FAQ’s Media Planning & Buying

Media planning is the process of determining how, when, and where an audience will be reached with a selected advertising message. Media planners analyze their target audiences, marketing channels and media vehicles to determine the most efficient way to communicate a message to the intended audience.

In the fast-paced world of marketing, it’s important to plan how you will reach your audience. To do so, marketers must determine the “right” place and time to deliver the right message to consumers. Media planning is the process of making these decisions.

Media planning is often the responsibility of media planners at advertising agencies. Media planners must work with media buyers and the client organization to develop a strategy to maximize return on investment on media spend. Media planners are expected to have a firm understanding of the organization’s brand and target audience, various platforms and trends in media technology.

Media planning is a strategy of formulating and evaluating the effectiveness of advertising campaigns while buying refers to the actual implementation of this plan.

The media planner will identify the most effective combination of messaging and media mix to reach consumers in a positive, impactful way.

A media plan is a detailed document that outlines which audience will be targeted, across which channels, at what time, and with which message.

An effective media plan helps an organization identify, create and purchase advertising opportunities that target a specific audience and fit within its marketing budget. To create effective media plans, consider these factors:

Who does the ad need to reach?
What is the marketing budget?
What are the conversion goals?
How frequency should the message be shown?
What is the reach (how many people will see it)?
How do we define success?

When creating a media strategy for your brand, you must decide what types of media will be cost-effective and generate sales.

Media planners generally consider three main types of media when creating a media plan:

Paid Media

Paid media refers to any form of advertising that brands pay for, including pay-per-click advertising, display ads, and branded content. This is one of the most common ways for brands to get exposure and boost sales.

Owned Media

Owned media is content that a brand owns and controls, such as blog posts and social media accounts. Increasing the use of owned media can allow your brand to reach more potential customers and increase brand awareness

Earned Media

Earned media refers to the publicity a brand generates from outside sources rather than its own company. For example, customer reviews, word-of-mouth, and media coverage are all forms of earned media. This type of publicity is valuable because it often comes directly from consumers. This feedback can also help improve the quality of the product or service being offered.

By weighing the pros and cons of each platform, your company can determine which forms of media will work best within its media plan.

A data-driven media plan helps companies to streamline the campaign review process by providing them with centralized information across multiple forms of media. This enables the company to optimize its campaigns and messaging while leveraging multiple platforms.

Key benefits of media planning include:

Establish Processes 

Media buying can be a complicated and time-consuming process. With proper planning, you can save resources and increase efficiency by getting your plans and processes in place.

Budget Tracking

Marketers must work within their budgets and come up with a media plan that accounts for all costs and estimated return on investment.

Audience Segmentation & Analysis

Media planning is an important part of any marketing strategy, requiring a thorough understanding of target audiences and the most effective messages to reach them.

Optimization & Testing

Good media plans use existing data to determine what has worked, what isn’t working, and what might work in the future.

Improved ROI

Media planning is an essential part of a successful campaign, allowing you to create an optimized campaign that delivers ROI.

Media planners must identify the best combination of advertising elements to achieve a particular goal. Objectives should generally align with business goals, such as long-term growth and improving return on investment.

Marketing plans rely on a variety of tactics to help their organizations increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive conversions.

Media Planning vs. Media Buying

Many people confuse media planning and media buying but they are not the same. Media planning is the process of creating a plan for how you will use your budget to reach your target audience across various channels and platforms, while media buying is the process of purchasing ad space across those channels and platforms in coordination with the agreed-upon media plans.

To maximize the success of a campaign, you need to evaluate platform formats and rates to ensure they coincide with your plan, negotiate costs, keep abreast of media trends, and build relationships with counterparts at various channels and platforms.

Media buying often leverages one of the following popular strategies:

Manual bidding
Direct buys
Programmatic buys
Real-time bidding
Challenges of Media Planning

Media planning is challenging because it requires balancing many different factors, and because some marketers believe that media planning strategies have not kept pace with changes in marketing.

Challenges include but are not limited to:

Consumer-Level Targeting

To create a successful media plan, marketers must understand consumers at a granular level in order to determine what types of messages resonate with them and create plans accordingly. To accomplish this, they need to rely on marketing analytics and an omnichannel measurement solution.

