Media planners develop a media mix by considering a budget-conscious programme between the objectives of the campaign and the properties of the media that could be used. They consider how each vehicle provides a cost-effective contribution to reaching the objectives, and then they select the mix of media that best attain all of the objectives – of course, all within budget!
Different size and shape organisations, with different overall budgets and very different objectives, means that there is no one size fits all approach to budgeting for media. To take that variety into consideration, all media plans (and budgets) have to be bespoke.
Despite these differences, all media plans need to operate within the constraints of a budget.
Here are a few questions that we think it almost always worth considering before settling on a budget.
- Is the advertising (and media) budget correlated with overall marketing objectives?
- Is the budget fixed on a percentage of sales (past or anticipated)? Is it objective based? Or perhaps loosely based on what the competition spends?
- Who is the target consumer?
- What media type will be most useful in reaching the target consumer?
- Which media would best fit the creative?
- What is required to get the target consumer to take action?
- How much profit is expected to be earned for each pound spent?
- What is the cost efficiency of the media considered?
- How much flexibility is there in the media plan, can it run on or take into consideration media deals?
- What plan have you and/or your media planning agency, got in place for post-campaign analysis?
We get such a kick out of creating media plans that are cost-effective and able to help achieve organisational marketing objectives. Find out just how happy media budget allocation makes us by getting in touch to discuss any of the above.
