Paid media and digital advertising playbook

A playbook to help you identify the steps you can take to ensure your integrated paid media investments are successful

How will this guide help me and my business?

The modern-day marketer has a large number of channels available to drive their objectives, as a result the number of stakeholders and agency partners has also increased. This makes integrated paid media campaigns complex to deliver to time, budget and expectation and opportunities for improved reach and targeting can be missed.

This paid media planning guide will provide marketers with a structured approach to paid media planning to help exploit these opportunities while managing the risks.

Our Paid Media playbook shows you:

• How to increase sales through lifecycle engagement
• Reporting on media effectiveness
• Targeting techniques
• Media planning
• Media optimisation

Who is this guide for?

This guide is aimed at budget owners in companies managing multiple agency relationships:

• Marketing directors and managers who are managing integrated online ‘campaigns’
• Heads of acquisition marketing
• Digital marketing managers

The guide will also be useful for agency directors and account managers looking to improve the delivery of their media planning and campaign results for clients.

How is the Paid Media Playbook structured?

The playbook is a short, highly actionable guide structured as follows:

• Introduction: Increasing sales through lifecycle engagement
• Reviewing and reporting on media effectiveness
• Audience and targeting techniques
• Setting objectives and reporting
• Offer, messaging and formats
• Media investment strategy
• budgeting investment in media options
• Media planning – maximising reach and conversion,
• minimising wastage
• Optimisation
• Resourcing

What is a Marketing Playbook?

A marketing playbook defines the types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives.

The concept is based on the idea of Playbooks in sports like American Football and Baseball where the coach agrees different attacking and defensive techniques with their team which can be deployed in different situations to help win against their opposition.

In marketing, media is fiercely competitive with multiple competitors and many communications techniques which vary through time. The larger the team in marketing, the more important it is to have an agreed approach which everyone in team follows including different agencies working with the business.

Resource Details

• Authors: Dave Chaffey and Andy Letting
• Last updated: 12 January 2021
• Format: Short, actionable and practical playbook format, to help you quickly audit your media channels, to improve your integrated marketing strategy

About the author

Dr. Dave Chaffey

Dave is co-CEO and co-founder of Smart Insights. He is editor of the 100 templates, ebooks and courses in the digital marketing resource library created by our team of 25+ Digital Marketing experts. Our resources used by our premium members in more than 80 countries to Map, Plan and Manage their digital marketing.

For his full profile, or to connect on LinkedIn or other social networks, see the About Dave Chaffey profile page on Smart Insights. Dave is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing.

Andy Letting

Andy has worked across a range of digital transformational projects where traditional businesses try and adapt to the fast-paced world of digital marketing. His greatest achievement to date has to be the evolution of Sky Mobile TV from a multi-million business to a now integral pillar of BSkyB’s retention armoury, now called ‘SkyGo’.