Digital Media Planning

How to build an effective Digital media plan that achieves your marketing objectives and maximizes ROI while staying within budget. Adapting to the new advertising climate is crucial in the new normal. Optimizing your digital media planning to reflect consumers’ fast-evolving needs is likely on every marketing leader’s agenda. If you’re looking for ways to optimize team performance to reach advertising objectives whilst saving time and money, you’re in the right place. Keep reading to learn the key steps to effective media planning that will maximize your return on media investment (ROMI) and help you to achieve your marketing goals.

01

DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AND THEIR PAIN POINTS

Marketing today is driven by creating positive customer experiences. Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product alone. Instead, they stay loyal to companies due to the experience they receive. If you don’t keep up with customer needs, they’ll leave you. This means you need to focus on specific audience pain points and needs and identify how to communicate your message to your target buyers in an engaging and appealing way. There’s no point trying to reach and appeal to everyone, so carefully profile your target customers based on their age, occupation, location, interests, gender, etc. With this information, you can determine what media will reach, resonate with, and convert your audience. Additionally, it’ll help you decide what platforms and channels you should share your content on to reach them.

02

DETERMINE YOUR MEDIA PLANNING OBJECTIVE

Consumer wants and needs have changed since before the pandemic and your objectives should reflect this change. Establish an objective (or two) to give your media plan something to aim for. To establish your media planning objectives, focus on reach, frequency and cost. Reach: how many people will see your ad over a given time period. For example, if your advert is placed on an industry news website, they will have an online readership based on metrics such as website traffic and quote the potential reach if your ad is placed there. Frequency: how often your ad is in front of your target audience within a certain time period. Aim to find a balance between getting maximum ad visibility and becoming too repetitive. Seeing the same message time and time again can help build brand awareness by subconsciously reminding your target audience of your company, but too much can get annoying! Cost of media: cost per thousand (CPM) and cost per person (CPP). It is important to understand the cost as you are budgeting. The cost will tell you which form of media is the best option for your business. Always check the ideal ad frequency for each channel and remember to integrate the data from your offline and online channels to see how people are interacting with your campaign and if the ad has fatigued or not.

03

CREATE YOUR PERFECT MEDIA MIX

Armed with your target audience personas and your campaign goals, it’s now time to identify which channels will be most successful at getting your message across. There are a lot of channels available, and you should resist the need to have a presence on all of them. Marketing optimization platforms (like Mediatool!) can help you decide the optimum mix of digital media for your campaign. Customized dashboards and reports help you visualize your data and media spend, and by comparing your business and media planning data you can identify which media are producing the best ROMI. Using an attribution framework is also a very useful tool to help you continuously monitor campaign performance across your channels.

04

INVEST IN TECHNOLOGY THAT TAKES YOUR CAMPAIGNS TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Digital media planning and management software like Mediatool can give you the data you need to see where to optimize your media plan next. We find that what brands and agencies struggle with the most is siloed data between teams, especially when it comes to creating omni-channel advertising campaigns. That’s why we built Mediatool to give you a 360-degree overview of your plans and targets, integrated with ad performance. Digital media planning and management software like Mediatool can give you the data you need to see where to optimize your media plan next. We find that what brands and agencies struggle with the most is siloed data between teams, especially when it comes to creating omni-channel advertising campaigns. That’s why we built Mediatool to give you a 360-degree overview of your plans and targets, integrated with ad performance. There are also other tools that can make your job easier. We weighed the best options for you here in case you’re in the market.

05

MONITOR, MEASURE AND IMPROVE

One of the most important steps to building a media planning strategy is to continuously monitor, track, and analyze your campaign performance. Media planning and marketing campaigns are by no means “set it and forget it”—you need to carefully manage them to drive maximum ROI. Having a hands-on approach enables your team to identify opportunities to optimize performance in real-time based on what is or isn’t working in each channel. This way, your media plan will drive more traffic, generate more leads, and deliver greater ROI on your media spend.

06

COORDINATE YOUR AD CAMPAIGNS FROM A SINGLE PLATFORM

With multichannel campaigns spread across many different media types, gauging the success of your campaigns can be a challenge. This is where a media planning tool like Mediatool helps you visualize your entire media plan from a single dashboard. You can input your media plan including your objectives, and you can track your campaigns at the strategic level to assess your KPIs and identify areas to optimize. Plus, real-time data feeds give you an up-to-date snapshot of your campaign performance so you can shift budgets and make other critical adjustments to optimize your campaigns.Get in touch with us for a free platform demo and to learn more about how Mediatool can help you run more effective campaigns.