Template media plan

It's like that "a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square" lesson that baffled us all in elementary school. Media planning sets the tone and direction for the buying that needs to occur. Once ad space is purchased or content distribution plans have been negotiated, there needs to be a strategy or media plan for getting that media to your audience and customers. As you work through the following media planning steps, keep in mind that how your business applies the results and conclusions derived from each step will be unique based on your audience and needs.

Market research will allow you to tailor the content you create and the media plan you implement to your target audience and customers. With this information, you can determine what media will reach, resonate with, and convert your audience. Download the Kit. When developing your media plan, keep a goal or a few in mind to help you effectively navigate the process. Moreover, goals can help you know what content types and platforms you can say "no" to. For instance, say you're looking to create a media plan for your Facebook and Instagram social content.

Your objective may be to streamline the content creation process in a timely fashion and then schedule posts on both platforms in advance.

This way, you ensure your posts are relevant to your audience so you can boost engagement and stay top of mind.

There are a number of easy-to-use templates available to help with your media planning strategy, such as editorial calendar templates and social media strategy templates. Media planning templates ensure you stay efficient and effective while working on all aspects of your media content. They keep your media content organized while publishing and sharing it among your audience members. Due to the variety of templates available for different types and parts of the media planning process, the templates you incorporate will be unique to your business.

For example, if your business is looking to create a media plan for your Facebook and Instagram social media, you might choose to implement a social media calendar template. This type of template will help you coordinate your content across both channels, boost engagement, and improve productivity among your team members — and therefore, achieve the objective you set in step two.

Ensure all parties who should be aware of the plan have the necessary details to help you execute accordingly. Additionally, share the contact details of the media-planning point person at your company in case anyone has questions or comments. To get a better understanding of what I mean, let's refer back to our example in the above step about your social media plan for Facebook and Instagram.

If you implement a social media calendar template as part of your media plan, ensure everyone who will be working on or creating the content and publication schedule for both platforms has access to it. Whether your media plan revolves around individual posts on Instagram or a month-long, company-wide campaign, be sure to measure the success of your plan.

Think about whether or not your social media content plan and the calendar template you implemented have helped you reach your target audience and achieve the objective you set. Ask yourself whether or not your media plan helped you boost engagement on the social platforms you focused on as well as collaborate and coordinate more effectively to increase team-wide productivity.

Normally there would be some concern that the template we purchase is coming from some kid doing freelance work in his basement. But the demand for this service has grown enough over the years that some of the most brilliant leadership minds have put together media planning templates that we can use for our proposals.

Guy Kawasaki was the chief evangelist for Macintosh - and also the person who made "evangelist" a thing in marketing - from its very beginning. Since then, he has been highly influential in the marketing world as an author and venture capitalist. He has pitched, he has been pitched, and now he has used that knowledge to build a template that he believes can give marketers an entrepreneurial edge.

All we have to do is fill in the blanks. Kawasaki's three presentation rules are as simple as 1, 2, 3. Pitching 10 slides in 20 minutes may seem like it's not nearly enough to persuade anyone of anything, but Kawasaki's slide template provides broad categories from which we can zone in on our keywords.

The final slide works on multiple levels. It provides key information that could be critical to extending the conversation, but it also leads to a natural presentation ending. We don't want to find ourselves lingering, looking like we might have something else to say but not knowing how to end it. John Coltrane once asked Miles Davis how he should end an improvisational solo.

Miles, in his iconic raspy voice, told him , "Try taking the saxophone out of your mouth. All templates Marketing. Media planning templates are a popular way to address such an issue. To build our own media planning template The traditional process of building a template has many benefits as well as some frustrations. The types of presentations Martonosi notes are driven more towards the realm of academia, but the following provided examples show striking similarities to modern marketing presentations: Quick, 1 minute "what I do" talk - known in marketing as an elevator pitch minute conference paper presentation - minutes is a good number for many presentations Project presentation - pitch Thesis defense - still kind of a pitch Job talk - or job interview, or a pitch The next step is to pull out the common factors in each presentation format.

Visual tips for slide templates It's true; it's not all about the words. Some visual tips we should consider for each unique presentation scenario include: Use color profiles and themes that fit the subject matter; clown colors only work if we're selling clown services Find a readable font that is not necessarily a standard font that we see every day, but also one that isn't visually distracting no comic sans, unless your goal is to polarize the room Size the slides to best fit the expected content Properly align any objects or symbols; use tools to create custom objects and shapes to fit presentation Embed websites and multimedia into presentation - rather than just showing a link, embedding the actual website or video allows us to provide the information without having to jump away from the slides Bring presentation on laptop - normally we would want to make sure all fonts and images are saved properly so that they can transfer easily to a different computer, but it would save everyone a few headaches if we just bring our own hardware.

