Media planning is the task of allocating promotional budgets to multiple media channels/platforms to communicate a product’s presence, differentiators and values. Traditionally for marketers, this has been a crucial exercise and mostly conducted in collaboration with an agency which works on behalf of the company and gets a commission for handling media buying, placement, and execution activities. Let us look at some of the traditional definitions which form a part of media planning.
- Media channel: It is the medium or platform through which brands communicate their message to target audiences. Typical traditional media used for promotions include television, radio, newspaper, magazine, while digital channels would include company’s website, third-party sites, social media sites, blogs..etc
- Media Vehicle: It includes specific methods by companies to deliver the communication message, for example, advertisements placed on a TV or a radio program. In digital cases, it is ads in the news-stream of a Facebook user or ads inserted into twitter stream.
- Media audience: The target audience which consumes a particular communication message placed on a channel. In TV, specific advertisements are placed during a particular program, while in online media, it could be the audience watching a particular ad placed on a single landing page of a website.
- Media schedule: In digital media, companies identify the decision making which makes media scheduling highly targeted and real time.
- Media Budget: earlier, firms need to think of allocating a part of their revenues to marketing on defined channels. With digital channels, marketers need to think and invest in multiple other factors like Market research, customer profile development, testing strategies, costs of tracking and monitoring, purchasing analytical products etc
- Media delivery: Finally there are concepts of media delivery like reach, frequency, and impressions etc which have different connotations and strategies in the online world.
