How to bridge media planning strategy and media planning optimization

‍

As a media planner, every time you pull a strategy together, you face the intimidating prospect of navigating a fragmented media landscape. 

Since consumers interact with brands over more touchpoints than ever, once-straightforward questions around audience targeting and channel selection become grindingly complex to answer.

You might be able to define your media goals, whether it’s for a brand campaign, a direct response campaign, or a mixture of the two. But identifying the right channels, creative, messaging, and campaign components is far less simple when buyer journeys are anything but linear.

A media planning strategy has to reflect and cater to this omnichannel experience, especially for brands and agencies looking to capitalize on the explosion of commerce media, reaching audiences wherever they shop, browse, and pay.

So the big question is: how do you create effective media planning strategies for complicated omnichannel campaigns?

‍

What an effective media planning strategy looks like in today’s fragmented landscape

‍

Media planners have to react to the evolving advertising ecosystem fast and with an omnichannel mindset. Just think of the shift from the full-length video ads that reigned supreme merely a couple of years ago, to the TikTok-led short-form content that dominates advertising today.

But a media planning strategy isn’t just about selecting the right new channels and understanding the different components they require. You also need to consider how you’re going to activate and optimize the ads as part of your omnichannel media strategy. In other words, the “what” (what ads you’re going to buy and run) needs to be combined with the “how” (how you’re going to buy, execute, and optimize those ads).

All this means an effective media planning strategy needs data. A lot of data, from a lot of sources, including:

• Real-time performance data to uncover optimization opportunities
• Audience data to refine targeting
• Market and competitive data for benchmarking
• Financial data on sales uplift and ad spend 

The only way to make strategic media planning and optimization decisions efficiently and confidently from all these datasets is with consolidated campaign insights.

‍

A consolidated media planning and optimization platform joins the ‘what’ with the ‘how’

‍

You gain a real advantage from being able to plan, activate, and optimize all your omnichannel campaigns in a consolidated solution (MarketerOS is a fine example).

Rather than analyzing individual campaigns and trying to understand how they compare, you can view and optimize all your omnichannel campaigns from one central cockpit. This makes managing and investing in new channels, platforms, and strategies significantly easier. If you see a campaign underdelivering in one area like an underperforming CTR, for example, you can simply shift budget within the same dashboard without having to switch to (and spend time learning) a different media planning tool.

The same goes for reporting and analytics. By returning data immediately from all your different downstream systems, you can quickly visualize all of your data without needing to run a pivot table or master Excel. Crucial campaign management data and insights can’t fall through the cracks, so your ad-buying operation becomes more effective and reactive than ever.

As for ensuring real-time, accurate data across omnichannel campaign management, that comes courtesy of bidirectional API integrations when you use an operating system for ad-buying like MarketerOS. 

The hyper-efficient data flow drives every piece of your day-to-day media planning strategy, from budget-planning to actualization and reconciliation, in a fraction of the time. And you gain total confidence in the data because it’s straight from the source, so you can go through an approval process assured that all your delivery data is accurate and you’ve actualized an invoice without the worry of make-goods eroding your P&L.

That confidence snowballs with each monthly reconciliation.

These deep integrations make it easier both to execute your media planning strategy and to elevate the expertise of your media-buying operation. Your team can remain channel specialists while relying on the operating system to take care of everything else in the flywheel of omnichannel ad-buying, such as navigating e-commerce and retail media networks.

This allows you to  add features to your media planning strategy, upsell different line items or channels to clients, and add more clients, without having to grow headcount or undertake a ton of employee adoption in new channel specialisms.

In a market groaning with AI-powered solutions that just push out a shell of a campaign, an ad-buying operating system like MarketerOS embeds AI development at inflection points in your day-to-day operations. You can lean on end-to-end intelligence for every process-driven action across your buying processes, including asking an AI copilot to recommend media plans based on historical performance and expected KPIs, in an instant.

Reconciliation becomes a day of work, rather than a whole week, thanks to AI ingesting full invoices, automatically matching them to line items and delivery data, and flagging any discrepancies. This closes the loop on a vital media-buying process that Finance can simply sign off, ready for your ERP.

With a consolidated operating system for ad buyers like MarketerOS, brands and agencies finally have a bridge between media planning strategy and media planning optimization.

‍

‍Drop us a line to discuss how this end-to-end thread can help make your ad-buying operation more efficient, effective, and profitable.