Using templates from industry leaders Wouldn't it be great if there was someone out there who already did the work for us? Guy Kawasaki slides Guy Kawasaki was the chief evangelist for Macintosh - and also the person who made "evangelist" a thing in marketing - from its very beginning.

This will be achievable through the usage of social media posts, online pages, and advertisements. A media strategy can also be a plan template in PDF or in any other software that is used by entities to increase their brand awareness.

More so, it can also be a plot that can be used to recreate how clients or customers perceive a product or a service. There are different online platforms where media strategies can be used. More so, there is the presence of television and mass media.

Identify the kind of media strategy that will work for your business before fully executing it. The best way to create buyer personas for any brand is by creating a customer journey map. A customer journey map is a visual representation of all the various touchpoints that your brand has with a prospective customer.

Shoppers can find and interact with your brand through hundreds of channels, both online and brick-and-mortar. Identifying the specific problem that your target customer is looking to solve is critical. This is how you define your persona and this is what ultimately affects the rest of your marketing decisions.

The first step when building a business marketing plan is to understand and define which business goals are the plan aiming to achieve. Business and marketing should always go hand-in-hand - remember that.

Questions you should answer are:. Want to get more insight on how to plan your marketing for success in ? Pricing is often part of the market and competitive analysis sections but sometimes brands discuss it separately. It depends on how important price considerations are for your business and how competitive your market is. For example, if a major advantage in your business is that your product is priced significantly lower than your competition then a pricing strategy will play a key role in your marketing plan.

On the other hand, if you are a brand like Apple that is trading on the quality and its other features more than a price comparison, then your focus will be less on price. This is when the price is solely based on the costs of the products. The company simply takes the cost it takes to produce the product or service and adds a markup. This strategy is based on the perceived value of your product. So a great example here is a company like Apple that prices its products significantly higher than its competitors because of the perceived value they provide.

This is when a company sets a price based on what the competition is charging. A great example here is gas stations. Each gas station competes with the other stations on the block, trying to outbid the other. This strategy involves setting a high price and then lowering it as the market evolves. A lot of tech products have a high price when they first launch in order to maximize profit and increased their perceived value.

Penetration pricing is the exact opposite of price skimming. It involves pricing a product really low at first in order to enter a competitive market, and then increasing the price slowly over time.

As you can see, there are a lot of different pricing strategies out there. Picking the right one for your business will depend on the previous steps in your marketing plan - the customer or buyer pain point, the market analysis, and the competitive analysis.

Much like marketing goals and KPIs, your budget planning depends on your business lifecycle stage are you a startup or an established brand. Normally, startups invest more in gaining market share and acquire new customers, whereas established brands would invest more in retention and reputation. Each industry has a different marketing structure and consumer behavior, so your niche defines your marketing budget allocation as well.

E-Commerce in a competitive niche like fashion, for example, will need ways to lower its CAC customer-acquisition-cost and upsell.

Every channel should have a different amount allocated to it based on the ROI and your profit margins. So make sure you invest enough into each channel to move the needle. Up until recently, only big brands invested in their brand.

Small eCommerce brands could only spend their marketing dollars on advertising campaigns. But as PPC prices are rising and the cost of acquiring new customers is getting higher due to the competition, small online brands have to increase their retention and build relationships with their audience, to be sustainable. And we have all of this in the marketing plan template for you. These are especially effective for eCommerce brands. A customer is not going to put their credit card in without making sure that your brand is reputable and that's why branding yourself on social media is so important.

You can read more about the e-commerce marketing challenge in our about the E-commerce Marketing Bubble. The first step when planning your marketing budget is to understand what are the growth channels that have worked for you so far and are part of your marketing strategy for the next year.

According to each channel's effectiveness, cost, and financial projections you can start allocating your monthly and yearly spend. Social media platforms and other marketing channels have absolutely exploded in the last decade so you have a ton of channels to choose from.

Now remember to have an authentic brand presence on every channel and only expand to ones that fit your brand strategy. Here are some of the top ones that you should consider for your marketing plan template:. Content marketing is very powerful for inbound marketing. Companies like Capterra and Quuu attribute their success to a really good content marketing strategy.

Why is content marketing so popular? Because it attracts the users that reach the "contact sales" button and aren't ready to buy yet. They want to learn, find information, get creative solutions to their problems, and if you can provide that value then they will eventually become paying customers. So content marketing isn't just about writing another blog post. It's about being customer-centric and honing in on specific content that will convert your visitors.

