What We Do Best

Media Planning

Media Planning Services

At Brand Water we take a personal approach to planning every campaign we work on. It’s because we know it is important to take the time to survey the entire landscape and listen fully to your story to identify your needs and wants and how best to deliver them.

Strategy

How are we going to achieve success? What does it look like? These are questions that need answers before we look at anything else, including production.

Budget

How much revenue does your campaign need to generate to be profitable? We can help you solve that equation and create a realistic budget using our proprietary approach.

Research

We know what types of media will be most efficient for your campaign because we look at the numbers to find the most efficient audiences and build your buy around them.

Recommendation

We aren’t dictators. We bring you the best options we can build around your needs and then we rely on your input to make them final.

Execution

We can build you the perfect plan and then make sure it’s executed exactly as built because our planners and buyers work closely to make this process precise.

Review

Maybe we didn’t build your campaign and you’re just interested in having someone review your plan to see if there are opportunities to improve. We do that, too.

A Common Question

How can Brand Water Help with Media Planning?

Advertising is everywhere because it can work anywhere. But a shotgun approach isn’t for everyone,. Brand Water helps you plan successful campaigns using perspective and experience to fully integrate your brand in a way that connects with consumers.

Components of Media Planning

The components of media planning serve as the foundation for any media plan. They serve as a checklist of crucial questions every media planner must answer before devising a media plan. These are:

Audience: The key to a media plan is targeting the right audience. Ideally, your target audience should be those interested in your products and services. This improves the effectiveness of your ads and saves time and effort.
Goals: After you have defined your audience, you need to know what you want from your audience. It could be patronage, engagement, or brand awareness. Whatever your goal is, be specific about it.

This is nothing new or earth-shattering: your goals should be ‘SMART’ – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Clearly defined goals help you strategize and make the right advertising decisions. It will also help you focus on the right audience. For instance, your goal could increase revenue at your local retail store location by 20% YOY.

Budget: This refers to the available amount for executing the media plan. Know how much you’re willing to spend, but also know how much you’re willing to lose in a worst-case scenario. Your marketing budget will define the extent of your marketing campaign and the tools you employ. Your media agency will walk you through the most effective options based on your budget.
Performance metric: You need to define what success would look like. This will help you determine if the campaign is effective or not. To do this, break your goals into milestones. Each milestone should be clear, measurable, and time-specific. These will serve as performance indicators. Using this, you can measure how effective the media plan is.
Frequency: Based on the other components above, you can determine how often the message should be shared. The optimal frequency depends on the platform you choose, your message, and your audience. This will ensure you stay in your audience’s mind without spamming them.
Message reach: This looks at the medium of delivering the message. There are many options to consider. Focus on the ones that align with your target audience’s media habits. Your audience media preferences – mobile, tablets, desktop, social media – should be the deciding factor.

Media Planning vs. Media Buying

Media planning refers to determining an advertising strategy; media buying is the execution of the media plan. They are both essential parts of the advertising process.

A media planner relies on the expertise of the media buyer when drafting the media plan.

However, the required skills are different.

While media planners have to be creative, media buyers understand how each platform works and its cost. They are experts in social media, paid advertising, and traditional advertising methods.

You will not want to go to an automotive advertising agency if you are Apple or another similar company. The idea here is that you want to go with a firm that can cater to your specific needs and one that can build you your exact custom audience.

Whether you are looking for help with social media marketing, general marketing services, web development, marketing strategy, or market research, you want a team that can meet your specific needs.

Executing the Media Plan

A media buyer handles the paid side of the campaign. Both of them have to work together and maintain open lines of communication to keep the campaign on track. The media planner can execute the organic side of the campaign by working with the social media manager or content manager.

The Brand Water Approach

The Media Planning Process

At Brand Water, we take in the entire market, all of the options for every form of media and we rank them based on how suitable they are for achieving your goals. We do this using research, access to numbers and decades of experience placing campaigns.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between media planning and media buying?

If media buying is the peanut butter to the sandwich that is your campaign, then media planning is the jelly. And We don’t care what anyone says, jelly definitely needs to go on first. Media planning is looking at the numbers, not just the impressions. How many units need to be sold to reach profitability, how many clients have to be converted to hit quota? What does it look like? How are you going to define success?

So media planners look for ways to make a campaign profitable?

Exactly. Media buyers execute that plan as best and as realistically as possible, but that plan is the responsibility of the planner and the client to create.

Is it better to have a separate plan for each market we operate in? Or should there just be one plan across all markets?

That is a question we have heard before, and for many of our regional clients it depends on the structure of the business. Are you a franchise? Are you one organization with multiple locations? These are factors to consider. However a true media planner will have the tools and capabilities needed to plan across all markets and all platforms no matter how big or small.

What is the point? Shouldn't it be easy to just run commercials and get business?

It’s easy to discount the importance of media planning because it’s a part of the sausage that you never see getting made. But the entire concept of marketing, the principles that govern it, are dedicated to the idea that frequency equals conversion. What this proposition fails to take into account is just how hard it is to build frequency in a market over-saturated with messaging. Take a walk around your town and try to count the advertisements you encounter. Form the car ride there to the walk around the square, to the 15 or 20 minutes before your movie starts, you are inundated with messaging. Like a Cold War, there has been an escalation in arms in the advertising industry and there are more tools now at businesses’ disposal to get your attention than there ever have been before. This means strategy wins the day.

So does every advertiser need every platform to be successful? How is that sustainable?

The best way to go out of business is trying to engage with every marketing channel at your disposal. There are too many and they cost too much but with savvy navigation of the process and with a birds-eye view of the market you can keep yourself from being swept out to sea. You can never eat all of the tacos. So you eat the ones that are best for you and you leave the rest on the table for the other guys.