The digital landscape of today is highly competitive. Businesses today can find success by creating and sharing media content with their audiences.

You increase brand awareness, engagement, conversions, and revenue by publishing new media. Media content also makes you stand out from the competition.

Over time, however, keeping track of, planning, organizing, distributing, and analyzing that entire media content can become confusing. Fortunately, media planning can help you.

What is Media Planning?

Media planning involves identifying and choosing the channels where advertisements will appear. A brand must also determine how, when, and why specific media content should be shared with its target audience. Media plans, then, detail the strategy behind the content that brands create, publish, and share with their customers.

Regardless of the size or industry, content sharing is essential to the success of any brand today. The SEMrush survey showed that 78% of companies have a content specialist team.

Content sharing can also boost engagement, conversions, and revenue in addition to boosting awareness. Media content can also help you stand out from your competitors in your field.

Media planning is needed to maximize the effectiveness of the many advertising channels available today. Media planners are usually hired by advertising agencies.

Roles of Media Planners

An advertising media planner develops a coordinated plan that fits an individual client’s advertising budget. These individuals decide when, where, and how to show an ad to maximize its exposure.

Media planners who excel in this area can stretch a client’s advertising budget so that they reach a huge target audience.

Media planners determine:

• Advertisers allocate budgets to advertising mediums
• Which medium could reach the most people?
• A specific ad’s media and advertising channel
• How often an ad should appear

The goal of a media planner is to determine the most effective combination of media for a particular marketing objective. Is media planning an investment worth making?

(Also Read: Traditional Media vs. New Media: Which is Beneficial)

Best Media Planning Strategies

1. Choosing the right media channel

   When a piece of content is shared, media planners have a choice of channels. Channels are platforms on which content is shared with users.

2. Establishing a relevant timeline

   It is necessary to develop a project plan to determine what assets are necessary to support a media campaign. It can be useful to start at the end when determining resource requirements.

3. Managing the channel mix

   One channel will rarely be included in a media plan. To ensure that as many people as possible are served the content, most campaigns will incorporate two or more — if not more. However, the message needs to be consistent across all channels.

4. Targeting the right audience

   Aiming a message at a specific audience and locating them is the purpose of audience targeting. A common method of audience targeting is to develop buyer personas, which are fictionalized representations of the audiences you’re trying to reach.

5. Identifying reach and frequency goals

   The reach of a media plan is closely related to its frequency. Reach is a measure of how many viewers, readers, or listeners are served content.

   The frequency of seeing or hearing the piece of content over time is known as impressions or frequency. When choosing a media plan, marketers need to decide what they hope to achieve with reach and frequency.

Considerations for Media Planning

When crafting your media planning strategy, there are a few other things to keep in mind.

• Budget
  You can disregard this question if you aim for free media. You will need to sit down with your marketing leadership to understand what funds are available for media planning and buying.

• Messaging
  The media content doesn’t have to be written in advance, but the main themes should be outlined so that all content is on the theme.

How to Create a Media Plan

A media plan requires consideration of both consumer needs and business objectives as part of the planning process. When creating a media plan, marketers must consider these steps and considerations.

Step 1: Define your media objectives and goals

It would be easy to assume that the goal is to drive conversions or engagement, but that would be oversimplifying. Departmental goals may differ, or one campaign may have multiple goals. In the case of the sales team and sales goals, revenue growth is the goal.

For marketing, however, brand awareness is a goal. How a campaign is conducted, as well as its messaging, depends on knowing its main goal.

Step 2: Identify your target audience

The goal of marketing today is to create positive customer experiences. Consequently, marketers need to focus on specific audience needs when developing messages and selecting where to display them across the media mix.

To engage an audience, marketers must determine which segment to target. To understand which types of ads these users interact with, which creatives work best, and which channels these consumers use, marketers need to look at attribution measurements and engagement analytics.

Step 3: Think about frequency and reach

Reach and frequency are also important aspects of a media plan. Reach refers to the number of people exposed to the campaign over a specified period. Throughout the campaign, the consumer will be exposed to the advertisement several times.

Marketers select the frequency in a few common ways.

• Continuity: With this approach, ads will run on a consistent schedule during the campaign: two ads per week, for example.
• Flighting: A “flight” is an interruption in advertising followed by a pause before advertising resumes. The strategy is ideal for seasonal products or those with a small ad budget.
• Pulsing: Pulsing is a combination of continuity and flighting. The goal of pulsed campaigns is to blend low-intensity consistent advertising with flights of higher-intensity advertising when more messaging may be most effective.

Step 4: Analyze and optimize your campaigns

Monitoring, tracking, and analyzing performance is one of the most important steps to building a media planning strategy. To maximize returns on marketing campaigns, they cannot simply be set and left alone. They require ongoing management.

The hands-on approach makes it possible for teams to identify opportunities in real-time to optimize performance.

Final Thoughts

Planning media content is the key to creating, publishing, and sharing media content successfully. This enables cross-team communication and collaboration around your media, as well as ensuring it is shared with your audience promptly.

To reach and convert more audience members, you should go through the media planning process steps above.