What Is Media Planning: Guide From Scratch

You spend your time on different media channels. You are constantly in touch with your mobile, laptops, OTT, newspapers, radio, and much more. While using all these media, you come across a lot of advertisements. These advertisements are shown by different brands to promote their product or convey a message. The main aim is to reach you (the consumer) and attract you towards a particular service or product. Now, who plans all these advertisements? Who decides which advertisement should run on which media channel and at what time? All this comes under Media Planning.

In this article, I would like to explain what is media planning. I would also like to help you understand how media planning can help your business grow!

What Is Media Planning

Media planning is selecting when and how an advertisement is to be displayed for which audience. The main aim is to run an advertisement campaign in such a way that it gives you maximum user engagement with minimum expenditure.

Imagine you are a brand owner. Your main aim is to develop your product. You cannot spend your time promoting the product yourself. It is not your expertise. This is when you hire advertising agencies. Such agencies have media planning teams. The team will sit with you and understand your product and your objective.

Then the team will come out with a plan on how to run your advertisement campaigns to get the most out of it. Some of the things they decide and plan are

Which media platform will be the best to run your advertisements.

• How much to spend on each media platform?
• How frequently the advertisements should be run?
• What is your target audience?
• And many more!

The entire media planning is done to attain your objective of running your advertisements. Your objective can be to get more leads or to get more sales. It can even be just to spread the word and see how many people were reached through your advertisements.

Objectives would differ depending on your goals. And this would determine the entire strategy of media planning.

What Are The Media Platforms In Media Planning

You can categorize the media platforms can be categorized into two different sets.

Offline Media Platforms and Online Media Platforms

Online Media Platforms

• Digital Publishers (Websites)
• Social Media Platforms
• Search Engines

Offline Media Platforms

• Television
• Newspapers and Magazines
• Radio
• Out of Home

What Is The Media Planning Process

When you as a brand owner would want to run advertisements, there would be a media planning strategy or process to follow. The main aim of this process would be to understand your goals and achieve them through successful ad campaigns.

Here is an overview of a media planning process

1. Market Analysis

The first step in media planning is to research the current market. This is the initial step to anything. As a brand owner, you need to understand what your competitors are doing. How similar companies are branding and promoting their products? This will help you understand what you can improve. You can analyze their current strategies and learn from them.

A very unusual opinion is to skip this step and move forward. However, media planning teams wouldn’t recommend this. Keeping an eye on competitors really helps and enables you to stand out.

2. Define Your Objectives And Goals

Once the market research phase is over, it is time to determine your own objectives and goals. Running an advertisement for promoting a product or a service can have many different objectives.

-> You can aim to generate more inbound leads

-> You can aim to generate more sales

-> You can aim to generate more brand awareness.

And many more!

The entire media planning strategy depends on your goals and objectives. This will help you allocate the right budget on the right media platforms.

For example, you are trying to generate more sales. Your entire ad campaign design would try to lure the customer in making the purchase. It would include designs focussing on why your product is the best and why you should purchase it right away!

3. Determine Your Target Audience

This is a crucial step in your media planning process. You need to decide your target audience. Target audience means the people you would want to show your advertisements to. You may target your audience as per their age group, the place they live, their gender, and much more.

Let’s say you want to advertise a new property in a particular area.

You would want to target people who are more than 25 years old. There is no point in targeting the ad for students. They don’t buy properties.

Your other metric can be people who are having a past of renting or buying properties. These people may be interested in your property too.

Like this, we can have many metrics. The list can go on.

4. Determine The Ad Campaign Settings

Now, after all this, you can set certain metrics and settings for the advertisements you would run. These settings would include

Which media platform would be best for your advertisements?

How much budget for each media platform?

How much should be the frequency of your advertisements?

And many more!

These settings and decisions are quite important. You need to run your advertisements without becoming a nuisance to your target audience. You need a perfect balance of promotions and branding. You wouldn’t want your audience to fire with massive advertisements in a short span of time. This would ruin their advertisement experience.

5. Evaluation Of Results And Changing Your Way Forward

The last step remains evaluating your work and improving it. Whatever you have been doing till now needs a thorough analysis. It would help you assess your work and know if you are heading in the right direction.

You need to check your advertisement results as per your objectives. If your goal was to increase more inbound leads, you can check how many people are interacting with your advertisements and reaching out for your services. If they are not, you can backtrack and change your plan.

Your main aim in this step would be to maximize user engagement and get the best return on investment. Your advertisement campaign is going and you need it to be impactful. This is where your entire team would check for improvements and implement them.

Bottom Line

Media planning is a complex process. You cannot implement successful media planning and advertisement campaigns within your company. This would require a lot of resources in terms of time, money, and expertise. You need to handle a lot of data and turn it into something impactful. It requires a lot of tools and expertise. For effective media planning, there are many media and ad agencies you can opt for. Being a product or service provider, you need to outsource this. Almost most of all companies are outsourcing media planning for them.

Previous Post

SWOT Analysis Of Walmart: What You Need To Know