Media plan template for Healthcare

The media plan with five columns a clinic, provider or health product needs: which service line the row sells, who it is aimed at, what the platform will not let you target, the reference of the review that cleared its claims, and what the row counts as a result.

Everything else is the general plan, unchanged. One row per line of spend, budgets as integers in minor units, one currency named per row, and a target column that ships blank because the number is yours.

Use it when the audience you would most like to reach is the one the platform will not let you build, which is the normal condition of health advertising. A plan written as though condition-based targeting were available will be rebuilt in the launch week, and the rebuild always costs more than writing it correctly the first time.

Write it before anything is built, and re-read it whenever a service line changes what it offers or a platform changes what it permits. Both happen more often than a quarterly rhythm catches, and the plan is the only place every affected row is listed together.

Health advertising is the category where the obvious plan is usually not a plan you can run. The audience a clinic would most like to reach is defined by a condition, and condition-based targeting is exactly what platform policy removes. A plan written as though it were available is not optimistic; it is a plan that will be rebuilt in the launch week, and the rebuild is always more expensive than writing it correctly the first time.

So the targeting limits column is filled in before the audience column, and it is written in words rather than implied. No health-condition targeting. No personalised wording that implies the platform knows something about the reader. Age and location rules where they apply. Then the audience column is written inside those limits, which usually means geography, life stage, and whatever the creative can do to make the right person recognise themselves without the targeting having to.

That last part is the real work of this category, and it is worth saying plainly in the plan: when the audience cannot be narrowed, the message does the narrowing. A row whose audience is broad and whose creative is precise is normal here, and it is not a weaker plan than one with a clever audience — it is the only plan available.

The service line column sets almost everything else. Different services have different claim reviews, different audiences, different attendance rates and different capacity, and a plan that blends two of them produces a cost per result that describes neither.

It also sets who the row is aimed at, which is why audience type is its own column. A patient, a carer, a referring practitioner and an employer are four different readers. They respond to different messages, they are reached in different ways, and only some of them can be reached by the targeting that is available. Blended into one row, the cheapest of them absorbs the budget and the most valuable one is judged by an average it never earned.

Every row carries a claim review reference, with the date it was given. The reference is the identifier of the review that read this row's wording against what the service can actually say — outcomes, timeframes, comparisons, anything that reads as a promise.

The date matters as much as the reference. Services change what they offer, practitioners change, evidence changes, and platform policy changes. When any of those move, the reference is what lets you list every affected row in one pass rather than reading every ad in every account and hoping nobody missed one.

Where a row's wording has not been reviewed, the row is not ready, and the honest thing is to leave the reference blank and the row out of the flight rather than to start and catch up later. Advertising that ran before it was read is the one category of mistake here that cannot be undone by turning it off.

The result definition column exists because an enquiry, a booked appointment, an attended appointment and a referral are four different events, and in most providers a large fraction of the people who enquire never arrive.

Judging a row on enquiries funds whatever is best at producing enquiries, which is frequently not what is best at filling a clinic. If the practice management system records attendance — and most do — count attendance, and write the same words in the row that the system uses, so the plan and the report can be put beside each other without a translation step.

This is also why the target column ships blank. The enquiry-to-attendance rate varies by service line more than any published figure can capture, and it is a fact about your reception process, your waiting times and your reminders as much as about your advertising. Read it from your own system, then write the target in.

The last thing a general media plan does not have to think about: a clinic can be full.

Before a budget is committed to a service line, check that there are appointments to give. Write the position in the notes — weeks to the next available appointment, or the number of slots a week — and make it part of the pre-flight check rather than something discovered when the enquiries arrive. A row pointed at a service with a six-week wait is not an ambitious plan; it is a plan to spend money creating a queue and a set of disappointed people.

The reverse is worth planning for too. A service line with spare capacity has a different job for its advertising, and it will often justify a higher cost per attended appointment than a busy one, because the marginal appointment is genuinely worth more. Say so in the notes rather than forcing every row to answer to the same number.

Six checks. Every row names one service line and one audience type. Every row states what the platform will not let you target. Every row carries a claim review reference with a date. Every result definition matches an event your own system records. Every budget is an integer in minor units with its currency named. And capacity is written against every row carrying a budget, so that the plan cannot quietly promise more appointments than exist.