and online channels out there, it's infinitely harder for marketers to measure the success of these campaigns together to decide which are most effective and which need to be updated.

Now, media planning needs to adapt to focus on the customer experience, using flexible budgets and unified real-time measurements that allow for optimization of the media plan within the campaign.

Ways to create a media strategy

Creating a media plan is a detailed process that requires planners to consider the audience's needs as well as the organization's goals. Here are some important steps and considerations advertisers need to make when creating a media plan.

determine media goalsIt might be easier to assume that the goal is to drive engagement or conversions; however, this would simplify this step. Goals can differ by department, or there can be multiple goals for a single campaign. For example, for Sales Team and Sales Goals, the goal is to improve sales. However, the media objectives can be to increase brand awareness. Understanding the main objective of the campaign determines its flow.

Once goals are set, media planners need to research market trends as well as the competitive landscape. This research provides information on whether similar brands and destinations have been successful in the past and informs planning decisions. For example, a brand may have long relied on email campaigns, but numerous studies show that competitors have had great success with native ads. This shows how the company should introduce changes to its plan.

When defining and setting goals, a digital media planner needs to consider a budget. However, marketers should avoid allocating dollar amounts to specific channels. Instead, flexible marketing budget handling allows for optimization during the campaign period.

Determine the target audienceToday, marketing is driven by creating a positive customer experience. This means that marketers need to focus on the audience's specific needs when creating messages and choosing where to display those messages in the media mix.

First, marketers need to consider which portion of the global audience they want to engage with. From there, marketers need to analyze various attribution measurements and engagement analytics to understand what type of ads these users are interacting with, which ad is more creative than another, and most importantly, which channels these customers are using. While marketers often consider demographic information such as age, general interests, location, etc., they need to ensure they consider personal data captured through a unified measurement approach to deliver the most personalized results.

Consider frequency and rangeAnother important part of a media plan is to consider frequency and reach. Reach refers to the number of people the campaign is shown to in a given period of time. Frequency is the number of times the customer sees the ad during the campaign.

Benefits of media planning

Media planning is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Planning to fail is planning to fail. Media planning can make or break an advertising campaign. There are several benefits of media planning. Some of them are:

Target group-One of the main benefits of media planning is that it gives you the ability to target your marketing to the right audience. When your ad is targeted, the return on investment tends to be high. If you're not doing media planning to take your business to the next level, you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

The ability to target your ads to a specific audience helps you target just the right audience with your promotions. Media planning is the only way to ensure this.

targeted mediaDo you want to reach your target audience wherever they are? Media planning gives you the opportunity to invest in the media your prospects visit. Why waste your budget on the wrong ads? Get your message out where your potential customers are.

Media planning helps you invest your marketing budget in the right media that will ensure a high return on your marketing investment.

Investment in digital mediaIf your company has invested in traditional marketing so far, it's high time to invest in digital media. In this digital age, there are so many potential customers that can be reached through online marketing.

Being present with the right message where your potential customers are gives you an important advantage over your competitors. You can accomplish this through your media planning.

With the help of media planning, you can easily see which portals and online media your target audience is on and advertise as cheaply as possible. Media planning helps your company or business to be found.

Choosing the right media –Another benefit of media planning is the ability to choose the right media. There are a variety of offline and online channels that marketers can choose from, and they need to use the information gathered during the research and goal setting phases to discover which channels will help them achieve the most success.