What is Media Plan?
When you are in the process of introducing a new product in the market, you need to plan its advertising process. This part of promotion or advertising is also known as the media planning process.
Media planning is making a decision to choose the right way of putting your message across to the target audience. The message of introducing the new product to your existing customer and also targeting new prospective customers. This needs to be done correctly in order to make it extremely effective.
Yes, the main part of advertising is the right content. However, The main motive of marketing and promotions is putting the right content across the right medium to target the audience.
Media plan is mostly outsourced, so these media planners choose an important source of media platform to promote or advertise a client or an organization’s brand or their products and services.
The main job of a media planner is to choose the best media options effectively to attain the objectives of the organization’s marketing campaigns.
During the process of the media plan, a few questions need to be answered.
- Who are the target audiences?
- What types of media can reach out to how many target audiences?
- Which media should be used to place the ad to reach out to the audiences effectively?
- What should be the frequency of the ad placed in various ad vehicles?
- What should be the budget for each ad vehicle?
Marketing has budget constraints for every organization. Advertising for promoting the goods and services of an organization is mandatory in any competitive market.
Advertising and spending big sums for promoting products and services is easier for bigger organizations. However, it is challenging for smaller companies to spend much on advertising. The cost of advertising through media is huge.
Smaller companies with smaller budgets and lesser advertising knowledge find advertising challenging. Budget constraints cannot help you advertise on TV, radio, national newspapers, magazines, or billboards.
Try using local newspapers with limited reach. Local magazines, even in the local language, are perfect, cheaper, or no-cost social media to reach a less targeted audience to spread awareness.
Choosing the right media plan will help you effectively convey your message to your target audience through the right ad vehicle. A media plan is a process that is successful only if planned well.
Of course, social media planning needs many analyzes, objectives, and strategies to implement in order to get the right output. The motive needs to be achieved.
Marketing always aims to create a need for the product and service amongst the target audience through effective content. And that is not it. The content must be displayed and flashed through the correct ad vehicle within the given budget to maximize profits and avoid losses.
Process of building an effective media plan
Look at the process of building an effective media plan noted below:
To choose the correct media plan vehicle to promote a product and service, you need to make sure you do
1. Market Analyses
Before entering the market with a new product or service, you research the market, the types of audience in the set or given market, their description, preferences, etc.
What is important is to know the market or analysis the market before you introduce a product or a service in that market. In short, you will analyze the market. Once you analyze the market, you will know how to create awareness amongst your target audiences.
A market analysis is a first and most important step in social media planning for advertising. It is important to know the market before you understand how and what to advertise and what will effectively grab your target audience’s attention.
2. Create an effective media objective.
Your main objective will be to reach out and create awareness about tour products and services amongst your target audiences to increase your sales and profitability within a budget.
Remember that your media objective is very important as it is the goal of your media plan. Your goal should answer the following questions.
- How many audiences should your media vehicle reach out to?
- How frequently should you flash your ads?
- How and how much should the ad circulate to be effective enough to meet your promotion and sales expectations?
- What should be your advertising cost?
- How much should you spend on what media vehicle?
Remember, your goals that your media objective need to be appropriate to attain the correct profitability by spending as less as you can. It is only about promoting correcting.
3. List down marketing issues.
You might face hurdles in different business stages, from production to selling and servicing. Some hurdles might be huge, and some small. However, every problem has solutions, and not one may be more than one.
All you need to do is choose the correct solution and implement it. Like other stages, you will face issues or problems even in marketing. List all the issues you can encounter while promoting your product and services.
Look for solutions. You can solve these problems and hurdles in a number of ways. However, the motive is to get the most effective solution.
4. Strategize
Once you have an answer to all your questions and solutions to all your problems, you better understand the market, your target audience, their likes and dislikes, and how to influence them.
Now you need to list the media plan or ad vehicles and the cost of utilizing their services. You can select the media vehicle you want to choose to promote or advertise your products and services based on the cost involved and your budget.
