4 smart media planning steps every agency should take

By Nick Reese
Agency
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Work at a digital marketing agency? Download our Twitter Playbook for Agencies to learn how to get the most out of Twitter when planning campaigns for your clients.

Media planning is still the lifeblood of most marketing agencies. But it’s no longer as easy as picking which TV show to run your ad on. Thanks to the near-infinite, always-on nature of digital marketing, media planning has become much more complicated. But that’s also what makes it that more impactful for your clients if you do it right.

Here are four key things every agency should keep in mind when building out their media plans.

It’s all about your audience

Traditional media planning was limited to the basics like demographics, geography, and broad interests. But now you can pinpoint your audience almost down to the person. Want to reach a coffee drinker in London who’s interested in music festivals? No problem.

On average, Twitter provides accurate demographic targeting 76% of the time, beating the industry standard of 59% compared to standard Nielsen Digital Ad benchmarks.* With Twitter’s ability to target audiences by recent Tweets, interests, and other Twitter accounts they follow, you can narrow your audience down to only your most likely buyers. That means you need to take the extra time to truly understand the different audiences of the brands you’re promoting so you can target them as accurately as possible.

Make sure the creative matches the channel

Once you understand the audience, you can design an ad and place it everywhere, right? While you used to be able to just resize your creative and call it a day, today’s audiences have very different expectations for how they use different channels and platforms.

Twitter is perfect for spurring engagement and conversation. To get your audience’s attention quickly on mobile, shorter ad lengths work best in achieving higher brand affinity. For video, the ideal length on Twitter is six seconds, according to Publicis Media’s research.

Think mobile

There’s a good chance you’re reading this on your phone; according to BrightEdge, 57% of website traffic now goes through mobile. When planning media, make sure you reach the audience where they are by planning mobile first, then desktop and offline media. That means using channels like Twitter that people primarily access on their phones. It also means creating ad experiences that are easy to engage with on the go, like putting captions in your videos for people who are scrolling through their Twitter feeds without headphones.

No plan survives contact with the audience

“Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman once wrote about Hollywood. The same thing applies to media planning. Your plan should start as a best guess about how the audience will react to the campaign.

But once it gets started, you need to carefully monitor it to see what actually resonates. Instead of spending your client’s budget trying to promote every Tweet equally, watch what gets the most organic engagement and then put your budget behind those to increase their reach.

Ready to start planning? Download our free media plan teamplate.

*Source: Nielsen TAR, 2017, results across six large-scale brands running Amplify Pre-roll on Twitter, Nielsen DAR US Benchmark, 2017

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