When devising a business strategy, companies use marketing services to determine the best way to promote their services.

Projected ROI, client influx, and the overall success of a project depends on a well-built and carefully-thought-out marketing campaign based on a media plan.

A media plan helps to uncover the best promotion methods and necessary channels for broadcasting your desired message to a specific audience. No matter how clear your message, if your target audience does not use your chosen promotional channel, you will never reach them.

That is why the media planning stage is more critical than the advertisement itself.

Key Highlights on Media Planning

  • Media planning is crucial for targeting and reaching the right audience with your message.
  • Involves strategic analysis of brand positioning, market trends, and competitor landscape.
  • Requires defining business goals, understanding target audience behavior, and crafting a tailored media strategy.
  • Selection of advertising channels is critical, blending traditional and digital platforms based on audience engagement.
  • Media planning faces challenges like budget constraints and the need for constant adaptation to market shifts.

Media Planning Stages

Planning is a complex and multifaceted process that requires market analysis, milestone markers, and optimization. To make it work in the best way, you and your team should follow some key steps to success:

Your brand or product position analysis

  • Market trends: Market dynamics, analysis of key segments, and assessment of your brand’s position versus other market players.
  • Competitor analysis: Determine your growth sources (how your brand will increase sales) and threats (brands that threaten your brand sales growth); identify crucial competitive brands and companies.
  • Target audience: Brand consumers; buying behavior models; key factors affecting the choice of goods on the market; consumer attitudes toward the brand; weak and strong associations.

Briefing

  • Business and marketing targets. It can be impossible to determine the aims of your business as a whole and mark developmental milestones along the way. Each branch of your business should be analyzed separately.
  • Target audience. The briefing stage includes analysis of future clients. To calculate your marketing campaign’s expenses and predict ROI according to the number of given services, It is essential to determine the potential number of clients. Divide your target audience into primary and secondary categories.

Media strategy development

Media mix defines which combination of channels you will use for your marketing campaign, based on your goals, audience, and budget.

  • Campaign scope. Define the reach of your campaign in terms of geography and demographics, and zero in on the most profitable areas.
  • Campaign period. Decide the optimal duration of your campaign, to maximize profits and minimize expenses.

While progressing through these stages, you can create a flowchart of brand activity that shows all possible marketing campaign channels, total budget, advertising effectiveness index, estimated GRP and TRP, advertising frequency, and overall coverage.

Selecting the Right Channels is Key to Success

Correctly choosing your advertising channels is key to a successful marketing campaign that brings in new clients and revenues.

Your media plan determines how you will convey information about new products or services to your target audience through advertising. Modern advertising is not limited to newspapers, magazines and billboards.

Every smartphone user can receive your message via multiple channels.

The most popular and profitable ways to promote your product online are:

Social Media

In the age of technology, social media has become an integral part of our lives. Social networks provide an excellent opportunity to promote products and services via online advertising. Targeting your audience on social media is easy, since every user’s profile contains demographic information such as age, marital status, location, and interests.

PPC

PPC (pay-per-click) is a low-key strategy for redirecting potential clients to your website, to maximize their interest in your services. PPC is one of the most effective ways to lure clients from another website, store, or digital platform.

Programmatic advertising

This approach is the most targeted way to promote your business. It uses algorithms to search for your target audience across diverse platforms, places bids for your ads, and shows them to your target audience. Programmatic advertising can be extremely cost-effective if well tuned.

Digital Publications

Digital publications can send personalized emails and share suitable content with users from its database, based on diverse factors.

Old-school advertising methods are still in demand in some areas, and they may even have more power over your target audience than digital channels. For example, newspaper fans tend to be the most educated and solvent customers, and radio listeners take the shortest time from hearing your ad to making a purchase.

Television can still be useful for product promotion, and billboards are seen by tens of thousands each day, so don’t write them off. Even a small interactive panel in the airport can become a great advertising channel if your message is clear and appealing.

Media Planning Challenges

Your business’s successful development requires a media planner’s essential skills and experience. A qualitative media plan requires a lot of data and in-depth market research. Media planners face the pressures of limited budgets, tight time frames, and incomplete market information. Nevertheless, every business expects its media plan to succeed.

Some challenges faced by media planners include:

  • Ability to think outside the box

Your thinking as a media planner should be flexible. Sometimes a client’s demands may contradict your point of view, and you will have to adapt and cooperate. At other times, you may have to insist and persuade the client that you are right. The ability to negotiate and compromise are hallmarks of a successful media planning professional.

  • Ability to adapt to your environment

Successful modern business people never stop learning. If you stagnate and get stuck in old ways of doing things, you will quickly be replaced. Studying and staying up-to-date with your industry’s latest trends is the secret to success.

  • Deliver the right message to the right people

The main purpose of any advertising campaign is to get as many people interested in your services as possible. When, where and how you deliver your message is critical. Your message should be clear, and it should appeal to consumers’ emotions. If customers enjoy your ads, they will want to get more information about your products and company.

  • Avoid creating unrealistic and expectations

Your presentation should make potential customers trust your brand. Be sure your products or services live up to the expectations your ads form in the minds of your customers. Put yourself in the consumers’ shoes, and imagine how they will perceive your company, based on your ads. Try to grasp the consumer’s vision of your product and build your strategy accordingly.

  • Justify every dollar invested and prove the effectiveness of your methods

An increase in ROI is the most valuable metric you should strive for. Increasing daily numbers of new subscribers, app downloads, and user feedback is your index of productivity. Your clients’ perception of your worth and professionalism will determine the success of your product and your campaign.

Always keep the needs of your target audience in mind when creating your advertising campaign – that’s where media planning really shines.

Communicate with customers, and try to understand their fears and expectations. To become a brilliant media planning expert, you need to continually improve your skills and knowledge, to reach the highest level of professionalism and maintain it throughout your career.