What You Should Know to Get Ahead of the competition
Whether your business is trying to generate more qualified leads, create awareness for your products, services or brands, or reach out to your existing customers, understanding the differences between paid, owned and earned media is integral to your content marketing strategy. Ideally, as a business owner or marketer, you want to strive for a synergistic strategy that leverages all three of these elements in achieving your marketing goals and objectives. Before we dive into some of the minutia of each type of media, so that you can identify opportunities to use each of these as you see fit to achieve different aspects of your marketing strategy, we must first define what paid, owned and earned media really are and why their differences matter.
Paid Media
Paid media is any marketing or promotions that you, as a business owner or marketer, pay for –when we talk about paid media, what comes to mind are more traditional forms of advertising that include newspapers, radio and TV. In today’s digital age, paid media also includes online media in the form of pay per click search engine ads, sponsored content on social media, push ads, banner ads, display ads, pop-ups and other forms of media that are promoted. Though paid media is generally a great way to generate leads, awareness and exposure for your products, services or brands, it has one caveat; if businesses solely rely on paid media, whether it be through ads via traditional or online channels, it can be perceived as being overly self-promotional, which may detract from the authenticity of your message. This is why balance is good thing – using a blend of paid, owned and earned media will ensure that the messages that you’re trying to convey to your target audiences (and target customers) are suitably aligned to their interests, their intent and their stage in the buyer journey.
Owned Media
Owned media includes any sort of content that is created and distributed on a platform that the organisation owns. Some examples may include your company website, blogs, vlogs, white papers or social media pages. The benefit of owned media is that it provides businesses an opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership in order to garner trust and confidence among their target consumers. Doing this correctly involves actively publishing relevant educational content via blogs, whitepapers or case studies to demonstrate that you are in fact an expert in whatever segment of whichever industry your company operates in. This aspect of paid media is quite important – if you, for instance, own a home renovation company and publish a blog on your website regarding home reno tips, you should ensure that whatever information you’re publishing is correct, relevant and timely. This means that you probably shouldn’t be publishing a blog on how it’s the perfect time to build a deck in the middle of the winter. Through owned media, your company can stand out from competitors by offering something of value to your target audience that doesn’t necessarily include your products and services; by doing so, you have a chance of converting potential leads that are on the fence about your business to potential customers because you have shown them that you truly are an expert in your industry.
Earned Media
Earned media includes content and conversations pertaining to your products, services or brand that are created by someone else and subsequently published on a channel that you don’t own. This may include social media mentions, reviews, shares, retweets, blogs, vlogs and press coverage that are created by people or organisations that have exposure to what you’re doing – whether that’s good or bad is what wholly makes earned media either one of your best tools to garner attention and awareness towards your brand or an obstacle that you have to focus on remediating. The benefit of earned media is that it provides your business with the recognition that you truly deserve in the most authentic voice – it’s akin to positive word of mouth, which has long been the boon of many businesses. Whether it be having your business covered by the local press, facilitating reviews for your products or services, or garnering recognition for your thought leadership as a guest blogger, earned media is one of the most effective mechanisms in creating attention, positive attitudes and potential loyalty towards your brand.