Media planning before you spend

A one-off plan costs $175 + GST an hour, usually 6 to 10 hours in total. That's about $1,050 to $1,750 + GST, an estimate until you get a fixed quote after the discovery call. Ongoing planning and booking sits inside partnership plans from $4,500 + GST a month. If a one-off plan your own team can run will do the job, we'll tell you before we quote.

It's the job of deciding where, when and how often your ads run, and how much each placement gets. A planner weighs who your customers are, which channels reach them and what each costs. The result is a written plan, so spending decisions are made once and on purpose, instead of one sales call at a time.

In advertising, it's choosing the channel mix, timing and weight of a campaign so enough of the right people see it often enough. Planners talk about reach (how many people see it) and frequency (how often). A regional campaign might pair two weeks of local radio with Facebook ads aimed at the same towns. We'd rather run fewer channels well than spread a small budget thin.

A media plan is the document that comes out of the planning. It sets out who you're targeting, which channels, which weeks, how much for each and how you'll measure it. It's usually a short written summary plus a calendar or spreadsheet. We keep ours to a few pages, because a plan nobody reads doesn't get followed.

An advertising media plan covers six things. They are the goal, the audience, the channels, the flighting (which weeks the ads run), the budget for each line and the measures. A good one also lists the creative each channel needs, such as a radio script or a set of Facebook images, so production starts on time and nothing is booked without an ad ready to run.

Most media plans look like a calendar, with channels down the side and weeks across the top. Each filled cell shows what runs, what it costs and what it should achieve, with totals at the bottom. We add a one-page summary in plain English, so you can follow the reasoning without decoding the spreadsheet. It's easy to share with a business partner or your bookkeeper.

Start with one clear goal and a plain description of your customer. Then list the channels they use, map the weeks that matter, split the budget and set a measure for each line. Our media planning process adds a review of your past results first, because last year's numbers are the cheapest research you have.

Planning decides what should happen; buying makes it happen. The plan chooses the audience, channels, timing and budget. Media buying books the space, bids or negotiates for it, and checks the ads ran. Some media planning and buying agencies split the two between teams. For a regional business, it usually works better when the same people do both, because the plan and the bookings never drift apart.

It's one service covering both halves: writing the plan, then booking and managing the ads. As a media planning and buying agency, we write the plan, run Google Ads and Meta ads in-house, compare local radio and press quotes, and report results in HubSpot each month. You approve the plan and every booking first.

No. You can buy a one-off plan at the hourly rate and hand it to your own team. Partnership plans suit businesses that want us to run the plan as well, and they have no lock-in contracts. Either way, you keep the plan and the calendar, and you can bring it back to us for a review later.