The Importance of a Media Strategy in Communication Plan

January 26th 2021

@golubevGolubev_Od_UA

Crynet.io (project manager), vtorov.tech (expert), ICO/STO/IEO, venture & marketing projects

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Media strategy is a medium-term communication plan that taking into account the marketing tasks of your brand.

The main objectives of the media strategy is to make a fundamental choice of communication channels and marketing promotion of the brand products and assess the estimated costs of its implementation.

Media strategy is also the answer to three main questions:

• when,
• where and
• how to promote in order to achieve your goals.

Media strategy is one of the most important elements in the formation of a successful brand story. A well-designed scheme serves as a guarantee of the success of an advertising campaign.

Creating a media strategy is a complex process consisting of several carefully thought-out steps:

Step #1. Definition of the target audience. An insufficiently thorough approach to this stage threatens the failure of the entire advertising campaign. The target audience should be determined very accurately. It depends on how effective the tactics of action will be. And additional differentiation of the target audience into target groups will help to direct the advertising campaign even more precisely.

Step #2. Analysis. At this stage, competitor strategies, market conditions and consumer behavior are analyzed. However, it should be understood that it is not always possible to obtain such information. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to guess how a competitor or a consumer acts. As a result, either an incomplete or a not entirely relevant picture is formed. But research in this area allows you to adjust the media strategy taking into account the behavior of the main players in the market.

Step #3. The place of the advertising campaign, or the choice of communication channels. The choice of a communication channel for an advertising should take into account the following factors:

• weaknesses and strengths of a particular channel;
• possibilities of a communication channel for solving tasks;
• features and specifics of the promoted product or service;
• budget size.

It’s not easy to choose from the variety of channels those that most closely meet your goal. For this, there is not always all the necessary data.

Step #4. Budget management for the implementation of the media strategy. The formation of a media strategy should be built in strict accordance with the funds allocated for promotion. In this case, it is necessary to select from possible methods those that are able to convey information to consumers most effectively. Media strategy should be part of the brand’s overall communication strategy.

The main goal is to maximize audience coverage within the budget allocated for advertising.

The choice of channel for the distribution of advertising should be based on five factors:

• Pros and cons of a particular channel;
• Consumer audience by age, gender, social status, geography of residence;
• Advertising strategy of competitors;
• Strengths and weaknesses of the promoted product;
• Budget allocated to an advertising company

But even after studying all these nuances, a number of significant questions remain as:

1. What advertising channels to focus on?
2. Is it worth to pay attention to advertising in major cities or regions?
3. When to start advertising to achieve the desired coverage, but at the same time save the budget?

It often happens that a new company enters the market and “loads” the consumer with a large number of advertising messages from the start, gradually reducing the amount of “media weight” over time. This is an effective system, but it does not work with every product.

There can be a great variety of options for launching an advertising campaign, starting with classic ones and ending with a creative individual approach. Only 3–5% of all media actions affect possible profits. We call such actions “money making”. The ability to attract “money making” actions and manage all your instruments for this is one of the key marketing preferable values. A marketing plan is an operational document that outlines an advertising strategy that an organization will implement to generate leads and reach its target market.

Any strategy answers three main questions:

1. What should I do? What actions or changes need to be done in order to start getting followers, subscribers, users, investments and profits? For example, to distance from rivals, make pivot, ICO, IEO or STO, start advertising, PR campaign and so on.

2. How should I do? What tools, instruments and methods to use. For example, targeted advertising, context, promotions, special offers and more.

3. In what way to implement? How to construct correctly a sequence of actions. For example, first — to study the market, then competitors, then products of competitors and so on.

Only with a clear and deep understanding how to stand out from competitors, how to object the target audience, how to find and convert it, you will grow your profits, and not your marketing budget. Strategy as a document consists of two main parts: the analysis and the product marketing kit. The analysis includes: market analysis, competitors analysis, target group analysis, that is, the project audience key factor segmentation.

The product marketing kit describes:

Positioning: information about how we differ from our competitors, what customer problem we solve and how we talk about it. Marketing instructions: it should be a detailed plan on how to run advertising campaigns, tell the campaign message we are addressing so that any team member can implement it.

Using a multi-channel approach to marketing strategies always has great results.

Since consumer’s attention is divided into different communication channels, if a marketer wants to optimize their chances of reaching out and interacting with their audience, it makes sense to use different channels and ways of communication.

Inside the marketing plan, we have to prescribe the structure of the plan performers:

• who will be involved in the implementation of the strategy?
• who is responsible for what?
• who has what KPI?

A company’s marketing goals should be consistent with the core business mission and long-term goals of its existence. Then we check the hypotheses, adjust the media plans and promotion tools, and finish the USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Then we scale our targets. Media strategy is also a basic element of the successful development of your crypto or blockchain project.

The Importance of a Media Strategy in Communication Plan:

Independent opinion. Information about your product will be better accepted by users if they do not read about it on the project website, but when a third party speaks about it in the face of the media and journalists, social networks and bloggers.

Communication tool. It takes few months by institutional investors to decide to invest in your project from the moment of the first meeting. To maintain a dialogue and reminder about yourself, a great option is to write to large investors, referring to your interview in a specialized publication or place a link to an article about your project. Remember that ordinary investors also read such publications and collect information about projects.

Etiquette rules. It’s better to have the ''Press'' or ''About Us'' section on the main page of your promising startup site. And the more business and blockchain media logos it contains, the better is your position. The more publications and press releases in the media you have — the better is indexation

Use someone else’s popularity. Sometimes, a startup takes as the CEO or adviser a person with a name. The fact that such people are in the leadership is an element of the media strategy that must be used 100%.

The media strategy algorithm for any project is:

• development of PR or communication strategy
• development of information events and content plan, targeting media
• development of brand recognition through social networks, opinion leaders, the use of
• traditional marketing tools (banner advertising, retargeting, and so on)
• communication through conferences, forums, road shows

In this case, the algorithm will be consistent if all channels of influence on public opinion are used:

• Business and professional (about your project) media
• Corporate blog (Medium, website, etc.)
• Corporate Social Media (SMM)
• E-mail newsletter
• Bitcointalk, Reddit and so on
• Professional conferences
• Opinion leaders on YouTube, Twitter, etc.
• and other tools and channels

Budgets for implementing media strategies can be different. Everything is individual here and the size of the budget depends on:

1. The complexity of the project and the tasks that it must solve
2. Retargeting and remarketing goals (audience and countries)
3. The general budget for the development of the project (including the costs of technical implementation, legal support and administration)
4. The main thing is an efficient and competent distribution of budget funds.

The principle applies: In the right place at the right time. Media strategy and KPI tools should be used to:

• Growth brand awareness
• Confidence in the project/brand
• Targeting key points of USP (unique selling proposition) of your project product
• Other media strategy goals mentioned above

Sergey Golubev (Сергей Голубев)

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Previously published here.