Photo by Malte Helmhold on Unsplash

Blogs, podcasts, and videos can set your brand apart from the competition, generate leads, and cultivate a loyal fanbase. But there’s one problem: keeping up with your content calendar is a lot of work, especially if you don’t have media planning software.

What is Media Planning Software?

Media planning software is similar to digital marketing software, except it helps brands plan, optimize, and review their entire marketing strategy. They’re meant to help enterprises run many campaigns at once, so advertising agencies prefer to use them to manage client accounts.

Why Should You Use Media Planning Software?

Enterprises use media planning software to aggregate their entire marketing strategy into one dashboard. If the software is an authoritative source (and all the best ones are), you’ll spend less time on administrative duties, like sending reports and more time on content optimization.

When you’re running multiple campaigns at once, it’s hard to stay organized, but media planning software allows you to create distinct media plans for every campaign, project, or client.

With an enhanced approval process, plenty of collaboration features, and a sped-up workflow, you can keep your team on schedule. However, no one media planning software will work for everyone, so be sure to research what features you’ll need for your next media project.

What Features Do You Need in a Media Planning Software?

At the minimum, media planning software should increase productivity and efficiency in your company, but that can’t be done with a tool that doesn’t include the following features.

1. Pre-Campaign Planning

To market your content effectively, you have to rely on several tools. The more you hop between software, the harder it is for your team to collaborate. A media planning software integrates what you need to plan campaigns effectively while lightening workloads and providing visibility.

2. Customizable Taxonomy

Taxonomy refers to a classification system that businesses use to name and classify their data. Without the ability to customize tags or organize your system, you’ll quickly lose track of everything you’ve stored. With taxonomy, you can vastly improve the quality of your data.

3. Results and Reporting

The only thing more important than running a campaign is measuring its results. Everything from content marketing KPIs to your budget needs to be tracked, reported and analyzed if you want to improve your projects. Media planning software takes care of this process automatically.

4. Tracking and Optimization

While some content marketing software will come pre-packed with every tool you could ever need, it’s more likely that you’ll have to integrate a few features. Make sure your media planning software can connect with necessary social media platforms and performance analyzing tools.

5. Increased Data Security

Your trade secrets are essential, but if you’ve added your client’s information to your software, you can’t afford a data breach. An incredible media planning software will include access permissions, industry-specific encryption, traffic monitoring systems, and 2-factor authentication.

6. Fast Approval Process

Ideally, your media planning software will use the cloud to give your team access to its data. If you have a hybrid team, you can get information from remote workers quickly. Instead of emailing individual files back and forth between clients, you can streamline approvals using the cloud.

7. Customer Service Support

SaaS companies that create media planning tools should at least have an FAQ resource on their site to help you get familiar with the software. They should also have a dedicated customer service department that can answer your questions or support you if something goes wrong.