Media planning and strategy is a critical aspect of advertising. This aspect in marketing communications is concerned with the dissemination of information. This article takes a look at some important elements to look into in media planning and strategy to help you get started in coming up with your own plan.
Clearly Define Your Target Audience
The target audience refers to the people whose attention you want to catch in your ad campaign. The population is composed of different groups of people, which is why you need to ensure that your media planning and strategy sessions should be structured in such a way that will allow you to come up with strategies to effectively reach your target audience. For example, if you want to target a certain demographic (for example, teenagers), you will need to do market research in order to find out what things appeal to them so you can structure your ad campaign in such a way that you will be able to get the attention of your target audience. Poor media planning will result in you not being able to reach you target audience effectively, and this can lead to your client company losing thousands, if not millions of dollars, in the process.
Define Communication Goals
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you need to set communication goals. What results are you actually aiming for in your ad campaign? Do you want to increase people’s awareness about a certain product? Do you want to retain the loyalty of your consumers? Make sure to coordinate with your client so you can come up with strategies that are in line with their objective.
Examine Media Vehicles
Of course, a media plan isn’t complete without identifying what media vehicles you will be using to effectively get the message across. There are two main approaches that you can choose from: media concentration and media dispersion. Media concentration refers to the option wherein you will only be using a selected number of media vehicles to get your message across. That way, the ads will have higher frequency of appearing. This is a good option if you have identified the target audience to be more exposed to certain media vehicles compared to others. Media dispersion, on the other hand, refers to the option wherein you will be tapping into multiple media vehicles (such as TV, radio, new media, billboards, etc.) in your ad campaign. This is a good option if you are planning on launching a product and you want to reach a wide variety of audiences at a given time. Do take note, however, that media dispersion can cost so much more compared to media concentration due to the extensiveness of this type of campaign.
Advertising isn’t just about releasing ads that are centered on the product you want to promote. It is integral that the creation of the ads should always be rooted in company brand development to ensure that the product stays true to the image that the company wants to create for the brand. As such, great care must be put into media planning and strategy to ensure that the plans made by the advertising agency are consistent with what the client company seeks.
If you’re a business that’s looking for some assistance with your media planning strategy, you should consider experts in the field, VionetGraphics.com.
Featured image courtesy of Kecko.
