Data Driven media planning: plan your content effectively

What is a Media Planning, how you can plan a successful one and turn your company into a Data Driven Company

Before we find out what a Data Driven Media Planning is and how it is possible to implement a successful one, there is one basic thing that every entrepreneur and manager needs to know exactly…

Every company must become a Media Company.

This phrase has been repeated often in recent years, and you have probably read or heard it yourself.

The point is that today, products and services are no longer enough to create ongoing connections with one’s customers, but it is necessary to create experiences and be ever-present through content, distributed across all digital channels (and beyond) where target customers are. The point is that companies that rely only on a website and traditional advertising are bound to fall behind.

That’s right: even having a blog is no longer enough!

Think that brands such as AirBnB, Nike, RedBull or Netflix have already become-though by different means-media companies in their own right. But this process does not only affect giants such as those just mentioned: even if your company is smaller, By creating content you can first of all increase the impact to make you known to many more people, and build an audience of people who are genuinely interested in your products or services, reducing unnecessary investment in paid advertising.

In this way you win the trust of those who do not yet know you, turn customers into “fans,” and fuel word of mouth and spontaneous referrals.

The real question then is not whether to start becoming a Media Company but rather how to do it effectively. And one of the basic steps of any media company is to draw up a media planning, that is, an editorial calendar of media content.

Yes, because before thinking concretely about the valuable content to be implemented, what makes the difference is to define a roadmap scome to convey it and on which media.

Be careful, though, because in order not to waste your budget you need to be data-driven and avoid relying on the ideas (based on what? Feelings?) of content creators.

How? Conducting market research based on listening to the network, that is, the opinions, preferences and desires expressed by your online customers. Publicly.

A data-driven media planning allows you to increase brand awareness, your customers’ engagement and your company’s conversions.

Moreover, it is the trick to distance yourself enormously from your competitors, because (here in Italy) very few take this approach.

They are clearly ahead in this regard abroad, but that is another matter…. In any case, it all works to your advantage: adopting a data-driven method before the others allows you to distance them not by a few meters, but by miles!

What is data-driven media planning?

Media planning, Italian for “media planning,” is a detailed editorial plan that allows you to perfectly organize the publication of media content (video, audio, text on your website, podcasts, images, and more).

This means that with a media calendar you can plan in detail all your content, asking yourself these questions:

• Who is the recipient of the content?
• What to publish?
• When to do it?
• Where to publish? In which platform?
• Why publish this very thing? What is my goal?
• How to organize the content?

If you are an entrepreneur there is definitely a professional who will do this for your company…. While if you are a Copywriter or Social media manager, this insight will certainly help you get up to speed and come up with successful work for your clients.

A media editorial plan should always follow a data-driven approach, that is, driven by the information that people (your customers!) express on the Web.

How to find this information?

With our help and with the support of social listening software, a practice we tell you about in detail in the following article: Social listening: what it is and why you can’t do without it today

Wondering why you should adopt a data-driven media calendar? Good question that deserves a timely answer!

Data-driven media planning: why does your company need from the start?

Planning media publication by getting “advice” from the customers themselves, that is, from the information they post daily on Social, blogs, review sites and many other channels, helps your web marketing strategy succeed for specific reasons.

Here are which ones:

• Listening to the network allows you to get to know your target audience at a very deep level. The result is being able to reach your target customers more effectively, build loyalty, create a confidential relationship with them and, as a direct result, sell more.
• Decide wisely on which media channels and platforms to share your content, and how often to do so, so that you achieve your goals without wasting time and monetary resources.
• Keep up with your industry trends and innovations.
• Optimize your budget by using it to create, publish, and share high-quality, winning content. Your ROI will thank you.
• You can conduct analytics to measure the success of your online campaigns.
• You start attracting a lot more people because social listening allows you to create engaging and, when it can be useful, viral content. Remember that shares and other interactions from your customers are critical to the success of an online marketing campaign!

In summary, the advantage of a data-driven approach is to have a media plan that starts not from your opinions but from the evidence of what customers are interested in, what is happening in the market, and what can really work in your industry.

