How to make a successful Media Plan?
A successful media campaign is dependent upon 2 things - strong creative messaging and an effective media plan. Craft a clear, creative message which is relevant and meaningful for your target audience. Make sure your message aligns with your campaign objective. To translate this creative message into a good campaign, an effective media plan is required. While there are many steps involved in making a good media plan, the following steps are critical in success of any media campaign.
Media Objectives – The first and most important step is to understand the key objectives and goals of the marketing campaign and discuss who the target audience is or should be.
Research- The next step is to gather and analyze insights about the market at large, research industry trends, assess the competition, identify target audiences, and understand where those audiences are most engaged with ad content.
Media Mix –. Consumers receive and engage with content in countless ways, both traditional and digital. Therefore, it’s important to find the perfect media mix for reaching the target audience across media channels.
Targeting – It is the act of identifying the ideal audience that should receive a marketing message. You should be kept in mind that the communication TG might be different than the product TG. This means that you might be wanting to communicate with youth but it’s possible that your product is being used by all age groups.
Target Market – This will depend on your focus markets and geographies. You might want to advertise pan India or might want to restrict your campaign to select markets. A lot of factors should be considered to decide the target markets such as – your market share, distribution, competitive intensity, cost per rating point etc.
Planning approach – There are broadly 2 types of approaches. Both are correct and one can follow either of these:
1. SOV: SOM approach – In this approach, you decide how many GRPs you need to deploy in a particular market basis your SOM (share of market or market share). For example, if your market share is 10% and category GRPs is around 10,000 per month, to sustain your market share, you should plan at least 1000 GRPs (10% of 10,000) in a month. You should deploy minimum 100 GRPs in any week for a creative to have any sort of impact. If you can’t, you should ideally shrink your campaign to lesser weeks.
2. Reach and Frequency approach – In this approach, you decide what percentage of your TG should watch your ad at least how many times. Media planning agencies have developed tools like frequency estimator which tells what should be the ideal frequency for a particular category. Generally, it is between 3 and 6. Next is finding the ideal reach. This can be done by calculating how many GRPs you need to deploy basis the number of units of a particular product you want to sell in a given period. The conversion percentage (from total aware to trials) is found to be in the range of 2% to 3%. For example, your TG universe is 100,000 people and you want to sell 1000 units of your product. To sell to 100 people, you need to show your ad to at least 33,333 people (100/3%). This translates to 33% of total TG universe. Assuming you want to show your ad min 4 times, the plan becomes 33% @ 4+.
Scheduling – Scheduling is indicating what time and day certain ads will be served across various media. This depends on target audience and their media consumption behavior. For example, serving an ad for a rice brand on a food channel during afternoon might make sense while for a youth brand, it might make more sense to place it on music channels on Friday night.
While there are no perfect media plans and there is always a room for optimization, proper planning and careful execution of a media campaign can help you gain a competitive advantage and achieve your marketing objectives.
Are you planning efficiently?