5-Step Media Planning: The 2022 Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses

1. Figure out your goals.

What is a SMART goal?

The letters of SMART stand for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

Examples: Grow your followers, increase sales or foot-traffic, visits to your website

2. Decide your target market.

If your company has a buyer persona, or perhaps even a few, then this might be easy for you. Or maybe you’re deciding between which persona you’re going to target for a certain campaign. Either way, your personas should guide your media plan.

3. Choose various media platforms to disseminate your campaign.

Ultimately, you should make this decision based on research on your target market. You should have answered questions such as "Where does my audience want to consume content?"and "What type of content do they want to consume?"

4. Produce the creative.

Once you know your goals, your target market, and most importantly, what type of content you’re going to create, it’s time to produce the creative for your campaign.

Your creative elements should follow your brand guidelines and tell a story about who you are as a small business.

To keep your workload easy, you might consider creating adaptable marketing assets that can be used for several channels.

5. Execute and analyze.

Once your plan is under way, its time to setup a schedule to review your analytics. I suggest bi-weekly. Remember, what gets measured gets managed.

After all, the omnichannel experience is what customers expect and want. Marketing is all about delivering the right message, to the right people, at the right time, and that’s what integrated media planning is all about.

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