Media Planning and Why It’s So Important

It’s not enough to just come up with creative content. You have to have a strategy behind sharing this content with your audience or nobody will see it. When doing so it is important to balance your promotional campaign across multiple different assets and media platforms. It can become difficult to track the success of all of your campaigns so it is important to understand the different mediums and metrics involved with using them so you can set and evaluate your KPI’s. This will allow you to make more informed decisions in the future and allow you to pivot where necessary if something isn’t going as planned or is not performing as well as you had hoped.

Media planning is exactly the process behind determining where, when, and how long you are going to run your ads to get the best ROI. A big part of this includes serving your consumers with the right messaging and the right time. Ask yourself a set of questions:

What are my goals and objectives?

Who am I targeting?

What are my conversion goals?

How do I want to reach my customer?

Start by determining your businesse's goals and objectives whether it’s increased revenue on a specific product, increase brand awareness, increase engagement, ect. Determining what your main goal is will allow you to figure out the right messaging and call to action to use.

After defining your goals and objectives determine who your target audience is. By understanding their needs you can better understand the types of advertisements that they are engaging with. You can see which creatives might be more effective. Are they into humour and would prefer to see a funny ad? Or are they more compelled by something inspiring? As much as you think you understand your target audience, I believe it is good to test different types of ads against each other to see which ones perform the best. Test, test, then test again! It’s also important to find out what channels your target audience is engaging with the most. Are they on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, listening to podcasts? They can be on more than one so sometimes it could be good to use an omnichannel approach. However, depending on your marketing budget it can be okay to focus on 1-2 main platforms that you know for sure are the best.

Another component of the media plan that you need to consider is the frequency of your campaign. How many times will your ad be shown to your target audience throughout your campaign? If you want to stay top of mind then you should consider taking a continuity approach so your ads are being delivered on a constant schedule. Or you can take an on-off approach where you have alternating periods of ads running followed by some breaks.

Now when running your campaign, don’t forget to continuously monitor and track your progress. You need to analyze your performance so you can maximize your ROI by pivoting and adjusting in real-time when necessary.

Media planning is evolving because of the tools we’re using. It can be a mysterious position to be in. There are many types of media tools that we need to consider when planning how we can properly communicate our messaging. There is paid media, owned media, earned media, and shared media.

Starting with paid media, this involves any boosted or paid media that you use to help expand the reach of your content. Digital tools have become extremely more prevalent in recent years and they can provide some detailed analytics.

Owned media is another great type of media that you can use that may look similar to paid media although it comes directly from your businesse's platforms. Such as your website, own social channels, webinars, ect.

Earned media is content that you don’t pay for and you end up gaining. Is commonly from WOM – word of mouth, influencer outreach, bloggers, interviews, ect.

Lastly, shared media is something that is fairly new and has evolved because of social media. It is exactly what you might think it is - when people share your brand with others. With social media we now have a world of a two-way shared experiences that is allowing for “real-time advertising”. A great example of this was explained by Terry O’Reilly in his Under The Influence Podcast (S2E20 – Real-Time Advertising). In 2010, Old Spice answered questions from customers in real-time. The old spice guy answered user-generated questions in real-time via YouTube. He would get the questions and they would film, edit, and post. Once viewers caught on that he was answering questions live, more and more questions started flooding in. This newer form of real-time advertising is great shareable media as they created over 180 video responses to real questions and had received over 40 million views total.

My personal favourite media tool is owned media. This is because of the level of creative direction you’re able to take with your own content. You can begin to develop your brands' voice through your messaging. This is typically where you will have more in-depth, longer videos for your brands that live on your website. You can adopt trends, such as on TikTok, you can easily engaged with your audience. It’s so important for brands to have a strong social presence online. You need to dial in your owned media first and foremost. If anyone is searching up your business, these are the first channels that they will find you on so it’s important to have compelling content ready for them so they don’t leave. High-quality photos and videos that are unique to your brand, tell a story, or follow and trend are some simple ways to get your owned media started.

Paid media is my second favourite type of media because you can oftentimes leverage your owned media content and “boost” it so it gets more reach and more eyes on your brand. You can also chop up longer-formed owned media and make multiple versions of ads. Something that I’ve seen working great for paid media is just simple iPhone video content. This is because people generally don’t like watching ads and they will skip over them if they see them. Since iPhone content doesn’t look like an ad right away people are more inclined to watch it, sometimes without even realizing it. It also sometimes can seem more genuine.

Overall, through our media plan, we want to instill stronger brand values and relationships with our consumers. The ultimate goal would be to build trust with our consumers.

What’s your favourite media tool for your business? Where do you struggle when media planning? Let me know in the comment sections below.

Terry O'Reilly. (2021, June 18). Under the Influence. Terry O'Reilly. Retrieved October 7, 2021, from https://terryoreilly.ca/under-the-influence/.