Media planning: six steps to reach your goals

When starting any business, no matter how necessary it is to plan, planning is half the work, so do not let it be exposed to the reactions and various crises that come to get you back to the beginning. In this sense, good media planning is the key to any successful advertising campaign. If you are looking for the best ways to achieve your marketing goals and maximize your return on investment while staying within your budget. You’re in the right place, keep reading to learn the basic steps of media planning.

What is Media planning?

Media planning is simply the process by which marketers determine how, when, where, and why they will share media content with the target audience, and also includes identifying ads that will increase conversions and return on investment (ROI). and analyzing audiences, media, platforms, messages, and ads to reach the most effective ones to promote a particular brand or product.

With the comprehensive media planning you’ll find here at ARYA ART, you’ll be able to reach potential customers by the right means and at the right time.

Who does media planning?

Media planning is carried out by the company’s media and marketing team, as media planning is carried out in cooperation between all departments of the company to cover all aspects of planning. To ensure that the campaign reaches the target audience and achieves the desired results. At ARYA ART, we have a creative and expert media planning team that you can rely on.

The main responsibilities of this group include:

1. Analyze data and use it to develop strategies.
2. Search for media and select them according to the target audience and the objectives set.
3. Negotiate ad prices
4. Create timesheets and determine ad placement.
5. Monitor the campaign to make sure it is on track
6. Evaluation of campaign results

Media planning steps:

Media planning has a number of steps that must be followed to carry out successful media planning. We will review with you six steps of media planning:

1. Identify your target audience and their weaknesses:

Marketing today is required to create positive customer experiences, as customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product only, but also the experience they find in companies, in dealing with them and knowing their needs. If you don’t keep up with customer needs, they’ll leave you. This means that you need to focus on their weaknesses and the specific needs of the audience, to determine the medium that will communicate your message to your target buyers in an engaging way.

But you can’t reach and attract everyone, so you have to identify a segment of the audience who have an interest in what you offer and are the target customers, so you have to carefully create a profile of target customers based on their age, profession, location, interests, gender, etc. By using this information and including it in media planning, you can determine the means by which you will reach your audience and resonate with them to reach the conversion.

2. Choosing the right media for your target audience:

As mentioned, the information you collect about your target audience will lead you to the best media to reach them, these means include the traditional means of television, radio and print advertising. Digital means are social media, websites, email, and other online platforms.

The medium chosen should be a platform that is likely to be frequented by the target audience. Media outlets attract users based on age, gender, socioeconomic status, and other demographic factors.

For example:

In the case of B2B(business-to-business) transactions and processes, audiences are more likely to be reached on LinkedIn, where companies and employees interact on a professional level. In the case of business-to-consumer interaction, the audience can be found on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. etc

You should not be satisfied with one media outlet, but rather create a combination of different means that it must adopt for successful media planning.

3. Competitor Analysis:

Before any big match, a good sports team spends time studying its opponent. Since no business exists without competitors in the market, when planning media planning for your media campaign, you must identify competitors for your business who use the same media as you and target the same segment and research their different marketing strategies.

Start creating a list of potential competitors, where will your customers go if they don’t buy from your company? Once you have a list of competitors to search, get to know their business. Look for basic information first such as the company’s history, location, and size in the market, then start by looking at the company’s websites, social media pages, and any news articles published about them.

4. Budget Management in Media Planning:

Determining the budget and how it is distributed is an important part of the marketing process at all stages, so it must be included in media planning. Once you’ve identified channels, the next step is to allocate a budget to each channel. The budget is allocated to see the marketing message by the target audience several times.

It is an estimate of a company’s promotional expenses over a given period of time, and the amount of money allocated to marketing efforts through traditional and digital forms of the means used. Good budget management will help you implement your media plan, by determining the amount of advertising spending on the right product at the right time, and thus determining the amount of frequency of advertising in line with the analysis you have done of the habits of your target audience on the selected platforms and media outlets. Budget management needs experience in forecasting spending and a good understanding of marketing strategy and current campaigns on different platforms. At ARYA ART, you will find a high level that enables you to know how to use your budget to promote your product in an organized and effective manner, even before starting a promotional campaign.

5. Measure and optimize advertising campaigns:

After determining the target audience, the appropriate platform you will use, and the budget allocated for the campaign, the most important step in media planning is to continuously monitor, track and analyze your campaign’s performance. You can’t control your media campaign, plan it, and then let it run on its own. Instead, you have to manage it carefully and continuously to maximize your return on investment. The effectiveness of the campaign in achieving its objectives is evaluated using different metrics for this purpose, namely:

CPM ((Cost per thousand): This refers to the cost for 1000 impressions.

CPP (Cost per person): This is the cost of each person who sees the ad.

CPA (Cost per action): This is the cost of each action taken, such as a sale or lead.

Return on investment: This is the most important metric because it measures the profitability of an advertising campaign. It is the total revenue generated minus the cost of the campaign divided by the cost of the initial campaign. Media planners are watching all these metrics closely to see how effective their campaign is and make the necessary adjustments.

6. Data-driven planning and strategy:

Strategic Media Planning consists of three pillars: reach, audience, and purpose. Media planners should use all three to ensure the effectiveness of their ads. Here’s a look at each one:

Access: Access and the amount of repetition are inseparable. Ad reach is the number or percentage of people who have been exposed to the ad at least once, and frequency is the number of times they’ve seen it.

Reach can be thought of as the number of “touches” an ad gets, while frequency is the number of times it is “viewed.” When designing a media plan, access is a key consideration. The more people who see the ad, the more awareness and interest are likely to increase.

Audience: An ad campaign may have a wide reach but doesn’t resonate with the intended target audience. For example, selling kitchen appliances on a platform where most of the university students are present. So there must be a connection between the advertised product or service and the people who will see the ad.

Goal: The last pillar is the goal. What is the goal of an advertising campaign? Is it to generate awareness, interest or sales? The answer to this question will determine the media strategy to be followed.

For example, if the goal is to raise awareness, a large-scale media plan will be more effective. If the goal is to increase interest and sales, a more targeted approach will be necessary.

All of the above steps must be supported by data, as data is at the heart of every successful marketing strategy. It’s critical to success and can help you improve your media plan for growing your business.

Determining how, when, and where the target audience receives the advertising message requires entering into the daily habits of the target audience, and as the diversity of media that consumers interact with increases, so do the data sources that media planners can leverage to conduct audience analysis. Data-driven media planning connects the right message with the right audience at the right time, leading to more effective marketing campaigns and higher rates of return on ad spend.

Therefore, media planning needs full knowledge of all media outlets and ways to deal with them, how to collect information about the audience used and how to best distribute expenses to remain within the specified budget, all of this needs an integrated team of experts in this field, which you will find in ARYA ART, which provides you with the best services to accelerate the growth of your brand. Contact us from here and let us achieve your goals, to make you a distinguished name in the business world.