Advertising is one of the finest means of marketing communication .It is adopted by an organization to create an awareness about its product or services. It is a marketing tool used by organizations to promote its products or services and reach its target consumers.

Thus, advertisements play a vital role in attaining the marketing objectives of every organization. Advertisement planning can be categorized into two major parts, message creation and message dissemination. Message dissemination is done through media planning.

Therefore, media planning can be defined as an integral part of advertisement planning. It helps the organization to communicate the message about its product or service to its target customers and thus help achieve an advertising objective.

Media planning is basically a four-step process. Based on organization and advertising objective, media planning involves – setting media objectives, developing media strategy, designing media tactics, Evaluation of the effectiveness of the media plans.

Media Objectives

Target audience and communication goals are the two main components of media objectives. Media objectives are defined based on these two components. One hand, target audience helps to determine the end user of the product or service offered. On the other hand, communication component helps to determine the number of customers to whom the message will reach and the number of times it will reach them.

Target Audience

Markets are always flooded with similar new products. So, it is very important for organizations to update its target customers about the new arrivals. This helps the organizations to reach its end users.

The main aim of media planning is to inform and influence the target audience through its advertisement. So, the most important step is to define the target audience. They can be defined in terms of –Demographics, Psycho graphics, Consumption pattern (product and brand usage), Primary and secondary target audience and Size.

Demographic

Demographics include age, gender, sex, household income, and marital status, number of family members, employment status, and education.

Psycho graphic

Psychographics includes target consumer’s personality traits (extrovert, introvert), personal interest (music, sports), shopping orientation (recreational, convenience or price sensitive shopper) and believe and attitudes.

Product usage and brand usage

Every consumer has their individual way of consuming a product. This means they have their own consumption pattern and usage pattern. Depending upon this, product users can be categorized into: heavy users, medium users, light users and non-users.

Similarly, brand usage has several categories like brand loyalty (who use the same brand all the time), primary users (who use the same brand, mostly but occasionally use other brands), secondary users (who use other competing brands, mostly but use this brand occasionally), brand switchers (who have no brand preference for a given product category).

Primary Target Audience and Secondary Target Audience

Primary Target audience is the one who plays a major role in the purchase decision of the product. While the secondary audience plays a less decisive role. Therefore, it’s important for media planners to identify their primary and secondary target audience. This in return helps media planners to know and target the correct set of consumers and plan and strategies accordingly.

Size of the target audience

Once the target audience is defined, next important step is to determine its size. This helps the media planners to estimate the size of the potential buyers and plan accordingly.

Communication Goals

After defining the target audience, media planners set the communication goals. There are different communication goals for different organizational and advertising objectives. It can be advertising recall, persuasion, and leads and sales. Advertising recall is termed as the cognitive effect of the ad. Persuasion is an emotional effect of the ad and lead and sales are behavioral effects of the ad.

While setting communication goal, media planners consider reach, gross rating point and frequency. Reach helps to know the total number of target audience exposed to media plan (target size) and accumulation of the target audience over time.

Gross rating is defined as the amount of exposure the media planners buy for their products from media outlet like TV or radio networks. Frequency is measuring of repetition. So, it helps to know the number of times a target audience is exposed to ads. Frequency =gross rating points /reach

Thus depending upon the media objectives, media planners establish the combination of reach, gross rating and frequency.

Media Strategy

Depending upon the budget; organizations plan and establish their media strategy. It involves detail planning on where to advertise (geographical location), when to advertise (timing) and how to advertise (media mix).Based on these, media planners formulate and establish an effective media strategy.

Geographical Location Decisions

Depending upon the nature of the product and its marketing objective, media planner either go for national approach (advertise in all markets), spot approach (advertise in some local market) or combination of both approaches.

Media Mix Decisions

Media can be broadly categorized into mass media, direct response media and point of purchase media. So, depending upon the media objectives, media planners choose the media to advertise their product. That is, if the media objective is –

To create broad awareness, mass media like the TV, newspaper, magazine, etc is selected. To build a relationship with consumers and sell products directly, direct response media like direct selling are preferred. To convert shoppers into buyers, point of purchase media like discounts, coupons, sampling, etc. is used.

Thus, media mix decisions play a vital role in creating awareness about the product, influencing the purchase decision, convincing to actually buy the product and its repurchase.

It also involves a decision on media concentration and media dispersion. When a media planner selects fewer media categories to advertise their product, it is called media concentration. Here, media planners are scared of sharing their space (brand’s ad) with its competitors.

Media’s dispersion approach is the one where media planner uses multiple media categories to advertise their product. Here, media planners plan to reach maximum number of target audience through a combination of a number of media categories.

Media Schedule Selection

Is based on factors like the seasonality, consumer product purchase cycle, consumer’s interval between decision making and consumption. Based on these, media planners either adopt continuity approach, flight approach or pulse schedule approach.

In continuity approach, scheduling is all across the year. In flight approach, scheduling is across alternate months. While, pulse approach is a combination of both the approaches.

Media Tactics

Designing media tactics are one of the important tasks of media buyers. Here, media buyers select media vehicles to implement its media strategies.

Evaluation of Media Plan

Once the media planning is done, it is very important for media planners to cross check the effectiveness of the plan. The right message should be communicated to the target audience at the right time.

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