Now, remember, content is a long-term game, short-term wins are very rare. You should to create, design, and post content consistently and continue to optimize. No content strategy would be complete without a consideration of SEO.

Organic traffic is one of the best marketing channels for companies that put out content regularly. The purpose of SEO is to optimize your site and content to improve your rankings on search results.

SEO includes not only keyword research and content optimization but also technical changes designed to meet Google's high standards of performance. These used to be things that any web designer could do but since the new search algorithm changes in the last 10 years, it's best to leave it to the experts. It provides an opportunity for you to present your brand in a visual way through images and videos. Studies show that The marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk has always said that brands in the construction or plumbing industries should absolutely post content and interact with their audience on social media.

If you bring people value you will generate leads that will eventually convert into sales. So having a social media strategy is super important to any business' success. Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing distribution channel.

If you are a B2C company then this is an absolute must. You should be sending out weekly or biweekly campaigns, you should set up some automatic welcome and cart abandonment flows, and you should definitely set up some email automation for the customers that convert through a popup. Don't overdo it and send too many emails because you will end up upsetting your customer base, but find your happy medium.

If you are primarily B2B you might think that email marketing is not as powerful for you but that is absolutely not the case. Another great way to use this channel is for branding. For example, a lot of companies leveraged the global COVID pandemic to engage in new ways with their customers.

This is our specialty here at Mayple. We have over 1, talented ads experts that we match with the brands that we work with. Advertising is an important aspect of your marketing strategy that you should absolutely have on your digital marketing plan template.

There are several ways you could utilize advertising as a marketing channel. First, there is social advertising. Google ads go hand in hand with your SEO efforts as they amplify each other to get you more real estate on a search result.

You could also retarget your site visitors using ads on any of these networks. This type of advertising is particularly effective and we recommend it to all the brands that we work with. After you figured out what are the channels that you're going to invest in, the marketing plan should show all the activities you're going to run under each growth channel. To plan and design your paid campaigns correctly you should know what are the most effective channels you are going to start using, and to build a marketing funnel that shows you when are you going to advertise to "first-touch" prospects people that don't know you yet and what will remarketing prospects will want to see in order to be persuaded to take the next move.

Now, plan the marketing activities for each of your marketing funnel and buyer journey stages from the setup stage to the live campaign stage. You can also add special events and design seasonal promotions in your paid campaigns such as sales season and other special occasions. Don't plan your social media if you won't have the resources to be consistent with your posting.

It's better to focus on fewer things and do them well. Content can include any valuable engagement you have with your target audience, whether it's on your Facebook, on your blog, or in your email marketing. Some of your content efforts will be ongoing for example, SEO and some will be building assets for future use for example, Video.

Many businesses are so focused on their online acquisition funnel that they forget the opportunities that good old marketing can have. Sometimes advertising locally and using offline marketing like brochures can go a long way in such a digital world. If it's the right fit for your business, I recommend trying it out at least once and see how it goes. Just remember to measure these activities as you would with your online marketing. And, I can't labor this point enough - You should always make sure your marketing activities will deliver on your goals and KPIs.

We organize all of this for you in a really simple sheet on the marketing plan template we provide. It makes it really easy to track and report. As we all know, marketing management can be lonely at every size of businesses by the way , so a crucial factor in your marketing success is building a good team to execute your marketing plan.

It can be an in-house team, a team of experts you hire, or as in most cases, a hybrid of in-house employees combined with marketing service providers agencies or freelancers. I'll start by saying a good marketing team depends first and foremost on its leader Yeah, that's you! When you choose the right people and knows how to manage them right, your success rates are already good.

At the end of the day, good marketing starts with a good strategy, continues with a reasonable plan, and depends on great execution. Your strategy and plan require specific human capabilities so they will be executed well. If you're planning on running paid media campaigns, you better start your year with an expert on your team that knows the job and that you can count on to deliver on your expectations.

To decide whether to hire an in-house employee or a service provider, you should consider two things:. We're back talking about your KPIs, and so should you in every marketing decision you make. After you made sure you have all the needed resources in terms of human talent to get your plan running, you'll need to keep tracking, measuring, and motivating them to be focused on achieving your goals and KPIs.

Not an easy task, especially when you need to measure both in-house employees and service providers. And you might be asking yourself, how do I write this marketing plan? There is so much research that goes into it, do I have to do it all manually? The answer is no way! There are numerous tools to use to obtain all the market research and business analytics for your marketing plan. Alexa is a great tool to get insights into your market and your competitors.

