Media planning is a customised and in-depth process in which marketing professionals examine the best ways to manage and disseminate budgets, campaign assets, and promotions across platforms, channels, and locations.

As a crucial requirement for growing brands in competitive environments, media planning ensures that businesses balance their efforts and investments through a carefully selected marketing mix, with tracking and management to see how each touchpoint performs and contributes to overarching objectives and aspirations.

While media planning can be a tactical and data-driven process, it also relies on skill, expertise, and knowledge. It involves identifying specific channels that will meet or outperform expectations and aligning campaign activities to ensure the results and returns are fully optimised.

Understanding Media Planning in the Context of Brand Marketing

Marketers play a pivotal role in campaign strategy and implementation, where a great deal of the work takes place well before an advertising campaign launches. Planners begin by conducting in-depth background research, analysing:

• Consumer audiences

• Potential marketing channels

• Advertising formats and styles

• Media placements 

The core aim is to determine the best way to configure a campaign to deliver the brand message to the target audience and encourage viewers to respond in the desired way.

Working with an accomplished media planning team provides businesses access to expertise and recommendations, ensuring they aren't making any guesses or assumptions about the right way to craft and deliver their promotions or invest in placements or adverts on the wrong channels or platforms.

Importantly, media planning isn't solely focused on digital or online advertising or out-of-home and billboard advertising—it encompasses even the most comprehensive media mix. It monitors the proportion of the campaign budget allocated to each placement, the cost per engagement, impression, or response, and sets minimum and maximum spending where appropriate.

Media planners and buyers collaborate, ensuring that everybody contributing to a campaign understands the strategy and helps to maximise the returns achieved.

How Does a Media Plan Help With Brand Advertising Initiatives?

Media plans are strategic documents that set out all the media agencies research findings and the decisions made with the brand. They also define how the campaign will work – including the messaging to be delivered on each channel and at what time.

Effective media planning provides an opportunity to break down all of the specifics and plot them against budgets or brand aspirations, including:

• The total and channel-specific marketing budget set.

• Targets and goals for conversions or engagements.

• Defined consumer personas and target demographics.

• Frequency of messaging to be displayed.

• Total anticipated reach or viewer numbers.

This initial preparation ensures you make informed decisions about where and when to position your campaigns and how you will define the success rates of your advertising or promotions.

What Are the Advantages of Working With a Talented Media Planning Agency?

As an integrated advertising and marketing team, One Day offers a complete range of services, including media planning and buying. This offers many compelling benefits, especially for brands looking to optimise their campaigns and extract maximum returns as quickly as possible.

Media planning is always backed by data, metrics and research, collating insightful information to help inform how your campaign is designed and displayed and enabling us to monitor and track performance and provide detailed reporting. Additional benefits include:

• Traceability: We appreciate that brands commonly have defined budgets and need to know precisely how each campaign or media placement has helped them achieve their goals. Media planning ensures you have oversight of each component in a multi-channel campaign and can trace spending vs. returns.

• Streamlined Implementation: Following established processes removes much of the time and complexity of creating and circulating a high-impact campaign. We provide the resources and know-how to offer efficiencies, economies of scale and expedited turnarounds when time is of the essence.

• Audience analytics: Experienced marketers can conduct deep-dive audience research to pinpoint key customer groups and prospective new audiences, helping brands understand who they are advertising to and how to align the brand messaging and proposition with that demographic.

• Campaign Testing: Rather than launching a campaign and hoping it does well or using A/B testing, we break down data to help identify which options are likely to produce the best outcomes and ensure we understand what returns mean in terms of performance against targets.

One of the biggest benefits for a brand using media planning for the first time is that they generate the best possible returns on every pound they invest in their advertising and can be certain that the goals and targets they set are attainable and realistic.

Are Media Buying and Media Planning the Same?

No; brand marketing and advertising involve several skills and techniques. Although media buying and planning are both part of the campaign design and deployment process, they are separate aspects of the total project.

Media planning is the initial background work that ensures you know when, where, and how to launch a campaign, who your promotions and offers need to appeal to, and how to optimise your advertising to achieve the outcomes you have set.

In contrast, media buyers take that strategic outline and work on the actual placements and purchasing, suggesting, reserving and negotiating to find the perfect channels, platforms and locations for each panel, display, billboard or digital ad, ensuring each is consistent with the media plan.

Planners will compare and evaluate the costs of varied advertising options, enter into agreements with platforms or centres, give feedback on media trends, events and other elements that could influence your decisions, and ensure you don't pay over the odds for your chosen placements.

You can find out more about media planning in this article: What is media planning?

Access Professional Media Planning Support From One Day

If you’re new to media planning and buying, wish to revisit campaigns that haven’t produced the results you’d hoped for, or would like to start building a strategy to ensure your next promotions achieve as much traction as possible, please get in touch with One Day Media Buying Agency.

We’ll be happy to explain more about how media planning works and discuss your campaign objectives to ensure you have full oversight of your advertising activities.