There are tons of media terms marketing teams need to know. Before you can start leveraging extensive measuring and tracking capabilities in various marketing or attribution platforms, you have to be fluent in marketing speak. So we decided to put together a handy glossary of some of the latest terms on data and media planning.
What is data scraping?
Data scraping, also known as web scraping, is the process of extracting publicly available data and information from targeted websites, such as social media sites, blogs or marketplaces, and importing it into a spreadsheet or local file on your computer.
What’s the point? Marketers lean on data scraping for multiple reasons. It allows us to take unstructured, scattered data from various sources, collect it in one place, structure it and make sense of it. Some of the most popular use cases of web scraping include:
- Lead generation: finding new prospects that fit your ideal customer profile
- Market research: structuring and understanding the trends and characteristics of your target market
- Comparisons: collecting data on variable aspects, such as pricing, and using it for comparison
What is data cleaning?
Data cleaning, sometimes also referred to as data scrubbing or data cleansing, is the process of preparing raw data for analysis by removing or modifying data that is incorrect, duplicate, corrupt, incorrectly formatted or irrelevant.
As the old adage goes: garbage in, garbage out. Since marketers tend to pull data from various sources, there are many opportunities for data to be duplicated or mislabeled. Skipping the data cleansing process could lead to incorrect data, which, in turn, leads to poor decision making. Gasp!
The techniques to clean data vary greatly based on the type of data you’re working with, but you can follow these four basic steps to map out a framework for your data:
- Remove duplicate and irrelevant data
- Fix structural errors, such as naming conventions, typos or incorrect capitalization
- Determine the validity of outliers: sometimes, you’ll need an outlier to prove your theory, but might also come across a one-off observation that doesn’t fit within your dataset
- Deal with missing data
- Validate and QA your dataset
- What is a marketing data warehouse?
Data storing is essentially the process of collecting and retaining digital information. With marketing data growing dramatically in volume, marketers are looking for a marketing data warehouse. Essentially, it’s a secure destination for storing and analyzing all marketing data. Unlike a limited dataset, a data warehouse can contain data from multiple sources across a vast period of time, providing a much better data granularity and better insights.
What is data taxonomy?
In marketing, taxonomy refers to the classification of data into standardized categories and sub-categories. It uses naming conventions to introduce common semantics and terminologies across multiple systems and processes as well as provides a unified, holistic view of all marketing data. With a proper taxonomy framework for your data in place, you’re able to analyze and attribute the performance of media dimensions that matter most to your brand. Plus, naming conventions and categorization means your data is tracked and attributed consistently across multiple sources and channels.
It’s important to note that every marketing organization has its own unique taxonomy to cater to its different lines of business, specialized channel teams and campaign objectives. For instance, with Mediatool, marketers can set custom tags and tag hierarchies for simple global classification. Your team gets to decide how to classify data, so there’s no risk of incorrectly labelled or duplicated data. This means you can plan campaigns, track data, filter, and generate reports with full confidence everything is where it should be and nothing is missing.
What is a media vehicle?
A media vehicle is a specific method of media used by companies to deliver advertising messages to their target audience. As part of media planning, advertisers select a mix of media vehicles to reach potential customers. In many cases, advertisers will drill deeper to identify specific vehicles in each media class. The following are common types of media class and the media vehicles within those classes:
- Audio: a podcast, a radio station, Spotify or another music streaming service
- TV: a channel, TV show or network
- Print: a newspaper, magazine, periodical
- Outdoor: a billboard, tube station, bus stop
- Digital media: social media site, online publication, personal blog
- App: a digital app like a game
- Event: trade show, conference, workshop
For instance, if we choose audio as the media class for advertising, the next step would be picking out the right media vehicle for our target audience – a niche podcast, a specific radio show or playlist on a music streaming platform.
What is media planning?
Media planning is the process of selecting media types and scheduling advertising to deliver promotional messages to targeted audiences. It is often a complicated process of finding a combination of appropriate media channels, advertising times and advertising spots to communicate the message in the most effective manner to the largest number of potential customers at the lowest cost.
So, in a nutshell: a marketing plan considers the overall marketing environment and sets the marketing objectives; an advertising plan is derived from the marketing plan and sets out the methods of how a company will achieve its objectives through paid advertising within a given budget; a media plan is derived from the advertising plan and determines the best combination of media to reach a marketing campaign’s objectives.
Here’s our guide to media planning and buying that covers the steps to identifying, planning, negotiating, buying, monitoring and analyzing your campaign performance! Plus, all the common media planning terminology!
What is a media planning software?
As much as it pains us to admit it, Excel spreadsheets still come up in conversations about planning and analyzing media campaigns. For many years, purpose-built software for managing, tracking and analyzing marketing campaigns have failed to replace Excel as the dominant media planning tool. Yet, with the dawn of online advertising, and the incredible tracking and attribution challenges that come with this medium, media planners and marketers are ready for something more robust.
That’s where Mediatool comes in. As an end-to-end media planning and marketing campaign productivity tool, Mediatool helps marketers unlock the power of their media data to run more impactful campaigns and achieve business goals faster. Plus, with Mediatool’s collaboration and reporting features, teams can work in a more agile, collaborative way and see the results of their campaigns in real time.
Are you too eager to move away from spreadsheets and experience the future of media planning? Book a free Mediatool demo and start mining the value of your media data!
