Every B2B media plan eventually becomes a conversation about channels

Platforms are easy to discuss

Customers are harder.

Everyone has an opinion on LinkedIn. Or programmatic. Or search. Or digital out of home. Those conversations feel productive because they're tangible. Budgets can be moved. Graphs can be compared. Click-through rates can be debated.

Customers don't organise themselves like that. They don't decide to buy because they happened to see a display advert on Tuesday and a LinkedIn post on Thursday.

They remember something much simpler. A company they kept noticing. A point of view that stayed with them. A brand that appeared consistently enough to feel familiar by the time the conversation mattered.

Very few buyers could tell you where they first encountered a business. Fewer still would care.

LinkedIn isn't your strategy

Neither is programmatic. Or search. Or events. They're routes to market. Useful ones. Powerful ones. Occasionally the right answer. None of them are a strategy.

Yet it's surprisingly common to hear marketing plans described through the platforms they use rather than the commercial problem they're trying to solve.

"We're investing more in LinkedIn." That's interesting. Why? The answer should never be because LinkedIn worked last year.

Markets change. Buying behaviour changes. Businesses change. Good media planning changes with them.

Buying committees rarely discover you together

One person has been reading your thought leadership for months. Another first hears your name from a colleague. Someone else notices your brand at an industry event. Procurement doesn't become involved until much later. The CFO joins the conversation near the end.

Enterprise buying rarely unfolds in a straight line. It certainly doesn't happen in one place.

That's why experienced media planners think less about channels and more about coverage. Not how many impressions a platform delivered. Whether the right people encountered the business often enough, in enough relevant places, for it to feel familiar when the buying journey gathered momentum.

That's a very different question.

More channels don't necessarily create more impact

Adding another platform is relatively straightforward. Making every interaction feel connected is much harder.

We've all seen campaigns where search says one thing, social says another and the event tells a completely different story. Each activity may perform well on its own. Collectively, they don't feel like the same company.

Customers notice that far more than marketers often realise. Consistency isn't about using the same creative everywhere. It's about making every interaction reinforce the same commercial idea.

The best media plans rarely start with media

They start with the business. Where does growth need to come from? Which accounts matter most? Who influences the decision? What do those people need to believe before they're prepared to engage?

Only then does media planning become interesting. Because channels stop competing with one another. They begin supporting one another.

The discussion changes from: "Should we spend more on LinkedIn?" to: "What's the best way to help this buying committee recognise us before they're ready to buy?"

That's a much harder question. It's also the one that tends to produce better media plans.

How Spanb2b approaches media planning

We've planned campaigns across LinkedIn, search, programmatic, premium publishers, connected TV, digital audio, digital out of home, content syndication, account-based marketing and field marketing.

We've never started with the channel. We've started with the commercial objective.

The route to market changes from one business to the next. The buying journey changes. The role marketing needs to play changes. The principle doesn't.

Media should help customers recognise your business, understand why it matters and remember it when the opportunity arrives. Everything else is simply how you get there.