4 Excel tips in media planning for a college senior
I saw a post on Quora in which a university student threw a question about how to use Excel and what is the important functions for the media planner role. When I just started my career, back then, I didn’t know what I could do with Excel either. In fact, I had an Excel certification from Microsoft but, you know, getting certified is actually different from applying the knowledge in real life. Luckily, I met a great boss to mentor me so that I could learn and grow.
Likewise, I’d like to share some Excel tips that I frequently use as a media planner with people who are newer to this area. If you learn proactively and get used to these things before starting your career, it will pave the way for a successful career.
1. Let’s play around with basic media math
There are fundamental metrics we need to know for media planners. For example, CPM, CPC, CTR, and conversion rate, etc. I’m sure that having a good command of manipulating these will be a great asset for your upcoming work life and also lead you to get a sense of relationships between measurements and metrics. Make sure you understand how and why it works. I suggest looking at this blog that would be helpful for you to have a grasp of the metrics!
2. The more you use shortcuts, the quicker you work
If you are comfortable with excel shortcuts, especially when you are soring out raw data and pivoting it in order to look into it in a multi-faceted way, it will be really useful because you don’t waste your quality time anymore. Filtering tables, autofill data, find and replace characters, freezing panes, and jumping between multiple spreadsheets are some examples that I typically use on a daily basis.
Hey there! If there is a media planner who is coming up with something more on this, please leave a comment to support future media planners working with us in the same industry.
3. Charting graph is life
When we devise and present a media strategy to clients, it is normally based on lots of supporting data to back up our market insights by including visual material such as graphs and charts. Since most of the market data is vast and complicated, we resort to graphs with multiple axes & pivot charts.
4. Organizing data is a key to finding meaningful insights
Pivot tables, conditional formatting, protecting spreadsheets with complex formulas by password, VLOOKUP, IF, SUMIF, and IFERROR are my favorite functions that I use a lot. Furthermore, if you are good at Macro which is an advanced excel skill to save tons of time and potential errors, it would be a huge advantage for your future career as well. Please refer to this blog for further information.
Conclusion: Don’t forget the purpose of it all
Be mindful. However important the 4 tips above may be, we shouldn’t lose sight of the goal: persuading your clients.
How well we visualize data in various formats to help our clients easily get the gist of it is the key and that’s why we use Excel, PowerPoint, and various kinds of marketing dashboards.
If you would have a question, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I always welcome enthusiasts. Plus, as a person who has got great help from my colleagues and bosses, I am willing to share my humble knowledge with you who are looking for an opportunity to learn from.
