“Failing to plan is planning to fail”
-Ben Frank
The outline or backbone of an advertising campaign is known as a media plan. A media plan outlines the strategies for advertising and communication, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes to the overall goals of the organization. Advertising costs real money, a limited resource for businesses and nonprofits regardless of the economy. Having a well-structured media plan can mean the difference between successful campaigns and wasted time & budget, leading to frustration or worse.
Building an effective media plan requires several steps. First, it is important to establish the goal: what is your ad campaign’s purpose? If we think of our media plan as a roadmap, where are we going? Defining what you are looking to accomplish lays the groundwork for everything that comes after.
Building an effective media plan also means identifying how much budget you are able to commit to a defined timeline of advertising. Too often, we see businesses defeated by advertising because they either stop it too soon or aren’t spending enough to properly reach their target audience. When thinking about a timeline, consider your product or service’s sales cycle: does someone decide to buy same-day, or does it take a few weeks or months for them to make a decision? If it’s the latter, consider that an appropriate window in which you should start seeing results, too.
The process of building an effective media plan continues with thorough research and analysis of your target audience. Knowing who your customers are, what they value, and where they spend their time is fundamental to tailoring your message and selecting the right channels for delivery (final step!). This often involves identifying the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics of your audience, which will inform your distribution choices.
And now is where we’ll finally choose the channels and platforms in which to serve our ads. Using the information we have on our target audience, along with our budget, we will select distribution channels, traditional and/or digital, based on which of these help us best achieve our goals.
This infographic is designed to focus on key points in building an effective media plan; the major areas to keep in mind when planning any traditional or digital advertising campaign. If you’re new to all of this and are looking for experienced digital advertising and marketing for businesses or nonprofits, send us a message today!
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