How to Plan Digital Advertising Strategy

It happened to me a lot that I talk to people about digital advertising, and they complain how annoying the online ads are and irrelevant products are being advertised to them. That’s actually where the whole adblocking dilemma originated. Many people are sick of online ads because they are products or services that they don’t need. Otherwise, how would you feel if you’re looking for a pair of sports shoes and then suddenly an ad about the exact sports shoes that you are looking for shows up on your screen? That’s awesome, right?

The reason, we’re seeing bunch of irrelevant annoying ads is that somebody didn’t (or couldn’t) do his job properly and didn’t plan his media properly.

Media planning is important and has a crucial impact on the success of your advertising and monetisation. If you don’t think things through in advance, you may end up wasting a lot money and getting no results. Plus it can be harmful for your brand.

In this post, I am trying to explain more about the process of media planning and give some tools and tips on how to do it better.

1- Set Your Campaign Goals
I’ve talked about this in other articles as well. It is essential to set proper goals for your advertising campaigns. What do you want to reach? and what is the value of your goal?

Your goal does not necessarily need to be the payment of the client. It can be one or a few steps before that. Remember your goal should be the step that you can narrow down your potential customers as much as possible, where you can have a good estimation on the ratio of your potential customers to actual customers.

2- Know your Target Group and Create subgroups
Having a clear understanding about your target groups and their needs will help you a lot in your targeting and also other steps of your media planning. For instance, based on this data you can understand what type creatives you should design for your ads.

The best method is to create a buyer personas for your product. Try to know as much as possible about your buyer. You should find out what type of people are interested in your ads and what sort of interests, hobbies or professions they have. Try to create different buyer personas and test them in your campaigns.

3- Market Research and identify relevant advertising sources
The next step is to understand, where your targets audience is engaged and you can find them. You should find out, what sources are working best on your target audience and which devices, OS, browsers, etc they perform the best.

You should also research how your competitors are running their ads and see how things are working for them.

First consider the following types of media for doing your research
Social ads
Search ads
Display ads
Native Ads
Video ads

For each type of media, there are several research and spy tools which are very helpful.

4- Create your Campaign and Optimization Plan
Ok, now that you know about your target group and the suitable sources, you should start planning and structuring your campaigns launch.

I have explained this topic in the article, 7 Rules of Media buying, thoroughly. But I would like to mention again that, it is important to structure your campaigns in a way that you can cover your target audience properly. Don’t plan campaign too niche from the beginning. Keep them a bit broad (as much as it wouldn’t get too messy).

In your optimization plan, think about what elements are important for you to optimize and how you can create niche campaigns. Consider features like frequency capping and bidding strategies in your planning.

5- Plan your Landing Page and Creative Designs and Messages
In this step, you should think about creating different variation of creatives, what type of messages you want to give to your audience and how you can design an effective call to action.

Also plan A/B testing for your creatives and landing pages. Identify the elements and items which can make a difference and create different variation of the same creative or landing page to test.

Try to create many different templates and variations. Testing many different creatives is the key to the success of your campaign.

Lastly, consider your campaign and optimization plan in your creative design. For instance, you need different creatives for CPM and CPC campaigns.

6- Plan Retargeting, Cross-sell and Upsell
Now that you covered your target audience in your campaign plan, you should make sure that you catch your target audience. Therefore, you should think about retargeting campaigns. In happens a lot that a user is interested in your product but simply at that time he or she is not ready to turn into a conversion.

So first, plan your retargeting. Consider the full funnel of your campaign, and set different goals. For each goal, you can retarget the user by a different strategy. Obviously, the more in depth a user go, the more interested he is. In most cases, the ROI of the retargeting campaigns are super high. So if you want to have successful campaigns, don’t miss retargeting.

Then, you should think about your cross-sell and upsell options. These types of strategies, can extremely boost your campaign success because, first you can cover a wider range of audiences, second your ARPU (average revenue per user) will jump, which means you can bid higher, which results in more traffic.

Source: http://www.adhoq.io/6-essential-steps-of-digital-media-planning/