A million dollar question that a media manager needs to answer is how can we make the campaign effective through an efficient communication plan?

Before develop a communication plan, you have to question back to your product or brand or campaign team.

•  What kind of effectiveness you expect from media campaign? Awareness, revenue, usages or something else?
• What level of awareness, revenue, usages, subscription etc you expect? How many people will contribute on that return? Most of the time you will get a answer like as much as possible. But you need a number at this stage what you can review in later stage. You also need to know the profile of your potential customer. This is you can get from your insight or analytic team.
•  How much budget you can allocate for media campaign? Again you will get a answer like as lowest as possible. My suggestion is also same, you need a tentative budget that you can review later.

So you know the campaign Target Group(TG), required reach and awareness level and media budget. Keep in mind that media can only generate awareness. Effective communication materials can generate interest. Sell mostly depend on product or package itself. So you can develop an effective media campaign, but that doesn’t ensure sell. Now you need to know answer of some more questions that your media agency or media research team can help you to find:

•  Required effective frequency to generate certain level of awareness for this type of brand and campaign? This is you can get evaluating your past similar campaigns or case study from market.
•  List of media that this TG consume and their cost to reach per thousand(CPT).
  Now you have enough information to develop the plan:

In the first stage, you need to draw the consumer journey which should state how you will generate curiosity, feed information to make them educated about your product, facilitate to buy the product and stimulate to share their experience.

 
In second stage, you need to create separate media basket for each stage of consumer journey. Different media or media content has different role. Hence all media doesn’t fit in every stage of consumer journey. While creating media basket for each stage, you should select the low cost (CPT) media first.

 
Third stage is to optimize media or communication plan based on media combination and duplication. Your objective is to reach certain level of your target audience (TA) with effective frequency. So one spot in tv and one insertion in print can give 2 frequency to one of your TA. Hence, you do not need to ensure effective frequency in each media. In fact that is going to be wastage. This exercise can help you to find media wise effective frequency.

 
In fourth stage you will go in deeper level. Do the similar exercise (that you did in third stage) for media channel of each media. This is how you will select which channel you will keep in your media plan and what you should exclude. You should also do day part and program/ genre analysis.

 
In fifth stage, you should draw reach buildup curve for effective frequency against cost. This curve should tell you how much additional reach you are getting for additional x amount of budget. You can also draw efficiency curve (reach per dollar) to find the optimum reach and budget for your communication plan.

 
Then you can go back to your product/brand/campaign manager and show him/her the expected ROI for different budget level. This information should be helpful for his/her to check with business case and come up with a budget decision.

Once you received the budget confirmation for your communication plan, you can go for scheduling.