How To Develop A Quality Media Plan

By: Deon Melchior
Advertising is important to every business and the largest expense in your advertising budget is going to be your media costs. Media costs include the cost of ads in newspapers and magazines, as well as ads on the radio and television. It’s important that you get the best value for your money so you will need to develop a quality media plan.

Your media plan should include daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, and your goal for the year. You need a plan to manage the money you are going to invest in media advertising. You should begin with an outline of what you want your media campaign to accomplish, then go back and fill in the details.

Many companies manage their media budgets the wrong way. The person in charge of the budget says yes to every sales person who comes along with an advertising product to sell. All of a sudden they are half way through the year and have no media budget left for the balance of the year. That’s because they neglected to plan out their media budget at the beginning of the year. Don’t make this mistake!

Without properly planning when and how you will use your media budget you will not see the return on your investment that you should. You will miss out on important opportunities and events like Christmas or a special local celebration.

Planning your media budget means you are going to set and choose a course of action. Your media budget should be planned out each year. You can use last years results to decide what worked well and what you should not repeat.

You can keep your media plan on your computer or store it in a binder. How you track it matters not. What matters is that you do in fact have a plan and you use that plan to get the best return on your investment.

You should have a section that lists all the media options you have and which of those options you will use. So for example your media outlets would include radio stations x, y, and z; newspapers b and c; magazine f, television station t.

You should also have a section dedicated to your media goals. This section would describe what you expect to accomplish from your advertising campaigns and how you plan to accomplish it.

The audience which is your potential customer is also very important so you need to have a section dedicated to them. This is where you will collect all the information you can on your target audience. It includes age, demographics, lifestyles, professions, and any other information that might be relevant to targeting your market.

Now you need to lay out your strategy. Write your strategy statement than follow up with the action you are going to take to achieve your strategy. Be sure to break your action plan into manageable steps.

Your budget needs to be tracked in its own section. You’ll need to keep track of what you have to work with for the year, what you’ve spent, and what you’ve got left to work with. Throughout the year you may need to make changes to your projections and forecasts. It is critical that you stay on top of your budget and know what you’ve spent.

The first year of your media plan will be the toughest because you have no previous information to use to make good decisions. However as time goes by you will be able to use previous media plans to make better decisions for the current year. You will know what works, what doesn’t. You will know what times in the year your campaigns work best, and you will know whether your targeted market has been receptive.

Your advertising campaigns are the most critical element to your business promotion. Once you develop a quality media plan you will be able to get excellent return on your investment.

Deon Melchior is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may reprint the articles that are included in our site, as long as the article is unedited and the author box is included with it's live hyperlinks.