It has some really great advanced features that can show you your site demographics, where your traffic comes from, and the traffic sources of your competitors.

Similarweb is another great tool for market research. Imagine if your Google Analytics dashboard could show you the data on your competitors.

This is exactly what SimilarWeb does. Ahrefs is one of the top SEO tools out there. It can give you some of the most sophisticated information about the types of backlinks you or your competitors have, search engine rankings, and much more. Basecamp is a great tool for team collaboration that has been used for streamlining project management. You can use it to message your team, store and organize project files efficiently, and work better with your team.

There are so many data points to gather for your marketing plan and you will need to collaborate with multiple teams in your company.

Slack is another great tool for team collaboration. This is a great design tool for making charts. They have a really easy-to-use drag and drop design interface that allows you to create fancy charts and diagrams for your marketing plan in minutes. Canva is a great graphic design tool for all kinds of design projects. It has a wide range of features that you could use to design amazing graphics and download them for your marketing plan. There are so many areas of digital marketing and if you want to be really efficient you should make a plan for each one.

You can download any of these or save a copy for yourself. This is a really great content marketing plan. It breaks down every process from discovering your ideal customers, to creating their buyer persona template, finding the main challenges that your content could solve, and so on.

This is a really in-depth guide designed for any content marketing out there. It's so simple that you can literally look at the guide and write it all out in Google Docs. This one looks really old school, so if you are a visual learner this one is probably not for you.

But if you want to see a really well-written explanation of every section of a traditional marketing plan, you will get a lot of this example. Download your marketing plan and fill it out, you will get a lot of value out of it. This one is really useful for a quick brainstorming session, especially when working with a remote team. Sumo has some incredible marketing plan templates. I used one of their templates to grow an Instagram account from k subscribers in 18 months. Creating a video strategy for a brand can be a pretty complex task.

You have a bunch of teams, a variety of factors to consider, and it can become a big mess pretty quickly. So, if you want to create a business marketing plan template for a specific project like that, then use this infographic template from Visme to display everything and make it all really easy for the whole team to follow. So organizing every project into a quick marketing plan infographic can provide a really great way to keep everyone organized.

An email list is one of the most powerful tools any business has. It deals less with the content strategy of things and more with specific growth tactics to help you grow your list fast. Hubspot is an incredible software product for any brand and they make incredible templates and comprehensive guides on virtually every aspect of digital marketing email marketing, agile marketing, social media and much more.

This plan outlines every aspect of creating a good email marketing program. Try it, you won't be disappointed. It's one of those marketing roadmaps where you can write out every strategy you want to try and keep track of KPI's. It helps you define your target audience, create your brand strategy, conduct a competitor analysis, and map out a plan to meet your marketing objectives.

It even has a SWOT analysis template to help you define your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This is something that we get asked often.

Find out as much information on your audience as you can. Look at the top companies in your industry or niche and the type of content that they are posting. You could quickly get some good ideas from doing a thorough competitive analysis on the various online platforms that you want to post on.

It might be that your competitors are using video exclusively, or relying heavily on user-generated content , and that should be the type of content that you should to create as well. You could also glean the post frequency from your competitors.

For example, one of the brands that we were working with wanted to expand into Pinterest. We did a quick analysis and saw that other accounts in their niche were posting 10 pins a day. Now that you know what your competitors are doing, compare that to where you are holding with your current efforts.

Next, choose the right social media platforms for your business. Decide which ones you want to use and for what purposes. It could be that one channel you could use for impressions, and on the other one, you really care about the engagement. You might find that Pinterest is a perfect platform to get traffic, while Instagram is primarily for sales. It totally depends on the industry, design, content format, and type of business you have. Once you upload all of your posts into one marketing calendar you can see it all visually, and see your post frequency for each platform.

Launch your posts for the next months and see how they do. After 2 months, re-evaluate your progress, double down on the posts that did really well. Here are a few of our favorite social media plan templates. You can use these to plan your calendar, to better optimize your strategy, and to rock out like the top brands out there. This template is a really great general for all of your needs. Each tab is divided into a grid for all your accounts, performance, audience, marketing goals, and even a SWOT analysis.

It's one of the best social media analysis templates we've ever seen. It's a marketing plan outline that you can use for any marketing channel. Here's another really great template that you can use for your social media strategy. This is one is from SproutSocial and it helps you breakdown your social media activity by month.

It's not your conventional social media plan. Instead of planning out your posts it helps you divide broader strategies into tasks, similar to a product marketing plan where you plan out the features of your product. You can plan out tasks like mapping out your audience personas, analyze your engagement, or drafting your influencer strategy.