Platform Preference

Brands must also know the various channels and platforms that their target audience members engage with, as well as when these individuals use those media. This will allow them to choose the most effective platforms for campaigns. It is important for brands to keep their budgets and media spend in mind when planning their marketing strategies.

Heavy Budget Focus

In media planning, marketers continue to focus on budget rather than customer engagement. However, there is no flexibility in a budget, preventing marketers from adjusting their campaign tactics based on what is working and what isn’t. Modern media planning requires the flexibility to allocate budget to different channels if they prove to be more successful.

Integrating Measurements

Online and offline marketing channels are so numerous that it is difficult for marketers to measure the success of various campaigns and determine which are most effective.

As media planning becomes more dynamic and focused on delivering optimal consumer experiences, agencies must adopt flexible budgeting and real-time, unified measurement capabilities that allow them to optimize their campaigns as they run.

How to Write a Media Plan (4 Steps to Follow)

A media plan comprises a detailed process that helps marketers understand the needs of target consumers and the goals of their business.

Here are the essential steps and considerations marketers must make when creating a media plan.

Step 1. Determine Media Goals and Objectives

It may be tempting to think that the goal of a campaign is simply to drive conversions or engagement—but this would oversimplify things. Each department has its own goals, which might in turn have multiple objectives. The sales team might be targeting increased revenue, while the marketing department seeks to increase brand awareness. Knowing the main goal of the campaign will determine how it runs, as well as messaging.

Media planners should conduct research into market trends and the competitive landscape. This research will offer visibility into where similar brands have achieved success in the past, informing planning decisions. For example, if a brand has long relied on email campaigns but research reveals that competitors have had greater success with native ads, it may be time to shift the plan.

When developing a media plan, consider your budgets. Do not assign strict dollar amounts to specific advertising channels. A flexible approach to your marketing budget will allow for optimizations to be made as campaigns run.

Step 2. Determine Target Audience

Today, marketing is driven by the creation of positive customer experiences. Marketers need to focus on the audience’s needs when developing messaging and selecting where to display their messages across the media mix.

• First, examine which segment of the overall audience you are trying to engage.
• Look at attribution measurements and engagement analytics to understand the types of ads users engage with, which creative is most effective, and importantly, which channels these consumers use.
• While marketers often utilize demographic information such as age, location, general interests, etc., be sure to incorporate person-level data gathered through a unified measurement approach to get the most tailored results.

Step 3. Consider Frequency & Reach

A media plan should include not only a strategy for targeting the right audience, but also a plan for reaching that audience frequently enough to make an impact.

• Reach refers to how many people the campaign will be in front of over a specific amount of time.

• Frequency refers to how many times the consumer will be exposed to the ad over the course of the campaign.

There are a few popular approaches that marketers take when selecting frequency.

The continuity strategy involves running ads on a regular basis over the course of a campaign. This approach is often used for goods that are not seasonal and require repeated reinforcement to stay top of mind.

Flighting is a form of television advertising in which a series of ads are aired on a specific program, followed by a break in ad content. Flighting works well for seasonal products or for those with less ad budget. For example, when there is a pause in a flighted television campaign, marketers may choose to run print ads instead.

Pulsing is a combination of flighting and continuity. Pulsed campaigns consist of low-intensity, consistent advertising that is augmented by higher-intensity flights of advertising during times when additional messaging has a high impact.

Step 4: Analyze and Optimize Campaign Performance

A crucial part of building a media planning strategy is to continuously monitor, track, and analyze performance. Marketing campaigns won’t succeed if they aren’t managed; that means looking at what works—and what doesn’t—on an ongoing basis so you can make changes as needed.

Selecting the Right Media Channels

Marketers have many choices of channels to use in their marketing campaigns. They should choose the ones that will reach their target audiences most effectively by using information gathered during the research and goal-setting stages.

The following are some of the most popular forms of media used for marketing, along with their strengths and weaknesses.

Offline Media

Magazines

Magazines have the longest shelf life of all print media and usually remain in a consumer’s possession for two to four weeks after being read. Research has shown that people retain more information from printed text than from other forms of media (60 percent of readers trust magazine ads).
Advertisements that tie in with consumers’ interests are more effective because consumers are less resistant to these types of ads. Magazines, for example, are highly targeted (e.g., running cooking magazines). They reach secondary audiences in addition to their primary audiences because they are passed along to family and friends.

