How to come up with a media buying plan?

So many of you business owners might have never even heard of it, but you have definitely asked your social media team, “What is the ROI that I am going to get for doing this?” Here is the answer for you. This is how you get the ROI for doing what you do.

And you ugly fucks, the first-time digital marketers. This is something that most of the digital marketing gurus won’t teach you: not in online courses, not in offline classes. Stop wasting money on offline classes. You guys don’t really learn anything over there apart from learning how to use the tool.

First things first: What is that media buying plan? Why do you need it?

So, a media buying plan is not a strategy. It is what comes after the strategy is made. It dictates:

• where you are going to spend your money
• what kind of ROI you are going to get out of that money
• what kind of campaigns you are going to run
• how much budget you are going to allocate for each campaign
• what results you are going to get out of it

One thing that you need to keep in mind: the numbers are always an estimate and never a promise that you are going to get that.

And if you start campaigns without coming up with a media buying plan first, you are basically gambling. You do not know what audiences you are going to reach or what kind of campaigns you are going to run. It is just like you are giving money to Facebook, and yes, sometimes you will get sales, sometimes you won’t, but that is basically gambling.

Here is the step-by-step process of coming up with a media buying plan.

1. Identify your goals. What is your goal?
2. Identify the platform that you are going to use. Let’s say you are going to use Facebook and Google, and even inside Google, you are going to use search and YouTube. For each of these, there will be a separate media buying plan.
3. Find out what the different types of campaigns you are going to run are. Put it under one column, and then, for how many days you are going to run that campaign and what the budget is that you are going to give to that campaign
4. Next step is to find out the CPM that you are going to get for these. If this is the first time you are doing a media buying plan for somebody and you do not have access to the ads manager, or there is no data in the ads manager, you can use industry standards. Just go to ChatGPT and search “industry standard CPM for XYZ campaign goal for XYZ location in XYZ industry,” and you will get the CPM.
5. Then Piyush Goel said, “Don’t get into that math.” Take that CPM number. Tell ChatGPT that this is the CPM that I am going to get. This is the money that I will be putting behind this campaign. How many impressions am I buying?”
6. Take that number and put it in the impression column.
7. Multiply it by the industry-standard click-through rate of that particular campaign type. Let’s say you are doing a reach campaign. The average industry-standard CTR for a reach campaign is 0.3% or 0.4%. If you are doing a sales campaign, the industry standard is 2% to 3%. Put that, multiply it by the number of impressions, and you are going to get the number of clicks. That is how many clicks your money buys.
8. Now multiply the number of clicks by the landing page view percentage. On average, you should aim to have a number which is above 85%. Anything below 85% means either you are reaching a wrong audience, you are buying fake clicks, or you have a very slow website. Something needs to be fixed. Once you have multiplied it, now what you get is the actual number of people who will be visiting your website.
9. Now you have the number of people who will be visiting your website. Multiply that by the conversion rate. The industry standard conversion rate for e-commerce is 1%. If you have only a prepaid checkout, it is even less. If you are giving away something for free, it can go as high as 40%. If you are doing a lead-in campaign, it will remain around 7% to 10%. Based on that, you are going to get the actual number of conversions.
10. Just a side note: do not expect any conversion from traffic campaigns or awareness campaigns. Whatever you get from there is a bonus, but do not expect anything.
11. Lastly, take the AOV multiplied by the number of purchases, and that is how much revenue you are generating.
12. Divide the revenue that you generated by ad spends, and there you get it. There is the ROAS.

Now, this is how you make a media buying plan, but this is just one part. This is the math, but behind the math, after this, you also have to take help of your creative strategists and put the right creatives and put money behind the right creatives. Without having the right creatives and the right offer, your media buying plan is going to fail.

Whenever you present this media buying plan to anybody, just make sure to mention that these numbers that you have been provided are estimates. The actual number will vary depending upon various market factors, including but not limited to your own website and the offer.