Digital Media Planning Stages

Planning for digital media buying is as complex an exercise for marketers as is buying for offline media, the simple reason being the fragmentation and nature of digital media channels. The digital platform, as we know from earlier chapters, can be divided into three key types—paid, earned, and owned media. The key difference in planning media for digital channels from traditional offline planning is the presence of owned media. Firms in the earlier era had no possibility of owning media and the only form of owned media they could use was the digital signage on top of their office buildings or large ads on the distribution vehicles they owned.

Figure 6.3 Digital Media Classification of Promotion Types

With the advent of the digital platform, a brand’s most credible marketing channel is supposed to be its website and blog, where you hear directly from the brand owners on their products and services and where communication is mostly in the form of content-based marketing. Let us classify the variety of promotional channels available to marketers on the digital platform.

In Fig. 6.3, we have classified key promotional types and their respective channels to understand the type of communications brand marketers can choose to execute through the three major types of digital media—paid, earned, and owned. As we can see, traditional marketers now have extended options to develop and market on owned media properties and garner earned media (with minimal investment on social channels)—options, which they could not even think of earlier. It has to be kept in mind though (as also covered in Chapter 3, section titled ‘Four Pillars of the IMC Construct’) that with such large options available, marketers should think in a strategic manner on how to integrate both the media for maximum impact in an integrated 360-degree manner and not in a disjointed fashion. To help them with planning their digital media buys, we now share the key ‘digital media planning’ stages which marketers should follow to manage the extensive channel types and communication choices available. Figure 6.4 reveals the four key digital media planning stages discussed herewith.