Essential Steps for Digital Media Buying and Planning

How to plan and create a checklist for a digital campaign

Essential Steps For Digital Media Buying And Planning

Why are you advertising and what would you like your advertising to achieve? This can include reasons such as launching a new product or service, combat a competitor or generate sales with objectives generally broken down into 2 key areas –

•Response – a measureable action such as buy, subscribe, enter

•Brand Awareness – create an emotional reaction to your brand

Identify your campaign objective

• Recognise and build a profile of your primary market or key customer base. This could involve identifying their common demographic profile, income group and media habits.

• You may consider a survey of your current customer base to identify some of these common profile markers.

Identify Your Target Market

• What marketing activities are your competitors undertaking? This can help you determine where and how you should be advertising.

Gather Market Intelligence

• There are several ways to determine an advertising budget from % of net or forecasted sales to how much you can afford. Your budget should take into account the actual media spend and cost to produce your advertising material.

Define Your Budget

• You may have heard of the terms – paid, owned and earned media or 'POEM'. This is fairly new terminology but is a very established concept as it describes a broader marketing mix.

• Paid – the paid advertising component of your marketing campaign

• Owned – your website, sales collateral, internal processes, brand

• Earned – press mentions/public relations, social media, joint ventures, branded content

• Your paid media campaign should be run as a compliment and in conjunction with owned and earned media strategies.

Other Marketing Channels

• This should fit with your pre-determined campaign objective. If your objective is to generate response then a strong call to action or incentive to respond should be incorporated into your creative message.

Creative Message

• Different media offers different features and benefits. Having determined your target market, campaign objectives, budget and done your competitive homework you can now choose the media channels and market genres which match this criteria.

Identify Media Channels

• Particularly if this is your first campaign you may consider casting a wide net to make yourself familiar with all relevant media options.

Request Media Kit Information From Relevant Media

• Once you’ve assessed media kits and developed a short list of media, you can develop and send a brief or request for proposal (RFP).

Develop and Send Media Brief

• Book or place advertising within media which best fits your brief.

Schedule and Book Media

• Creative should meet material specifications supplied for each media

Brief and Produce Creative

• Send material with clear material insertion instructions including date of appearance.

Traffic Material

• Is your business, and everyone in it, fully prepared for the increased sales and enquiries you should attract through your well thought out paid advertising - owned and earned media - campaign?

Ensure Your Business is Ready

• Ensure you’ve developed processes which allow you to identify which media type and media platform is generating your advertising’s response. Depending on the medium used (ie digital media) you may be able to measure response and optimise your campaign in real time.

Measure, Optimise & Report

• Analyse final results from your campaign against the objectives you created at the start of the campaign planning process. This will also allow you to develop insights and strategies for your future media and advertising plans.

Review

These media planning and buying steps are not definitive and may change depending on your

business, market objectives and the media channel your campaign is scheduled to appear in - but this

can be considered a broad template.

Benefits of working with a Media Buying Agency

One-stop process

• It's handy to have a single contact rather than dealing with a multitude of phone calls from outside vendors. Research, contracting, production, billing, and any post-buy analyses are all taken care of for you rather than by you.

• Because of an agency's existing expertise, relationships, and buying power with vendors, your media dollars will be spent as efficiently and intelligently as possible.

Cost-efficiency

• Media buying agencies have formed contractual relationships with vendors over the course of years, which can benefit clients by allowing a broader range of space for an advertisement to appear at the lowest possible rates.

Expertise

• Creating a strategic media plan on your own could take a great deal of time. Getting an agency involved allows you and your employees to stay focused on other key business areas, such as sales.

Time savings

Understanding media placement strategies, as well as developing creative ads, are the two most crucial aspects to ensuring high frequency with your media buys. The primary goal of a media

buyer is to design a media plan that successfully and continuously reaches your key audience in the most cost-effective

way possible.

For more conversations

www.twitter.com/nitinkarkara

www.linkedin.com/in/nitinkarkara