Digital Media Planning and Buying
Digital media planning and buying require a lot of thought and it can be quite confusing. It is essential to understand what you are buying for your ad, who or where the audience will be, and when you can expect to have those results back so that your budget and plan are realistic.
Proper planning and segmentation of media will result in the most effective campaign possible.
In this post, we’ll explore how you can create an effective media plan.
Set Your Objectives:
Itâs not enough to just buy ads. You need to know what you want from them.
There are two main types of objectives: performance and branding. Performance goals are more straightforward, like increasing sales or driving traffic to a website.
Branding goals, on the other hand, are more abstract and harder to measure, such as increasing brand awareness or improving customer perception.
The best way to set objectives is to think about how you want your customers to feel about your company after they see an ad.
Do you want them to think of you as an expert leader in your industry?
Do you want them to feel like they can trust you with their money?
Or would it be better if they just felt good about your brand?
Determine Target Audience:
The second step in digital media planning and buying is to define your target audience. To start, you need to identify the goals of your campaign.
For example, if you’re selling high-end jewelry and looking to reach affluent consumers, you might want to focus on reaching affluent women who are 45 and older.
If you’re selling a new line of children’s clothing and looking for moms who are active in their communities, you might want to focus on reaching women between 25 and 54 who live in suburban areas.
Once you’ve determined your target audience, it’s time to start defining the characteristics that make them up. These characteristics can include age, gender, location (city or suburb), family status (married or single), income level, profession and interests
Research The Best Channels For Your Business:
Defining your target audience also helps you determine what media channels are best suited for reaching that audience. For example, if you know that your ideal customer consumes most of her content through mobile devices and social media feeds, then it would make sense for you to focus on those channels when planning your digital campaigns.
Set The Budget:
The budget establishes how much money you have to spend on digital advertising, and helps determine which channels to use, what ads to create, and where to place them.
It’s important to note that there are no hard-and-fast rules for how much money should be allocated to online marketing. There are many factors that affect the cost of a campaign â including industry, competition, keywords, and goals â but one thing remains constant: It’s much cheaper than traditional media like TV or radio.
Develop Message Strategy:
The media strategy is the most important asset in your digital marketing plan. It affects every aspect of your campaign and its implementation.
Media strategy is a prioritized list of channels that you plan to use to communicate with your target audience. These channels are selected based on several factors, including:
Demographic of your audience
Geographic location
Behavioral data (e.g., what they buy, what they post on social media)
Pre-Buy Plans:
A pre-buy plan is a document that outlines how you will purchase inventory during a digital campaign. It is used to forecast the performance of specific creative assets or media plans, or for evaluating the effectiveness of an entire campaign. It includes the:
Number of impressions you want to buy (often called “impressions”)
Cost per impression (CPM) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Type of inventory (e.g., banner, video, mobile), and
Targeting criteria for the inventory (e.g., location, gender, age).
Post-Buy Analysis:
The post-buy analysis is a critical step in the media planning and buying process. It allows media planners to determine if their strategy was successful or not and if they need to make any changes going forward.
The post-buy analysis is essentially an audit of the campaign, where you look at all the data from your previous buys to see what worked and what didn’t. This may seem like an obvious step, but it’s surprising how many brands neglect this critical step and simply move on to the next campaign without looking back at what they did right or wrong.
It provides a comprehensive look at how each campaign performed, including:
– Quality scores for each ad creative
– Conversion rates by device
– Bounce rates by page and destination URL
– Funnel analysis (where users drop off in the conversion process)
Once you’ve completed the post-buy analysis, you can take the lessons learned from that analysis and apply them to future campaigns.