Hi Everyone, Welcome to the this blog where I will be sharing my experience about Media Planning & Buying.
Before I start let me share that I have been working in the marketing domain for 2+ years, working with brands & businesses has helped to learn and share this along with you.
This year along with my work I decided to invest in a short course that helped me learn about Media Planning & Buying. To those who don’t know what this term means it’s basically planning your marketing & media for Digital and Physical to get the maximum efficiency & ROI of your marketing budget.
So if you are a digital marketer, entrepreneur, marketing enthusiast or curious to learn about agency this blog will help you to get an overview of How to Plan & Buy Media.
Media Planning helps you to Ensure that you reach & communicate with your desired target audience in an efficient & cost-effective manner
Myth In Media Planning:
Media Planning is the last step of process.
Reality is that one should Always plan media alongside the creative as it helps you to create the best Impact.
one thing which I would want to highlight is if you are new to Marketing & Digital, Media Planning should be learned last after you have had sufficient exposure to various platforms.
What is a Brief? – A Brief In Media Planning
Everything that happens in an industry starts with a BRIEF.
When Client Shares a brief there is a certain objective that you need to map to the brief & there comes the 4 Elements of AIDA Model:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
A Brief helps us in Understanding the objective the client is trying to achieve. It helps you to map your objective from the AIDA Model and plan accordingly. Every brief that reaches you ultimately is mapped to one of these objective.
Two Sides Of Any Media Plan
Just like a coin has two sides. The two sides of brief has two solutions:
- Creative Solution
- Media Solution
The best results that we have noticed appears when you plan your creative along side with your media. This helps you to judge what will work and plan accordingly.
Here’s a case study of Campbells Soup that was shared to us during our online course at IIDE:
In 2016, Australia Witnessed its warmest winters which lead to an all time low sales of Campbells Soup.
The Brief Given To It’s Marketing Agency had two Points:
- Sales of Campbells soup have hit an all time low.
- How do you make soup still relevant for people in today’s time?
The Agency came up with a Media Plan that created Individuals ads each one specially tailored for what your were searching for on youtube.
This didn’t give the audience a reason to buy it gave them Thousands 😊
Requirements For Every Media Strategy:
Every Media Strategy Requires:
- Campaign Duration: The Duration for which the particular campaign would last.
- Definite Budget: The budget to be spent.
- Media Planned As Per Creative Strategy
For Instance:
If your creative strategy involves # Based Content then the media platform you will use: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & Influencer marketing.
Note: The Media Planner sits with Creative Strategist understands the brief and try’s to see where the Creative Strategist is trying to take the campaign and accordingly plans for media that fits perfectly with creative.
All of this plan could be drafted roughly in an excel sheet. Learning basic of excel would always be helpful while designing media plan 🙂
The excel sheet simply contains: Platform, Budget, Campaign Duration, Media Planning Components.
After Planning Comes Buying.
But before buying one needs to understand the basic terminology of Media Buying Ecosystem.
Understanding Ad Publisher & Networks.
An Ad Publisher is nothing but an individual site that has become so large that it can run media on its own. Eg. FB is a Ad Publisher
Whereas, Networks are a cluster of unrelated small website that might now be able to attract on their own & hence they team up together.
They are similar websites that team up together so advertiser find it easier to target them. Eg. GDN you can find network of websites related to Home Décor. Double Click consist of network of premier websites and is also managed by google, popularly knows as DV360
Understanding Self Serve & Non- Self Serve Platforms.
Consider you go at a restaurant that is self served. What do you do?
You go help your self Similar is the case for Self Serve Platforms where you can start running ads on your own.
Popular example for this is: FB, Google Ads, Youtube Ads.
But In case of Non-Self Serve there’s a difference. Non-Self Serve is when you actually need to contact the platform to buy media space.
Popular example: Scoop Whoop
Components Of Media Plan
In total there are Eight essential Media Planning Components that is present in mostly all media plans:
They Include:
- Budget
- Targeting
- objective
- Platforms
- Ad Format
- Deal Type
- Duration
- Weightage
Components of Media Plan is something that is the job of A Media Planner so unless you are someone who plans media knowing these terms would be sufficient but incase you want to dive deep into learning these components download this pdf that I have created.
Metric That Matters: Choosing your North Star Metric
As a marketer the one biggest challenge that I face even today is getting lost in numbers & metrics. There are so many campaigns to look at more the metric more is it confusing for the team to monitor and measure.
Setting a North Start Metric helps the entire team to align.
But the Question is What should be you North start metric?
Well the simple answer to this is the Metric that Matters.
I have created this small pdf mentioning the metric that one can choose depending on the type of objective they are trying to achieve. Download it to learn metric matters for you.
Lastly, Media Planning & Buying is also more of dependent on intuition and the brand you are working with. You can switch the budgets to performing campaigns incase of digital even after you have planned media.
The more you practice the more you do the more efficient you will become. To understand how all of these it put together in an excel sheet download the mock media plan.
Incase you have any doubts or want to learn media planning & buying in depth feel free to reach out on my email: haiderppc@gmail.com
Thanks for Reading!
Haider