This week’s lecture notes will look at how the media implementation cycle fits into marketing

communication planning, and how we might measure effectiveness across multiple channels.

Media implementation cycle

Before diving into the media implementation cycle, we must first look at the different types of media
available. Using media will support communication planning, as it allows you to consistently promote
company messaging through channels that your prospects are using daily.

The three key media categories are:

 Bought media: Adverts, Sponsorship, Pay Per Click (PPC)

 Owned media: Websites, LinkedIn articles, Blogging

 Earned media: Press Coverage, Viral and Social media

Media implementation strategy needs to be planned systematically. Pickton & Broderick (2005)
developed the media implementation cycle to be used as a planning framework for media activities. The
media implementation cycle features coherent activities including media strategy planning, scheduling,
target audience, and media selection, right through to media evaluation at the end.
How do we use the media implementation cycle?

 Marketing communications objectives and strategy: This is the first step in the framework, and
it means that your objectives and strategy need to be set ahead of planning media
implementation. For definitions on objectives and strategy please see my last blog.

 Target audience: Your target audience/ audiences are the people that you intend to reach with
your media marketing communication messages.

 Media objectives: In this section, you should outline what you plan to achieve in terms of media
reach, the frequency of activities, and the impact of messages.

 Media budget: The budget of the media plan will vary depending on company size, but any
budgets should be relative to the objectives you plan to achieve and segmented by each
platform to give better analysis of financial resources for each activity.
  Media selection: These are the range of media channels you plan to use to communicate
company messaging to your target audience.

 Media scheduling: The process of planning the frequency of advertising, and when you plan to
place your ads.

 Media buying: Speaking with publications to seek the best advertising rates or the process of
purchasing other media promotion methods.

 Media evaluation: The assessment of how well your media advertising performed, you may wish
to evaluate advertising based on click-through rates or uplift in sales.

Many of these steps within this media planning framework concern the reach, frequency, and impact of
messages communicated to the audience.

How do we measure the effectiveness of different communications?

Using a variety of channels really brings a bundle of benefits. However, measuring all these channels
alongside each other can prove difficult as each channel will have a slightly different way of analysing
metrics. For example, when reviewing advertising stats, you could be looking at click-through rates and
impressions. When reviewing a contributed article that you have earned, there’s simply no metrics you
can pull out from it except the number of people the magazine was sent to. Even when taking the
circulation figure, that doesn’t really tell you the actual number of people that read or even acted (such
as visited the company website to find out more information) from reading the article. The challenge is
real.

Seeing an uplift in sales is one of the most used methods for measuring the success of campaigns. It
doesn’t provide granular detail on what assets were performing best but it does provide you with real
stats that indicate how well your overall marketing is doing. Another key indicator is the number of direct
responses your company is receiving from new prospects such as incoming calls, redeemed vouchers,
and higher email open rates. It is important to factor in that the results for some of your marketing
communication plans will be long term, such as brand building. While some of the media advertisement
may bring direct short-term business such as sales.