These media plan options include television, radio, newspaper, interactive media platform, magazines, and digital media. Choose the media bases on the set media objective; remember that is your goal. Your ad vehicle should be able to meet your social media planning goal.
You should be able to differentiate
- Which option reaches the maximum target audience?
- How many times will your target audience be able to view it?
- Most importantly, does the media vehicle fit your budget or advertising cost?
5. Your media vehicle should be able to do the following
- Reach out to<
You have a set number or a certain percentage of audiences you would want to focus on. Your media vehicle should be able to reach that number or that percentage of people. The reaching out can be reaching out to individuals or homes and families in a specified period of time.
- Frequency
Flashing an advertisement once or twice is not enough. You must flash the ad and occasionally expose it to your target audiences to create awareness.
You need to know how often the media vehicle flashes your ad, the average daily flashes, or a set period to expose it to your target audiences.
Averagely for a consumer to realize and take action, it takes more than 3 times. Hence considering and knowing the frequency is important.
- Cost per thousand customers
You have a set budget for advertising your products and services. However, there are better ways of budgeting than spending the money and not knowing how many audiences the ad vehicle reaches.
For example, if a newspaper is circulated to 50000 people, you can divide your advertising cost by 50000 to understand how much you spend to make your ads reach per thousand audiences. You will never know who can be your next prospective customer.
Remember, advertising cost divided by how many thousand audiences will give you the cost spent per thousand.
- The impact that it will create
Is the medium or the ad vehicle making enough sense? Does it give the content a complete opportunity to make sense? Is the advertisement visible and audible clearly? Is the quality of the graphics and designs appropriate? Is the quality of production good? The quality of the content and the other aspects need to be checked and scrutinized to ensure it is understandable and appealing enough to the audience.
- Degree of selection
You aim to reach out to most of your prospective audience. Now this is true that anyone can be your next prospective customer. However, how many and who can be your most logical prospect, and up to what degree can you select to target your logical prospect audiences?
Degree of selection can save your advertisement cost because you can focus on your prospects.
6. Implement your strategies
Now that everything is set and all questions are answered, you must implement your media planning. Now search for the best Social Media Channels for Business (Marketing) when you buy the media. You select the promotion media for your ads.
This process includes committing to the media provider by submitting the advertisement and paying the advertising bills. When you see your hard work coming together, you will simultaneously be extremely excited and relieved.
As it has finally paid off for now, promotion and advertising of your products and services are now going to fetch you the results in terms of increasing sales and profitability.
7. Evaluate the results
After you reach the implementation stage, you must sit and wait for the results. These results can be in sales and profits, as mentioned earlier. However, is it meeting your expectations, was the effort enough, and were your analyses correct? You are aware of your media plan objectives and your media goals.
You need to understand if you successfully met your goals and objectives. Were your strategies successful? If this media plan of yours works out well, it will help you determine your other media plans.
8. Follow up and continue promoting
Promoting a product and a service at its launch to introduce it to the public and then not promoting increased sales or publicizing it is incorrect.
You want to reach out to your target audiences in different ways, and discontinuing promotions of your goods and services wastes all the effort you put into understanding the market and promoting accordingly.
Ensure you are in touch with your customers and know them better as you deal with them. Knowing your audiences better will help you promote and expose yourself to your goods and services better than you promoted before.
Keep the promotions on, keep the advertisements going, and do not stop researching the market, your customer, and the changes you have seen and experienced. This will save on your effort of redoing the market research.
Keep the follow-ups on and continue to promote your goods and services to get more exposure to gain better publicity and more business.
Conclusion
Knowing the market and marketing accordingly is extremely important to be successful in your business. You can sell better only if your products and services are exposed to your target audiences better.
Yes, content is the most important part of advertising. However, choosing the right ad vehicle is also very important because only the right ad vehicle can help you effectively promote your products and services by reaching out to your target audiences.
Target audiences can be your existing prospect or logical prospect customers.
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