Steps Involved in Media Planning

5 Steps to Effective Media Planning

In this ever-cluttered marketplace, many advertisers are making a critical mistake. They focus too heavily on budget when developing their campaigns and completely neglect something far more important: their media plan. For your campaigns to be successful and your messages to make the right impact, much thought should be given to the markets you serve and the channels you choose for delivery.

Here are five steps to effective media planning:

1. Know Your Target Audience

There’s no point in media buying if that media doesn’t reach your target audience. You should have a clear idea of your target market’s age, gender, income level, and media habits – where they consume media during the day – before you spend a single dollar on advertising. Some ad planners even create an ‘avatar,’ a composite ‘person’ who has all the traits of their target customer. They then use that avatar to find out where their target audience consumes media – online, in print, on television or on radio – and is therefore more likely to be exposed to your advertising.

2. Define Your Goals

You can’t measure the success or failure of your media planning efforts unless you set clear goals from the start. Perhaps you want a 3% conversion rate from media exposure to actual sales. Perhaps you want 7% of people who see your message to visit your site and sign up for your newsletter. Only by knowing your goals can you measure whether your media plan is performing as you wish.

3. Use Smart Tools for Media Planning

The days of flying blind while putting together a media plan are over. Online services like mediatool.com allow you to plan, organize and analyze your media spending all in one place. With the ability to collaborate with others in your business and keep all your media planning files, tasks and communications in one place, mediatool.com is ideal for small, medium and big businesses who want a comprehensive media plan their whole team can view and understand, as well as the tools to see whether their media buying is achieving their goals.

4. Determine the Perfect Media Mix

With the help of smart services like mediatool.com, you can complete your ad planning by deciding on the best mix of online, print, radio and TV ad buying. Features coming soon to mediatool.com include customized dashboards and reports that help you visualize your media spend data in an understandable way, and the ability to compare your business data with your media planning data to discover which media are giving you the best ROMI.

5. Execute Your Media Plan

With the media planning templates available on mediatool.com, you’ll know exactly when to send out the right message at the right time in the right media channel. You control your budget and your message, and all of your marketing plans, data and discussions will be contained in one convenient place in your account.