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A DIY guide for Media planning & buying in India

Media buying is not easy, especially in India. There are more than a lakh newspapers registered with the RNI (Registrar of Newspapers in India). The total number of TV channels has risen up to 832, out of which 403 are news channels. 86 is the total number of radio stations in India right now.  With so many options available, it can get quite tough to figure out where to put your money. What you would need is a media buying plan tailored to your requirements and goals.

A media buying agency would be ideal for preparing your media buying plan. Such an agency would be experienced in planning up media buying strategies for different kinds of businesses across industries. These strategies would be customized to help you achieve your goals and designed to maximize the returns on your investment.

Given below are a few steps that you can follow to create a media buying plan. These are the very steps that a media buying agency would follow while coming up with a plan.

Identify Your Target Audience

The first thing you need to determine before creating a media buying plan is to find out whom you are targeting. You may want to answer a few questions here:

1. Who will benefit the most from your products or services?

2. What is the age group such a customer would belong to?

3. Are you looking at a male or female?

4. What is the average income your customer earns?

5. Where does your ideal customer live?

The answers to these should help you figure out the best way to allocate your media buying budget.

Conduct Market Research

Market research is very important to find out where your target audience is and which the best way to reach them is.

1. Are they regular readers of newspapers and magazines?

2. Do they watch television? If yes, which are their favorite channels or shows?

3. Do they spend most of their time online? If yes, what do they do? What is the kind of behavior they exhibit?

4. What are your competitors doing? How are they reaching the audience? What strategies are they adopting?

You can either do your own primary research or gather the details of a research that has already been done by someone else. Most media buying agencies would already have conducted extensive researches across markets. Going with a media buying agency would prove very cost-effective considering the amount of time and efforts needed for conducting such a research.

Determine Your Purpose And Your Goal

Once you are done identifying your target market and conducting research, you must focus on setting your objectives.

1. What is it that you want to do by buying media – Create awareness?

Capture leads?
Drive Sales?

2. Do you wish to get your consumers to sign-up for a service or download your app?

You can set different objectives for different media buys. You can even measure your performance across Medias to see if these objectives are being achieved.

Come Up With A Plan Or Strategy

Before you do this, you will have to identify your budget and figure out the way in which you can allocate the same. Prepare a summary of your strategy. Write down your objectives. Find out how you are going to achieve them. Based on this choose your media outlets or publications and allocate your budget across them.

Identify the objectives that you wish to achieve against each of these media outlets. Explore your options and compare various media outlets. Estimate the amount that you will have to spend to achieve these objectives. Pay attention to details. Do your research. Negotiate as much as possible.

Creating a media buying plan is very important if you wish to achieve success in your business. Organize the information in a file or put it up on your computer. Going further, this can become a media buying history, acting as a referral point. While saving your research time, this plan will also make it very easy to execute your strategy and achieve optimal results.

So, are you all set to create your first media buying plan? Or would you rather depend on the expertise of a media buying agency? The choice is yours after all.

Tried all? Still Failed

If you feel you have tried all the mentioned points, then give a call on this number – +91 9739557963. We give end-to-end assistance on media planning & buying. We have an extremely comprehensive advertising process on each medium you need, which not only saves money for you but helps you get high-quality sustainable leads.

Why Mplan?

Mplan Media is a full-service media planning & advertising agency.

Established in 2015, Mplan a full-service media planning and advertising agency in India. We equip our clients with comprehensive ad inventories across both traditional and digital platforms.

By leveraging Media, Data, Technology, and Commerce, we offer advertising solutions and strategies that empower brands to “Plan Ads Better” ensuring they achieve measurable success.