Tools

Media plan for small business: monthly template

August 6, 20269 min

Most small businesses have no media plan. There is a feeling that "we should advertise something", a few thousand hryvnia sitting free, and someone writing "shall we launch?" A month later the money is gone, and nobody can answer what worked — because nobody wrote down in advance what was supposed to work.

A media plan for a small business is not a 40-slide agency deck. It is one table for one month that takes an hour to build. It shows how much money goes into which channels, on what dates, for which goal, and by which metric you will judge the result. Below is the template plus a worked example with real prices from Kyiv indoor screens.

A media plan is not just a budget split

A budget split answers "how much goes where". A media plan answers four more questions: when, with which creative, for what goal, and how will we know it worked. If you have already read how to split a small business ad budget, the media plan is the next step — turning percentages into dates and numbers.

A minimal media plan has seven columns:

Channel	Goal	Period	Budget	Creative	Metric	Metric target
...	...	...	...	...	...	...

That is all. If your table is more complex than this, you are most likely planning work you will not actually do.

Step 1. One goal per month, not five

The most common mistake is writing down "awareness + leads + followers + sales" at once. With 12,000 UAH a month you will not achieve all of that, and the blurred focus makes the result impossible to interpret.

Pick one of three:

Leads / calls — when you have something to sell right now and you count cost per client.
Local awareness — when you are new to the neighbourhood and need repeated contact.
Traffic to a specific promo — when there is a deadline: an opening, a season, a sale.

Everything else is a secondary effect you record but do not make decisions on.

Step 2. A one-month horizon with a decision date

A monthly media plan needs a date on which you evaluate it. Not "at the end", but an actual number — say the 28th. On that day you look at the metric in column 7 and make one of three calls: scale it, change the creative, or switch the channel off.

One detail small businesses break constantly: do not change creative or budget mid-month. If you swapped the video on day 10 and added another channel on day 15, by month-end you cannot say what drove the result. We covered clean-test methodology in the article on running a test campaign for a local business.

Step 3. Two or three channels, no more

For budgets up to 20,000 UAH a month the rule is simple: two to three channels. One primary (60–70% of the budget), one or two experimental.

A typical set for a local business in Kyiv:

Search / maps — catches people already looking for your service. Expensive per click, but warm.
Social media — cheap reach, but a cold audience that scrolls past.
Indoor screens in venues nearby — contact with people physically in your neighbourhood, at a moment when they are seated and in no hurry.

The last channel usually drops out of small-business media plans not because it is weak, but because historically it was not self-service — you had to call an agency and wait for a proposal. That is no longer the case.

Step 4. The media plan template

Copy this table into Google Sheets and fill it in:

Channel	Goal	Period	Budget	Creative	Metric	Metric target
Primary channel	Leads	01–31.08	60–70%	What exactly, deadline	CPL	No more than X UAH
Test channel 1	Leads	01–31.08	20–25%	What exactly, deadline	CPL	Compare to primary
Test channel 2	Awareness	01–31.08	10–15%	What exactly, deadline	Reach / QR scans	Establish a baseline

Three rules for filling it in:

The "Creative" column contains a deadline, not just a description. "Vertical video, 15 sec, ready by 29.07" is right. "Video" is not.
The "Metric" column is one number you can physically obtain. If you cannot calculate CPL in that channel, use what you can: QR scans, calls to a dedicated number.
The "Metric target" is filled in before launch. Targets set after the fact are always "achieved".

A worked example: 12,000 UAH

Take a nail studio in Podil. Goal for the month: booking enquiries. Budget: 12,000 UAH.

Channel	Goal	Period	Budget	Creative	Metric	Target
Search	Leads	01–31.08	7,000 UAH	3 ads, by 30.07	CPL	≤ 180 UAH
Indoor screens, 4 nearby cafes	Leads + awareness	01–31.08	3,000 UAH	15-sec spot + QR, by 29.07	QR scans	≥ 60 scans
Instagram	Awareness	01–31.08	2,000 UAH	2 story creatives, by 30.07	Reach	Establish a baseline

The 3,000 UAH for screens is not an invented figure. On HostAd, placement is priced per second of loop time per month: in Kyiv venues that is 40–90 UAH per second. So a 10-second spot on one screen costs roughly 500 UAH a month, and a 15-second one around 750 UAH. Four venues within walking distance of the studio is exactly those 3,000 UAH — and that is a full month on air, not two weeks.

This line of the media plan has another property that matters for planning: it is fixed. You know the amount before launch, and it will not burn through faster because of auction competition.

Step 5. Creative is planned alongside the channel

The most common reason a media plan collapses is creative that is not ready on time. That is why creative in the table carries a deadline two or three days before the start.

Requirements for indoor screens are minimal: 10–20 seconds, no sound (the guest reads rather than listens), large type, one idea per frame, and a QR code to click through. That can be shot on a phone in an hour — we described the process in the article on the first 3 seconds of a cafe screen ad.

Step 6. Reading the result on the 28th

On evaluation day you look only at the "Metric" column — not at gut feeling, not at comments under posts.

Metric beats the target → the channel carries into next month with a larger budget.
Metric within ±20% of the target → keep it, change the creative.
Metric more than twice as bad → switch the channel off, move the money to what worked.

What exactly to look at in a screen campaign report — impressions, unique contacts, QR scans and how they relate — is covered in how to read an ad campaign report.

Where HostAd fits in the plan

The "indoor screens" line has historically been the hardest to plan: price unknown until negotiation, a quarter as the minimum contract, and weeks of approvals between decision and air time. None of that fits into a one-month plan.

HostAd removes exactly those three barriers:

The price is visible before booking. On the map, every screen carries the owner's own price — you put the exact figure into your table at the planning stage, not after a call with a sales manager.
Book for a single month. An August media plan can be closed out in August, with no annual contract.
No agency markup. You pay the screen owner directly — what you wrote into the budget is what goes there.

The network currently has 22 screens in Kyiv — craft coffee shops and small bars in Shevchenkivskyi, Podil, Pechersk, Obolon, Solomianka, Holosiiv and on the left bank. The audience is people sitting in a venue for 20–40 minutes, a few blocks from your business. ZHNYVA on Nestorivskyi Lane is a typical site of this profile.

That makes the channel a fit for local services and the wrong choice for national campaigns — and saying so honestly matters more than selling a media plan line that will not perform.

Four mistakes that kill a media plan

Planning five channels on 10,000 UAH. Every one of them gets a statistically meaningless sample, and you learn nothing.
Not writing the metric target before launch. Then any result looks acceptable.
Changing everything mid-month. You lose the ability to attribute anything.
Not budgeting time for creative. The channel starts, the video is missing, and money burns on an old banner.

In short

A media plan for a small business is one seven-column table, one goal, two or three channels and a date when you decide. It needs no agency and takes an hour.

If you are adding a local channel this month, check which screens are available near your business and put the exact figure into your table: the HostAd map.