Media planning is a critical process that involves identifying how, when, and to whom branding and advertising messages are delivered. As a media planner, you must analyze how a message aligns with a marketing or advertising strategy before developing tactics to reach the right audience in the right places with a purposeful message. Before creating a media plan, you must carefully fill in specific components that make up a media plan. Trying to create a media plan without first understanding these components would be like attempting to ride a bicycle blindfolded. Creating marketing and advertising content that effectively translates the intended messaging and elicits the desired response from consumers requires a thoughtful approach. Digital media entails all the online assets a consumer may come across, including pay-per-click ads, targeted remarketing banner ads, videos, static ads on social media, website development, and more.

To successfully deliver a message to a target audience, you need to understand audience targeting. For many marketers, this process involves creating buyer personas, relying on fictionalized versions of the target audience. By developing target personas, you can select the appropriate marketing platforms to reach your intended audience. To develop a detailed persona, you need access to data such as age, gender, profession, buying habits, hobbies, geographic location, socioeconomic status, and personal/professional goals. Collecting this data is achievable through original research into a current customer base or tools such as Google Analytics. A crucial element in persona development is determining which media platforms are most commonly used by the actual people the persona represents. Platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all provide audience segmentation tools that accurately break down demographic information to help you target the right users.