What is Media Planning?

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.