Media Plan

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is it?

A media plan defines where exactly our ads are going to go. Media plans can be created by our internal team, by yourself, or indeed by our media agency that we’re working with.

It’s a very useful document because it’s a financial document that shows what we’re paying and what we’re getting. It shows where we’re going to be doing the activity, the names of the websites, or the type of targeting, and it will also show the run dates. So you know when these campaigns or when these line items are expected to run.

When we have all of this in one place, we’re able to see in a snapshot what our campaign is going to do, and what we’re going to deliver in terms of that reach, impressions, and clicks. And we can, if we have enough historical data, start predicting things around conversions.

But it’s not always wise. Because of the type of channel that display is, we don’t always want to include the conversions on a display media plan because its pure focus is to drive awareness, not drive action. Search drives action.

This will show us our reach and our impressions and all of that stuff in one centralized document. It’s very useful for keeping things on track, making sure things go live, and making sure that you’ll not overspend or underspend on certain channels.

Benefits

The benefits of a media plan include the following:

• You can track your overall costs.
• You can project manage your campaign.
• You can forecast results based on the number of impressions you get versus your KPIs.
• It verifies your media choices because you can go back to your media plan and see what worked and what didn’t.
• That will inform how you’re going to deliver your creative, because you might find that certain types of placements (social placements, for example) might have more informal creative style versus traditional display placement. So it may inform how and what type of creative you do want to deliver for the different line items.