The Internet has made everything so easy. From learning about all the available product options to actually making the purchase, the World Wide Web serves as a primary channel for almost every stage of the buying process.
But while it helps companies reach farther than they did before, the Internet has also made implementing a marketing strategy in Dubai more daunting than ever. With loads of information at customers’ fingertips, breaking through has proven quite challenging.
To help you reach the right audience and make your desired impact, this article will serve as a concise guide to media planning in the era of the informed customer.
Media Planning: The Basics
Before diving into the strategies and steps you need to take, you must first learn about the basics of media planning.
The process of media planning entails determining when, where, and how frequently advertisements should be run to achieve optimal customer engagement and better ROI.
It can be split into online and offline channels, including:
- Broadcast
- Sponsored ads
- Video ads
- Native content
With the marketing landscape becoming more competitive as the years pass, delivering the right message through the most appropriate channel at the best time has become more crucial. A media plan helps marketers identify these messages, channels, and timing.
What factors should you consider when creating a media plan?
A media plan can only be considered effective if it takes into account the following factors:
- The marketing budget
- The target market
- The conversion goals
- The frequency and reach of the message
- The KPIs of media plan success
Media plans are almost always created by marketers and digital media agencies in Dubai. They can work with you on a strategy that will maximize the returns on your media plan budget.
What are the goals of a media plan?
Media planning requires the right combination of ads to accomplish specific objectives. It needs to be aligned with the company’s target while staying true to its brand identity.
To make sure your organization reaches its ultimate endgame, media planning needs to perform different strategies to achieve the following goals:
- Boost brand awareness
- Generate leads
- Promote conversions
4 Basic Steps to Media Planning
While you need the help of professionals to perform media planning efficiently, client organizations still need to know the four basic steps to be taken for the plan to succeed.
This includes:
Step #1: Research
Some companies already have a good amount of data about their target audience that help create effective ad campaigns.
But if this data doesn’t exist yet, a media planner will conduct thorough research to gather all the information they need to get a good grasp of the target audience and the market.
Step #2: Goal setting
After market research, the next step to media planning is establishing goals for a particular advertising campaign.
Is it to increase brand awareness? Or perhaps the goal is to generate more leads that have a higher chance to convert?
These objectives will guide the campaign, making it more effective and successful.
Pro Tip: The more specific your media plan goals are, the more focused the campaign will be.
Step #3: Creating a strategy
Next, you need to work with your media planner to come up with a strategy for achieving the goals you’ve set for the campaign.
One part of this entails identifying the most suitable types of media for the campaign. If you go back to your research, you can quickly identify which ads are the most effective in reaching your target audience and accomplishing your goals.
Step #4: Monitoring and analyzing results
Even after the baton has been passed on to media buyers, media planners still play a crucial role in the process – by monitoring and analyzing results.
After the ad campaign goes live, media planners will have to track its performance on a regular basis and determine whether:
- The ad reaches the right audience
- The ad effectively attracts and engages the audience
If they find areas where the campaign is falling short during assessment, media planners can re-strategize with the client organization to fix the issue. In this case, media planners need to improvise to enhance the current media plan.
Media Planning: 4 Key Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Sometimes, media plans fail because companies don’t take into account the potential challenges that may hinder their success. Below are some of the primary challenges to watch out for and some ways on how to overcome them:
1. Platform Preference
Certain niches and brands have a specific set of platforms that the members of their target audience use the most. This means that the media plan should include the most appropriate channels through which the client should run their campaigns.
Of course, all this must be done with the media spend and budget in mind.
Solution: Careful strategizing is the best way to overcome this challenge, combined with thorough audience research.
2. Consumer Targeting
Understanding the consumers at the granular level will bring out the best messages and strategies a media plan needs for the most fruitful campaign.
Solution: Again, conducting in-depth research and marketing analytics of your target audience is needed to ensure media plan success.
3. Heavy Focus on Budget
Sometimes, media planners focus too much on staying within budget (or using it all up) rather than ensuring customer engagement. If the budget is lacking, it also creates limited opportunities for marketers to run effective campaigns.
Solution: Develop a media plan budget with sufficient buffer to support flexibility and use of various channels to boost campaign success rate. You can also overcome this challenge by tapping on historical data or competitor analysis to determine which channels work to reduce costly trial-and-error campaigns.
4. Measurement Integration
With so many channels used in media plans – both online and offline, measuring campaign success can be quite challenging.
Solution: Come up with key performance indicators (KPIs) or criteria that are applicable across all platforms to determine which campaigns have been effective and which ones need to be updated.
Join Forces With the Experts in Creating a Digital Media Plan
Digital media planning is a collaborative effort between professional marketers, media buyers, and the client organization.
Yellow Branding will help guide you through the process and make sure that your digital media campaigns become fruitful.
Please reach out to us for more information.
