Owned, paid & earned media channels
How to use them together?
Digital marketing comprises, among other things, three media channels: owned, paid, and earned media. In the next few lines, I will explain how can you use them together, providing examples, and why each channel is important for improving your awareness and brand authenticity.
What is owned, paid, and earned media?
The first one, and also the most important one, is owned media. Why is this the most important one? Because owned media is about how to shape your brand and image that you want to share with people, starting with your own content. Your own content could be your website, social media accounts, blog, the people who come into contact with consumers, etc. It is the media that you create and manage. It’s the stuff a brand creates to promote itself.
Owned media promotes your brand in a very personal way by highlighting your values and what the product or company does. These are some questions you should ask yourself when thinking about this type of media: What do I want people to see? What are my company’s beliefs and values? What message do I want to get across to my audience?
Some benefits of owned media can include longevity, cost, and the fact that you can create a go-to platform for potential clients who want to get more info about your products or services.
Now let’s get to the second channel, paid media. This type of media can help you boost your traffic, targeting only groups of people that are interested in what you are offering. It comprises any form of media designed to promote your brand, product, or service online for a fee. Examples of this include social media, advertising, paid search, display adverts, or paid influencers.
Even though you have to pay for it, paid media is the most effective way to increase your visibility and reach more people rapidly. Gaining organic traffic comes with time, and you need to constantly create relevant, useful content that is meant to target certain audiences using keywords research tools. At the same time, there are various reporting methods you can use, like the Google Analytics platform, to optimize and improve your campaign for better results and outcomes.
Finally, earned media is the ultimate goal for brands and digital marketers. It is when you have created a good piece of content, shared it through social media or ad promotion and now people start engaging with it, like it or comment because they consider it to be important, funny, useful and so on. Earned media builds trust and credibility more than paid media ever could, just because normal people actively interact with your content of their own free will.
So why is earned media so valuable? Because it comes personally recommended by people, it’s free and lasts longer in time.
“92% of respondents reported that a positive recommendation from a friend,
family member, or someone they trust is the biggest influence on whether they buy a product or service.”
― Paul M Rand, Highly Recommended: Harnessing the Power of Word of Mouth and Social Media to Build Your Brand and Your Business
How do they work together?
While is it important to consider each one of them individually, you should also find the best way to combine them in harmony for a more successful campaign.
Analyzing the infographic above, we can see that all three channels are interconnected. You can gain more exposure to web properties using pay per click campaign(paid media), along with SEO techniques. By sharing your own content via social media platforms, you can drive back traffic to your website, and encourage people to be active by mentioning you, share your post, review your service/product.
You should explore how paid media will promote your own content, and, how your own content will help to influence earned media. Paid media is a great way to promote content in order to generate more earned media and can also be used to drive traffic directly to your owned media properties.
While each element has its own role, using all three together will make your digital media strategy that much more effective. Even though the content is the core of everything, it doesn’t work alone. You need to distribute it through paid and earned media to be successful.
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