7 Quick Tips For Media & Marketing Plans

Improving your media and marketing plans will have a beneficial impact on your business and provide a clear strategy for brand growth and ROI. At 23 Media Audits, we ensure that our clients’ media is efficient across all buying and quality parameters and equally effective to their business objectives.

The media business is far better at doing this across traditional media than we are within the digital sphere. However, we have seen improvements with far more emphasis on brand safety and ad fraud levels. Chasing a low CPM inevitably delivers low-quality environments for brands and, across every advertiser category we have worked with looking at premium positioning and targeting, the KPI’s have been fully achieved despite the initial CPM levels being higher than the standard entry CPM.

Once these have been set make sure you have full backing from your procurement/finance teams. In the first instance work out internally how much money you need to hit your KPI’s – this is where 23 Media Audits can play a pivotal role in helping companies calculate their budgeting across different media before then asking their agencies what they can do for their available budget, be it £500,000 or £5 million. This pre-plan stage is great for helping brands understand how much each media costs before involving the agency planners and buyers. Also, some media KPI’s may be centred around growth whilst for other brands, it could be sales ROI. The key is making sure your marketing and finance teams are aligned internally.

Within your media plan make sure you understand what each media adds to your customer’s touchpoints. For instance, if they are searching via Google does your brand come up and is this budget aligned to the traditional media budget of creating awareness? You must ensure all the media work as one rather than independent media via a standard media block plan.

How do you make sure that your media plan is looking at total brand reach rather than individual reach for each media? 23 Media Audits have developed a forecasting tool that calculates both total reach and frequency. This is a key approach for brands and enables them to pull together their entire media plan rather than having each media working in a silo, which is still how the majority of agency teams are set up to plan and buy media.

Ultimately all advertisers use media channels to try and reach as many people as possible, looking to not just talk to your loyal audience but also to potential customers who may buy very occasionally and are hard to reach. Try not to overcomplicate your media and especially your digital media. Targeting is important (in fact very important) but not to the extent that your reach is so narrow that it fails to talk to a wider audience. Remember to try to keep your media simple and that too much data can adversely affect a brands performance.

Start by looking at previous performance and media spend and critically analyse whether you were successful by gauging what could be improved and ultimately what were your learnings. Using this information to look at competitor activity, the timing of media within the year, reach, media quality and channels may not have all the ultra-targeting of programmatic and audience segmentation etc, but they are the add-ons that can help reap the extra few % from the more basic overall media plan. Making the plan too sophisticated can lead to a narrowing of the brands potential and ultimately less brand awareness and poorer longer terms sales.

Brands we work with (especially SME’s, Challenger and regional brands) have built their reputation with internal teams and through digital networks and e-commerce. Once they become more established their biggest challenge is to start looking at long-term growth and awareness through broader media channels and moving away from the hyper-targeted quarterly sales-focused goals to the more long-term strategies of brand awareness.

Want more help with your media plan? Download our media plan guide or get in touch to learn how we can help.