With the goal of helping your company grow and achieve business goals, we bring you good news: in the next few lines you can read how to do data-driven media planning.

In addition, if you wish, you can contact us to ask for more information about it, consultations and even training courses for your employees!

How to make a winning media plan?

First and foremost, good media planning must consider several aspects:

1. The right channels on which to go and publish content.
2. The topics to talk about in the texts, videos, images and any other content you are going to publish.
3. Tone of Voice and line of sight.

Be careful because you can’t just go randomly and say, “In my opinion…” or rely on the opinions of your co-workers. Nothing could be more wrong!

Keep your goals in mind (grow? Sell more? Outperform competitors? All of the above?) and work to pursue them, not just publish content for the sake of it.

Of course, if you have money to throw around you might as well do that…. But it would be better to invest it than to throw it away!

Do you really want to achieve your business goals? Then read the details regarding all the aspects we listed earlier.

1) Where to publish media content? Your customers tell you so!

The first point of excellent data-driven media planning is to choose the right channels on which to publish content (and then organize the type of content to be published in the various channels).

But how to do it?

Certainly not at random, but by looking at what channels work in your industry.

This means that you have to start with your target customer (thus who you are addressing right now to create your media planning) to figure out where they spend most of their time online.

With amarket analysis based on web listening, you will find out whether your target customer spends time on social media (and which ones), blogs, and other platforms, such as Quora or Slideshare.

The goal is to understand where you can find your target customers and then choose one channel over another based on actual interest.

The final choice also depends on your budget! If you have a limited time, resource, and monetary budget you will choose, perhaps, 1 or 2 channels that you can best devote yourself to.

However, if you have a higher budget available, you can also vary and choose more than 2 channels. However, it is better to work well on a limited number of channels than to work poorly on many channels.

So watch out!

2) The choice of topics to talk about in the media.

To draft a successful media planning you cannot choose topics at random, being guided by instinct or your own ideas. As with platforms, you need to be guided by data.

Again starting from the target audience (and also fromcompetitive analysis) go to understand what people are looking for and what topics create the most engagement.

For example, with social listening software you can analyze what they search for on Google, Amazon, YouTube and other channels regarding your industry, but also how they get to its competitors’ sites.

In fact, you can see what keywords customers are coming to each site from and understand what topics, at this time, they may find most interesting.

You can also see interest over time, figure out month by month what topics are historically most interesting to your customer, so you can understand whether seasonality exists in your industry.

This aspect is very important especially when doing media planning in the editorial field: having written content that interests different readers at different times of the year is really crucial.

In addition, again based on people’s interests, you can start posting the topics that have higher relevance, so they are more searched than others or are viral at that moment.

For example, we at Central Marketing Intelligence worked for two companies in the editorial field that dealt with two different topics (one cooking and the other femininity).

We monitored what the topics were both in real time and seasonally to come up with editorial content, covers, and insights that were in line with customers’ interests.

Read also: Web marketing strategies do NOT work (if you don’t start with data)

3) Tone of Voice and line of sight, critical to successful data-driven media planning.

Figuring out what tone of voice and visual line to use in the media is critical to your media planning, because these distinctive elements must be true to your company’s industry.

How do you figure out how you should address your customer, with what messages, and in what tone of voice? Always withlistening to the network, looking at what works most in your industry!

Taking a given keyword/topic you can go and see what posts in the different Social, blog articles in the sites have received the most shares, the most likes, the most views. So whatever has been most successful.

By studying this information and doing some sort of reverse engineering, you can figure out why they worked the most, what content is also most successful by looking at user interactions and how they communicate.

By doing a social listening analysis on your topic, see which of the many posts and images published triggered the most interest… And you can take inspiration to go and create your web presence.

Do you want to evolve your company into a Data Driven Company?

You can simply contact us and we will help you get all the information you need to create successful content and evolve your company into a Data Driven Company.

Are you ready?

Contact us now! We are here to help you!