Regardless of which product you sell, there are a lot of different digital marketing channels that you could use. You need a really good digital marketing to determine which marketing channels are best to promote your product. And you need them to create a really good digital marketing plan to strategically execute every channel.

Digital marketing can be summarized into 5D's: digital devices, digital platforms, digital media, digital data, and digital technology. If you want to stay on top of the latest eCommerce strategies and future trends around topics like CRO, SEO, PPC, online marketplaces and eCommerce strategy, then check out the tips of these disruptive eCommerce experts. Bar Gedalyahu, founder of Botim , specializes in a new and exciting field of marketing - Conversational Design. With 5 years in promoting businesses online, Bar is constantly searching and developing better ways to benefit his clients and their marketing needs.

Think about your expectations as an eCommerce user - cross-channel, personal and immediate interaction. Brands are expected to change form and e-meet the user in a much more friendly and interactive manner. Introducing - Messenger Chatbots, the ultimate tool for brands to become approachable and likable, when done right, of course. This is the new e-world, in which interactive content is truly the king.

Who said eCommerce cannot be a fun experience, or even a game? Using chat marketing features, we create fun, non-binding and challenging games within Messenger. We make customer experiences that make users engage, engage, and engage. During engagement, users provide you with valuable information - thoughts, beliefs, shopping preferences, etc. Take this data, crunch it, process it, learn from it - create more personal and compelling ads and content, content that over time increases ROI and improves results.

This is how you turn a static brand into a marketing beast. This might not come as a surprise, but - people are mostly interested in themselves. How is that related to marketing? Because if that is true than people always - sometimes without knowing much about it - strive to get a better understanding of their personality and experiences.

This is also a significant insight to content marketing, think about it - getting the user's attention means interacting through a personal dedicated message.

A message that presents a challenge, that makes you rethink what you know about yourself. Ever wondered why extensive workout makes your muscles sensitive to injuries?

The answer is simple, not using the right equipment to help your body cope with massive training. They reached out to us looking for a chat-based marketing solution to lower marketing costs, segment users by sport types, and then custom-tailor.

Socks, off. To build an ecommerce business you must be able to reach your customers where they are, on Instagram, Google, YouTube, reading a newspaper or checking the weather - marketing is what enables you to do that.

For online marketing to be affective you need a brand promise that is clear, beneficial to the customer and memorable. Strategic story telling is an often missed component in effective paid-media campaigns.

That lifts all ROI metrics significantly. To maximize the growth of a business the story needs to make sense to the customer. First, you must stop people before you can sell them. People are always moving. And online people move like they are on the highway - fast. The first order of business for copy writing an ad, is to find a way to get people to stop and then draw them in with the benefits of your product.

Stop them. Then, sell. Harry Winston's website significantly improved on how the business delivered the House of Winston brand promise when we launched their website. The focus on making the product the hero of the story and how the customer could best experience the amazing jewels and the the ultimate in fine jewelry Harry Winston built its fame on.

On the website or by scheduling a visit - what ever helped the customer the most - that was transformative for Harry Winston online. The fact that SEO story about the Hope Diamond lead to a purchase of over million dollars was extra sweet. Hilary has passionately been working in digital marketing for the last 8 years focusing primarily in paid advertising.

With a developed balance of creative skills and analytical skills she has successfully been able to continually create fresh ways to increase ROI for medium to large b2c and b2b clients. Google Analytics, or some top-level conversion tracking in place not just within the platform that you are advertising. I prefer Google analytics as Google is the largest search engine and can show an accurate picture of what is happening on your site when users come through an ad.

But whichever conversion tracking setup you use, there needs to be two one to accurately assess the true value of platform conversions.

For example Facebook even with the IOS changes is still very "liberal" with it's attributing conversions, you need another platform to provide comparison and clarity.

You can't improve performance without a clear picture of how you are doing with your current efforts. A paid marketing technique that I have implemented across all my accounts both paid search and paid social and always seen improvement in ROI are complex remarketing funnels that push the user from a cold lead to a warm lead and ready to purchase.

For social I particularly ensure that users aren't seeing the same ad for more than a week before they see a different ad with different messaging. This approach prevents ad fatigue and usually increases conversion rates. The day when marketers got away with "salesy' ad copy is long over. In order to drive conversions ad copy needs to be engaging and directly tied to the audience being targeted or keywords being targeted.

Users are looking for conversational language, messaging that resonates with their goals, beliefs, and values. More and more with the changes in society users are becoming focused on connecting with brands before they purchase.