The elements of media planning include understanding marketing objectives, setting campaign goals, performing market research, managing a budget, structuring media objectives to establish a media planning strategy, creating a media plan, implementing the plan and evaluating the results of the plan. Media planning is the process based on these elements, which lead media planners to build context before building an actionable strategy.

Most media campaigns begin with a brand or client crafting and delivering a marketing brief that describes all of the long-term marketing objectives and goals for the campaign that they want to accomplish. The brief will also provide more insight into the brand’s products or services that need media advertisements, potential target audience information and other suggestions and contextual information for the campaign.

Media planners start here to build an understanding of what information they already have to work with as they seek the best placements for their ads.

Media planners then perform any necessary market research to continue to better their understanding of the target audience and how similar products or services may have been marketed in the past. They may conduct surveys, consult existing study results, run product tests or discuss with focus groups.

Market research may be done in-house (whether by the brand itself or the agency doing the media planning for a client) or performed by a hired third party. The findings from this research are then analyzed and condensed into key insights that will impact the eventual structure of the media plan.

With the background for the marketing campaign established through initial goals and research, media planners can begin to set specific objectives for the media plan. These media objectives will be narrowed down to create the direct goals for each media campaign, helping to construct the framework for the media planning strategy.

Media objectives should include specific KPI benchmarks, audience requirements and optimal spend levels. Marketers should consider whether objectives like overall brand awareness are more important than driving volume of sales to a specific product, for example. Through these objectives and the initial background research, a media planning strategy is established – this paves the way for the creation of a media plan.

Using the knowledge of the media planning strategy, media planners construct a media plan that incorporates one or more media platforms in which ads will be placed. The channels chosen for the media plan will be cost-effective for the advertiser’s budget constraints, adequate for the required reach and frequency goals of the target audience and relevant in format to the creative and messaging being placed.

Once the team or client has been presented with this plan, the media planners move forward to the media buying phase for implementation. Media planning and media buying teams are often separate, so the media planners may consult with the media buyers to get their plan implemented and the ad space purchased.

After the campaign has gone live, media planners will continuously analyze the results of the campaign to ensure that goals are being met and the plan remains optimized for maximum effectiveness. This analysis will in turn help the planners learn more about their target audiences and craft future campaigns with better success.

Like other media tools such as a media flowchart or an ad campaign calendar, media schedules can be easily created in any program (like Microsoft Excel) that allows you to create a table. The columns and rows of that table will partially depend on the scope of your media spend and the types of content you are promoting. However, one of the axes will delineate time, while the other identifies the details of your media placements. Those media details can include things like:

• Expected spend
• Expected impressions
• Target audience
• Frequency of posting/placements

At a high level, media planning is the act of strategically selecting what sort of media channels and formats to include in the execution of a marketing campaign. The process of media planning entails the decision of the locations, timelines and frequencies of media placements in which advertisements will be presented.

Media planners consider the characteristics of their ads, or creative, as well as the details of their campaign, such as budget, timing, audience targeting and more. Media planners also typically utilize market research to inform their strategy and set campaign goals.

The purpose of a strong media plan is to guide media buyers, who are often separate entities from media planners, when they buy media.

Contextual targeting hinges on the theory that a user may be more likely to take interest in an ad that is related to or directly about a subject that the user is already interested in. They’ve proven their interest in the subject of the webpage’s content by visiting the page. Presenting this user with an ad for a relevant product, service or company is therefore likely to pique their interest as well.

Consider the example of listening to multiple music artists whose songs are each categorized into a common genre. When you listen to a certain style of music, you may be more apt to wade through a list of related artists to find new songs that sound familiar.

Contextual advertising offers that exploratory experience to users on a website, asking them to peel back the next page of content that seemingly fits right in alongside what they had already shown up for. Though it’s an advertisement, its relevance — the context in which they are seeing it — makes it worth engaging.

Contextual targeting platforms assess the content on a page, finding keywords, contextual categories, tags and more. Google AdSense is one example, but there are plenty of platforms out there which are often industry-specific and offer a deeper focus on context within those industries. In practice, this automated process delivers this contextual data to the ad networks, or SSPs, that in turn provide it to media buying platforms to display contextual ads.

Often, advertisers will create multiple variations of an ad based on their key audience characteristics (e.g. job function, industry, or location). They can then leverage specific design elements and wording in their ads to create a personalized ad experience. Of course, they need to ensure their targeting parameters are accurate to truly connect with each individual audience member.

As a consumer, you may be able to pinpoint when you’re being served a personalized ad versus a more generic one. At the very least, even if you’re not compelled to click on the ad and follow through, you’re more likely to remember it.