Create a Budget Allocation Plan

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the types of insights that the MPC can provide.
  
• Install and configure the MPC app.
  

The Media Planning Center (MPC)

It’s the end of the fiscal year, and NTO’s management has analyzed performance and decided on revenue and growth rate goals for the year to come. In light of these goals, Isabelle Givens, NTO’s marketing manager, wants to put together a strategic plan for the allocation of advertising budget for the new year. She’s excited to see how Marketing Cloud Intelligence can help her do this. 

Isabelle learns that Marketing Cloud Intelligence’s Media Planning Center (or MPC for short) is designed specifically for this purpose. The tool facilitates budget allocation at a high level, meaning advertisers like Isabelle can strategize by entity, such as by channel, platform, campaign objective, and so on. Since MPC is an integral part of the Marketing Cloud Intelligence workspace, it has full and immediate access to all historical data related to the budgeted entities. This allows the MPC to utilize past performance in order to do the following.

• Forecast performance for the current plan.
  
• Identify allocations that were not cost-effective in the past and suggest better alternatives.
  
• Use artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate (forecast) the performance of multiple budgeting scenarios for comparison.
  

Isabelle is thrilled to learn that the MPC doesn’t require her to import or export data anywhere. Once she installs the tool, all of the company’s historical data and planned budget is automatically and seamlessly aligned within the MPC for immediate use. 

App Installation and Configuration

Isabelle’s eager to get started. The MPC is a Marketing Cloud Intelligence app, so she proceeds to the Marketing Cloud Intelligence Marketplace in order to install it in NTO’s workspace. At the Marketplace, she searches for the Media Planning Center app and then clicks Get It Now.  

Isabelle must make a few configuration choices during the installation process. The first item she needs to select is the plan timeframe. She can choose from Week, Month, or Year increments, or create a custom timeframe.

Next, Isabelle must select the budget allocation dimensions. Although, technically, the system allows you to select any dimensions you want, we recommend that you choose high-level dimensions such as channel, platform, strategy, market, target audience, and so on (or any entities that denote activity). Isabelle selects Channel, Platform, and Objective. She orders the entities according to her budgeting hierarchy. Let’s see what that means. 

The dimension at the lowest level of the hierarchy is where she assigns budgets, so she puts Objective in the lowest spot. Once she assigns budgets at the lowest level, the MPC sums them up consecutively at the levels above, with the grand total at the highest level. Isabelle can change the hierarchy simply by dragging the dimensions into a different order. 

Since the MPC calculations are cost-based, Isabelle needs to tell the system what measurement NTO uses for cost on all channels and all sources in the company’s workspace—so that when the MPC generates these calculations, they are relevant to the company’s actual spend. She selects Media Cost since this is what NTO uses to measure all cost-related activities in its workspace. 

The last step in the configuration process is defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the plan’s objectives. Remember that NTO’s management set goals to increase both revenue and growth rate this year? 

To measure these goals, Isabelle selects Social Reach, Revenue, and Total Conversions as the KPIs.

Isabelle has installed and configured the MPC according to her company’s business needs. She’s now ready to put it to use to create a budget allocation plan. The next unit is all about using the MPC to produce the insights that can take her budget allocation skills to the next level.