How to Create an Effective Media Plan for Your Digital Marketing Campaign

As a digital marketer, the crucial step to launch your digital marketing campaign is to have an effective media plan. The media plan helps the digital marketer to execute and achieve the objective of their campaign. A Media plan is not only about choosing which media to use but also to have a clear understanding of the audience and the best way to deliver the campaign message.

Before we started with the media plan, we need to first define clearly our campaign goals and objective. Campaign goals and objective that are quantifiable and meaningful for your business.

Understanding The Audience

Creating an effective media plan starts with understanding the audience. Marketers today are dealing with audiences that have a tremendous amount of privilege to consume and respond to any message in the digital sphere, audiences that demand perfect digital experiences.

We can start understanding the audiences with the 5W1H formula.

Who are they? 
What is their goal? 
Where can we reach them? 
When is the best time to reach them? 
Why do they want to respond to our message?
HOW?

Answering these questions help us as marketer deliver a digital marketing campaign that ensures the audiences experiences. It also helps us get the best response we wanted from the audience.

Some tools can help answer these questions faster; one of our favourite today is AlsoAsked.com. A tool that generates popular questions from search audiences for specific topics or search queries. Providing us with insights on the audience's goals and challenges.

An audience's persona creates a representation of our audience. A persona is, as the name suggests, a character created to help the company better understand who the customer is and what he or she needs.

Choosing The Right Digital Channel

Now that you have a better understanding of the audiences, the next step is to choose your digital channels. Channels that help you reach and engage your defined audience better.

What we need to understand is that audiences today are juggling from one channel to another on their digital journey. Someone who is in the market to buy a smartphone, for example, might have been reached, searched, or interacted within multiple channels.

If Samsung is targeting these audiences, and they are no in one of the audience's journeys, there's a chance that the audience buys a different brand of smartphone.

As a marketer, we need to make sure that our digital campaign reaches the audience on every step of their digital journey.

Every digital channel has its characteristics and capabilities. For example (not always), channels like Facebook Ads and Google Display Network have capabilities to reach more audiences. On the other hand, Paid and Organic search tend to generate higher user engagement and conversions because of its intents based approach. Information like this, combined with the audience personas, helps decide which channels are suitable for our digital marketing campaign.

Deciding which digital marketing channel to use also involved decision on the strategy to deliver our campaign through those channels. The strategy that we called today as an Omni-Channel Approach. Compared to the traditional multi-channel approach, the Omni-Channel approach makes sure that marketers deliver a streamlined message across multiple digital channels.

Your competitors can also give you insights on choosing the digital channels. A marketing mix report from SimilarWeb, for example, shows the channels that your competitor uses to drive traffic to their website.

Campaign Budgeting

Now comes the most complicated part of media planning, the budgeting. It is deciding how much investment you're going to invest in every channel you have. The truth is, there is no exact formula for this. It highly depends on the result of the first three steps, your campaign objective, the target audience, and the channels.

Here are some sample scenarios to give you ideas on setting up your campaign budgeting.

Scenarios 1 is where your marketing goal is 40% brand penetration on the market

Scenarios 2 is where your marketing goal is 10% Year-on-Year revenue growth

(Bonus) Media Plan Template

We have created a template to make it easier for you to create your media plan. With this template, you need to fill out the key metrics of your campaign. The template will generate an estimated performance of all your marketing channels.

Email us at ridho[at]search.agency to request for a copy of this media plan.