Aug 12, 2024

Comprehensive Guide to Strategic Media Planning for B2B

In B2B marketing, media planning requires a holistic strategy that aligns with your business and marketing objectives. To be effective, your B2B media planning must encompass the entire buyer’s journey from awareness to post-purchase across online and offline channels, ensuring all channels work in harmony. This integrated strategy maximizes reach and engagement while delivering a consistent brand message. In this blog, we’ll examine the components of strategic media plan framework and additional tips, including:

What is strategic media planning?

Strategic media planning is a data-centric process of creating a framework to target your specific audience across multiple channels. The key elements of your media plan framework include your audience, marketing goals, channel mix, messaging, frequency, reach and timeline. Media planning aims to reach the right customers with the right message at the right time and on the right channel. It can help your organization:
  • Drive brand awareness
  • Increase audience engagement
  • Optimize campaigns
  • Generate leads
  • Improve ROI
  • Increase sales
A wall consisting of dozens of screens showing various traditional media channels.

Understanding traditional media channels

When we talk about traditional media channels, we’re talking about the types of advertising that were in use before the internet. It includes broadcast advertising like television and radio, print ads in trade magazines, direct-response mail, exhibits at industry events and roadside advertising. One of the benefits of traditional media is its ability to reach a broad audience. Its reach enables your business to promote your solutions to a large, diverse demographic, building brand recognition. In addition, established channels with a long-standing history have built trust with audiences that can lend your media planning efforts credibility. Unlike digital media, which requires continuous changes and updates to avoid viewer fatigue and hold interest, traditional advertising methods can use the same assets multiple times, getting more mileage from promotional materials. While the broad reach of traditional media channels can help build brand recognition and trust, it does have drawbacks. Because traditional advertising often comes with a high cost, it can be challenging for small businesses to compete with larger organizations. Moreover, the wide net it casts reaches uninterested consumers and if you use broad messaging it may not resonate with your intended target, leading to wasted ad spend. Traditional marketing lacks the advantage of immediacy and interactivity. The success of your traditional marketing efforts is also difficult to measure. Because of these limitations, some marketers may view traditional media channels as suboptimal to digital media channels.  However, it’s important to understand that traditional marketing also facilitates targeting. It can be effective for reaching older generations as well as those who spend time away from technology. Local broadcast and print channels enable you to reach  a geographic location and target industries specific to certain areas. When you understand your audience’s interests, you can identify traditional marketing channels that cater to specific audiences. Trade magazines also enable audience targeting.

Understanding digital media channels

Digital media plan includes organic and paid marketing efforts across online channels. Your website serves as a way to establish authority and educate your audience about your solutions while facilitating lead generation and conversions. Email marketing enables personalized communication and lead nurturing with prospects and customers. Social media platforms, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, enable you engage with prospects and customers. Paid advertising across industry websites and email platforms, social channels, search engines, display platforms and online news portals is a means of building and maintaining your brand, growing your audience, driving traffic to your website, and generating leads and conversion. Digital channels support targeting and have a broad reach, allowing you to connect with your audience anywhere at any time. Paid media efforts are measurable. This enables you to understand the impact your efforts have on your goals. It also enables you to continually improve your campaigns to get the best results from your advertising spend. The major disadvantage of digital marketing is its saturation. With so many businesses vying for user attention, it can be difficult to stand out. This is where a deep understanding of your audience becomes particularly important, enabling a well-thought-out messaging and design strategy that resonates with your target. Because digital media is fast-paced, involving shifts in behaviors, trends and algorithms, effective digital marketing efforts require constant monitoring and adjusting, which can be time and resource intensive. We’ll get to all that in a moment.

The importance of a balanced media mix

Combining the traditional media’s broad reach and credibility with digital media’s targeted and measurable engagement enables your business to reach a wider audience and maximize your impact, creating a cohesive and effective media plan. The key is to select channels that most effectively reach your audience and align with your campaign goals. This decision should be based on the data and insights you collect about your audience’s preferences, behaviors and demographics. To fully leverage the strength of each medium, you’ll implement that knowledge about your audience’s media consumption patterns. For example, you might use television campaigns to build awareness and display advertising and search engine marketing (SEM) to drive prospects to your website. Thought leadership across your website blogs and social videos will engage and educate your audience. Then, using social media and email marketing will nurture leads and drive them down the sales funnel. Meanwhile, event marketing provides tangible experiences that create lasting impressions. Digital ads might target specific decision-makers showing intent to buy, driving them to white papers or case studies. A woman viewing her phone overlayed with various digital media icons and app images. The overlay gives the viewer an idea of what the woman may be seeing and thinking.

Understanding your audience

At the core of all effective marketing efforts lies a deep understanding of your customers. What does your ideal customer look like? This means understanding firmographics such as business size and revenue, geographic location and so on. It means having a clear picture of their challenges and goals, what drives a buying decision and what barriers hinder a decision. How many people are on the decision-making team from users to C-level executives? What message resonates best with each of them? With that in hand, you’ll break down your broader audience into more specific groups based on characteristics such as industry segment, business size, job role, age, education level, interest and so on. Based on the differences within these groups, you’ll be able to craft personalized and relevant content that resonates with each segment across each stage of the buying journey.

