Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
The role of media plan
A media plan serves as a guide plan to how you will spend your ad budget, but it also serves as a way to track spends. At the end of each month, you should be reconciling your plan, which involves putting actual spends in the columns moving budget either forward or, if you've overspent, moving it back. Media plans are usually tables in Excel with each channel written on its own row as a line item. The channel name, for example. Facebook is written on the left and the audience targeting, objective, ad delivery, cost and run dates are written on the right of the table.
The benefit of detailing each platform line by line is that now you can determine how much content you have against how much support they will each receive. When campaigns are being set up, this is important because you'll know exactly what you're going to be doing throughout the whole campaign. And if you have an idea for a piece of content that's adding to this, then you'll need to actually find budget first.
The plan will also contain estimates of impressions and clicks which should be delivered for the budget. Digital marketers can work out ad delivery, impressions and clicks, by agreeing a CPM in advance for premium display. By dividing the budget by historical CPMs for GDN and social channels and historical CPCs for paid search, digital marketers can estimate what the budget could deliver in terms of click traffic and impressions.
Sometimes including the historical conversion rate for the channels could help forecast conversions from the campaign. Simply multiply the forecasted clicks for that channel by the conversion rate for the channel to broadly estimate conversions for your activity.
Once executed by the different in-house or agency stakeholders, such as PPC specialists, social media specialists, display and video specialists, checking-in daily becomes part of the routine to see if the plan is working or if changes are required to rectify errors or capitalize on opportunities.
Back to TopJessica Preddy
Jessica is a consultant with experience in marketing and an in-depth knowledge of the latest marketing techniques. Her previous roles have included working in a marketing agency and numerous customer-service-facing positions that have given her exposure to a wide range of customers and clients.