Newspapers

Placing ads in local newspapers can help to ensure a brand’s message stays local. Marketers can choose to place ads in sections of the newspaper that are relevant to their target audience. For example, if you want to target consumers interested in fashion, you might select space in the Style section of the newspaper. Additionally, readers of local newspapers tend to have higher education and household incomes than the general population, so this could be important when selecting ad space based on demographics.

Radio

Radio ads are an effective way to target local areas or regions of the country. Radio ads can be used to build frequency with your target audience, and they are considered a lower-cost medium. Research shows that exposure to a radio ad and time to purchase is the shortest of any medium. When paired with other forms of media, overall campaigns can be more effective.

TV & Cable

TV and cable are highly visual media that frequently show commercials demonstrating products in everyday life. A commercial for a cleaning product, for example, can show the product at work while highlighting its benefits and features. People watch an average of five hours of television a day; commercials are an important way to reach them.

Out of Home

Billboards are large and can be seen from a distance. In a busy area, a billboard could reach 10,000 people in a month. Outdoor advertising is not limited by the size of the billboard, only by your creativity. Outdoor advertising is also an extremely mobile option; for example, you could use displays at an airport to advertise luggage.

Online Media

Digital Publications

Digital publications often allow you to include an email newsletter or a one-to-one personalized email in their publication. They can track the open rate and understand the conversion rate of visitors to your site or asset. These tools are great for lead generation campaigns.

PPC

Advertisers can capitalize on people’s search intent by advertising their products when consumers are looking for them online. Advertisers can retarget people who visit their sites with ads for those products and services. Search engine marketing, or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, is extremely cost-effective because advertisers only pay when people click on their ads.

Social Media

Social media marketing is an extremely cost-effective way to target consumers. It allows marketers to target their audience by interests and demographics, giving them the chance to create more personal relationships with customers. Many successful brands have built communities around their products through social platforms, allowing them to connect with consumers in a more meaningful way. This can result in more brand advocacy, which is a surefire way for your content to go viral on social media.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising uses an algorithm to find and target specific audiences across digital platforms. There are two methods to consider when looking into this method of advertising:

Programmatic Bidding – uses demand side platforms to buy ads on the digital market based on target audience.

Real-Time Bidding – allows advertisers to bid on impressions to their target audience. If their bid wins, the ad is displayed right away.

Tips for Building a Media Planning Strategy

As marketers begin to strategize new media plans, keep these ideas in mind:

Reach

When buying ad space, it is important to consider when and where the advertisements will be viewed by your target audience. For example, purchasing ad time during a live televised event (such as a sports game) ensures that viewers will be watching live and not fast forwarding through commercials.

Establish Clear Goals

What are your goals for this campaign? How many people are you looking to reach, and what are your expectations regarding sales?

Engagement
How you approach your advertising directly relates to how much people will talk about your brand. Making sure that your ad has a clear direction and plan of action, as well as how you plan to test the effectiveness of your ad.

Attribution Models

When planning marketing campaigns, it is important to use a marketing attribution model that can track offline and online media. This will ensure that your team is using the right criteria when choosing between different types of media.

Since the start of the pandemic, more customers have begun shopping online. 77 percent of window shoppers make impulse purchases. This number is expected to rise as more and more people become comfortable with purchasing goods over the internet. It is important to have an effective media strategy that separates your budget between print, digital, video, and broadcast ads.
To ensure that your brand is getting the most bang for its buck and delivering content to the right audience, you should know the costs and effectiveness of using each form of advertising. From there, your company can allocate the appropriate amount of resources to each campaign to increase website traffic and brand awareness.

A comprehensive media planning strategy allows organizations to make more data-driven decisions about how to improve marketing ROI and drive conversions. Many teams leverage tools that allow them to be smarter, faster, and more accurate in their media planning choices.

Marketing Evolution’s Scenario Planner allows organizations to build an annual media plan that includes multiple “what if” scenarios, which allows them to modify key campaign factors without impacting active initiatives. This enables teams to optimize their advertising mix while simultaneously reducing wastage.