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A Media Plan

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

The role of media plan

A media plan serves as a guide plan to how you will spend your ad budget, but it also serves as a way to track spends. At the end of each month, you should be reconciling your plan, which involves putting actual spends in the columns moving budget either forward or, if you've overspent, moving it back. Media plans are usually tables in Excel with each channel written on its own row as a line item. The channel name, for example. Facebook is written on the left and the audience targeting, objective, ad delivery, cost and run dates are written on the right of the table.

The benefit of detailing each platform line by line is that now you can determine how much content you have against how much support they will each receive. When campaigns are being set up, this is important because you'll know exactly what you're going to be doing throughout the whole campaign. And if you have an idea for a piece of content that's adding to this, then you'll need to actually find budget first.

The plan will also contain estimates of impressions and clicks which should be delivered for the budget. Digital marketers can work out ad delivery, impressions and clicks, by agreeing a CPM in advance for premium display. By dividing the budget by historical CPMs for GDN and social channels and historical CPCs for paid search, digital marketers can estimate what the budget could deliver in terms of click traffic and impressions.

Sometimes including the historical conversion rate for the channels could help forecast conversions from the campaign. Simply multiply the forecasted clicks for that channel by the conversion rate for the channel to broadly estimate conversions for your activity.

Once executed by the different in-house or agency stakeholders, such as PPC specialists, social media specialists, display and video specialists, checking-in daily becomes part of the routine to see if the plan is working or if changes are required to rectify errors or capitalize on opportunities.

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Please note that the module slides are designed to work in collaboration with the module transcript document. It is recommended that you use both resources simultaneously.

Digital Marketing Resources:

Jessica Preddy

Jessica is a consultant with experience in marketing and an in-depth knowledge of the latest marketing techniques. Her previous roles have included working in a marketing agency and numerous customer-service-facing positions that have given her exposure to a wide range of customers and clients.

The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful. While relevant to this module, you will not be assessed on this content.

You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    Digital Marketing Strategy
    Jessica Preddy
    Skills Expert

    This module identifies the core components of an effective digital marketing strategy and explains how to develop an effective budget plan and measure the ROI for digital activities. It covers how to set clear and actionable objectives and measurable KPIs as well as the key research activities to undertake to guide channel selection and messaging. It also explains how to develop a creative strategy based on campaign research to engage an audience and deliver on campaign goals. The module concludes by explaining how to execute a digital marketing strategy supported by a channel plan, a paid media plan, a campaign action plan, and succinct strategy documentation.