Understanding media consumption patterns

For media planning, you need to know what channels your audience segments use in their business and personal lives. This includes the industry sources they trust and the types of content that are most popular with audience segments across different stages of the buying journey. For example, younger demographics may favor specific social media channels and video content. Older groups might prefer traditional media like television and print. C-level executives might prefer quickly consumed content, such as executive briefs, at the consideration phase. Understanding media consumption patterns enables you to allocate resources effectively and stay ahead of shifts in customer behaviors, ensuring that your media efforts reach your intended audience effectively. This deep understanding of your audience enables you to tailor your media strategies based on demographics and their media consumption preferences. This can include selecting the right media channels, crafting personalized messages that speak directly to the needs of each segment, and timing campaigns to maximize engagement and impact. These insights enhance the effectiveness of your media plan for a stronger audience connection and a higher ROI.

Methods to gain audience insights

Gaining this knowledge requires that you delve into research and data. Qualitative research, such as customer surveys, feedback from sales and customer service teams, and social engagement and inquiries, can help you develop this understanding. You also need data to understand which channels are most effective, when and where people engage with your brand, and what resonates best with them in terms of content and creative. If you haven’t been engaging in media planning activities, you won’t have the historical data you need. However, market research and audience benchmarks can help. Goals written on sticky notes and posted on an office wall on the left. Office chair, desk and pencils are in the background.

Defining your goals and objectives

Setting clear, measurable goals that align with your business objectives is a vital part of a strategic media plan. This could range from increasing awareness to boosting sales and should be quantified. By how much? What are the milestones along the way? As you’re defining your goals, it’s also important to consider your budget. How much you are able to invest in your media planning efforts will impact your success in reaching your goals. Defining your goals provides direction and purpose. This means making sure your sales and marketing teams are aligned and everyone is working together to achieve a specific outcome. To ensure your goals are realistic, attainable and relevant to your business objective, you must have open collaboration among different departments.

Using KPIs to measure your progress toward your goals

Your campaign goals also help you to determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. Based on your goals and the media channels you select, you might measure the following KPIs:
  • Cost per click (CPC): The amount of money you’re spending on an ad based on the number of clicks it receives. While a high CPC might be due to competition or a higher industry value per conversion, CPC can help you determine how well your ads resonate with your target audience.
  • Impressions: The number of times an ad is displayed, regardless of whether it was viewed or clicked or not.
  • Reach: The number of people who see your ad. This KPI measures the exposure of your campaign.
  • Frequency: How many times an individual is exposed to your ad. This helps you determine the optimal number of views to achieve your goal. Frequency also helps you understand if you’re reaching a point of diminishing returns.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown.
  • Conversion rate: How many people take a desired action.
  • Cost per acquisition (CPA): This metric indicates your total campaign spend per converted customer.
  • Return on ad spend (ROAS): The revenue gained in comparison to the advertising costs. ROAS is typically compared against your historical benchmarks––or if you don’t have them yet, industry benchmarks––to help you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.
  • Engagements: Measured in different ways across different channels. May include downloads, follows or time on a page. For social marketing, engagement may include likes, shares, follows or comments. High engagement indicates increase in brand loyalty. A low engagement indicates the need to optimize a campaign.

Leveraging targeted messaging

Skillfully blending online and offline tactics to create a unified brand presence requires that you align your messaging across both types of channels to create a seamless brand experience. This includes a strong content marketing strategy that builds a brand narrative that educates, engages and converts your audience. To deliver messaging that resonates with your audience, you must craft personalized messaging that is relevant to different audience segments at different stages of the buying journey. A business professional reviewing a work calendar on an electronic tablet. Tablet is being held in hands along with a stylus.

Setting reach, frequency and timeline

As defined in the Goals and objectives section above, reach is the percentage of targets that are exposed to your ad. Frequency is the number of times an individual is exposed to your ad. Your timeline is how long your ad campaign runs. Understanding your reach and frequency goals can help you to gauge whether your channel mix will facilitate them. For example, if you have a goal of  reaching 60% of your target audience, but your channel mix only reaches 40%, you may need to adjust your media plan. Defining these parameters before you launch your media plan can help you stay within your budget while achieving the best ROI. For example, if you determine that your reach should be 70% of your target market and frequency is three times per person, you can calculate the number of impressions needed to achieve this goal.

Measuring success and optimizing strategies

Measuring success and optimizing strategies is an ongoing process. It involves continuously monitoring your KPIs, testing your campaigns and assessing the effectiveness of your media channels and marketing efforts. This continuous process enables you to make informed decisions to adjust your campaigns and channels to get the best results. By perpetually refining your strategies, you can maximize the ROI on your media spend.

Understanding media channel recommendations

Media channels can help you identify which campaigns are performing well and offer recommendations to optimize ads with below-average metrics. For instance, if your ad frequency is high and you only have one ad creative running in an ad group, a channel might suggest adding another to reduce repetition for your audience. While this can help optimize your campaign, remember that it might be beneficial to lower your ad frequency. However, media channels will never advise you to spend less. Instead, when alerted to suboptimal metrics, it’s crucial to adjust your campaigns according to best practices.

Partner with strategic media planning experts

Developing a strategic media plan required a deep knowledge of your audience, media channels and tactics, as well as the expertise to continuously refine your strategies while adhering to your budget. If you’re just getting started or struggling to get the best return for your efforts, we can help.  At Elevation Marketing, we specialize in developing and executing strategic media plans that drive success for our clients. Contact us to learn how our expert guidance and effective strategies can support you in creating a strong and impactful presence online and offline.

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