Get to Know the Media Planning Process

Learning Objectives

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

• Describe the two stages of media planning.
  
• Explain the benefits of Marketing Cloud Intelligence’s media planning tools.
  

What Is Media Planning?

With so many digital advertising systems and platforms in use today, digital advertising can be both costly and complex. At the same time, as a digital marketer you often have challenging goals and strict budgets. For these reasons, you tend to carefully plan your advertising activity in advance. Media planning is the process that you use to decide where, when, and how you intend to spend your advertising budget in order to fulfill your goals. 

The Different Stages of the Media Planning Process

The media planning process consists of two main planning stages. In the first stage, you create a budget allocation plan to strategize how you’ll spend your advertising budget across high-level entities such as channels and platforms during a given timeframe. Once the budget allocation plan is approved, you progress to the next planning stage: the media plan. This is where you break down your budget allocation plan by activity. The media plan contains the scope and details of each advertising activity, including the activity’s assets, its start and end dates, cost type, rates, budget, and so on. On some platforms, this level of detail is referred to as an insertion order, or IO for short. 

The Benefits of Media Planning in Marketing Cloud Intelligence

Regardless of whether you’re at the budget allocation or media plan stage, effective media planning requires you to align your planned data with your delivered data. You need to assess how your marketing activity performed against your plans in order to make the best decisions for the future. 

Marketing Cloud Intelligence enables you to do just that. Not only is Marketing Cloud Intelligence a market leader in connecting and unifying all your marketing data, but it also gives you tools specifically designed to align your media plan data with your marketing data. This is a huge advantage, as well as a very unique Marketing Cloud Intelligence capability. Other solutions require you to retrieve the data from separate platforms and engineer alignment, a potentially huge undertaking.  

The Marketing Cloud Intelligence Media Planning Tools

Let’s see how one company adopts Marketing Cloud Intelligence media planning tools to make more effective, data-driven decisions. 

Meet outdoor and recreational gear retailer Northern Trail Outfitters, or NTO for short. NTO has been using Marketing Cloud Intelligence for a long time to ingest, harmonize, and analyze data from all the marketing platforms with which it promotes its goods and services. Since all of its marketing data is already in Marketing Cloud Intelligence, NTO’s digital marketing manager, Isabelle Givens, wants to start using Marketing Cloud Intelligence to take her media planning expertise to the next level. First, she gets acquainted with Marketing Cloud Intelligence’s media planning tools.  

The Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform has three tools dedicated to media planning.  

• Media Planning Center (MPC)
  
• Media Transparency Center (MTC)
  
• Pacing app
  

In the next units you follow along with NTO to learn about the tools, their function, at what stage you use them, and how they contribute to the media planning process.