Owned, earned, and paid media refers to three distinct categories of marketing channels that a business can use to promote itself.
- Owned Media: Here a business creates the content and distributes it on channels it controls. Owned media can include a company’s website, social media accounts, blogs, and email marketing.
- Earned Media: Here people outside of the company create the content about the business. This content can include customer reviews, news stories, or social media mentions.
- Paid Media: Here a business pays to place its message in front of an audience. This includes paid display advertising (both print and digital), paid social media, paid search, television, and radio.
Local businesses should pay attention to these types of media because they allow for a comprehensive marketing strategy that maximizes brand visibility, builds trust with customers, controls messaging, reaches a wider audience, and ultimately drives more engagement and sales by utilizing the strengths of each media type:
- Owned Media: Provides complete control over content and branding, allowing for consistent messaging across all platforms which helps to build and reinforce a strong brand identity.
- Earned Media: Generates organic buzz and credibility through positive social media shares, press coverage, and word-of-mouth recommendations including customer reviews. Earned media enhances brand reputation and perceived trust among customers and is important because of the value consumers place in personal recommendations.
- Paid Media: Enables targeted reach to specific demographics allowing for quick audience expansion and driving immediate results.
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By managing all three types of media your business can increase reach, improve brand reputation and enhance engagement. As we have recommended in previous blog posts, a multimedia approach that works to engage customers throughout their customer journey, is a best practices approach.
For example, paid media is an effective channel for increasing your brand’s visibility in the Awareness Stage of the customer path-to-purchase. Earned media has significant influence within the Consideration Stage of the customer journey as consumers are evaluating their options and making their decisions about what company best meets their needs. Owned media is versatile in that it is effective throughout the customer journey including helping brand discovery through organic search in the Awareness Stage, and further, aids in conversion within the Purchase Stage of the journey by providing potential customers relevant, persuasive, and informative content.
There are challenges in balancing these media types including:
- Measurement Complexity: Tracking the effectiveness of each media type and their combined impact can be challenging, requiring sophisticated analytical tools.
- Strategic Alignment: Creating a cohesive campaign that integrates all three media types requires careful planning and coordination.
- Earned Media Uncertainty: You have less control over how earned media is portrayed, which can sometimes lead to negative publicity that will need to be managed.
Typically, metrics to measure owned media include website traffic, time spent on site, and social media engagement. Earned media metrics include media mentions, social shares, review ratings, and sentiment analysis. Paid media measures include click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, cost per click, and impressions delivered.
A best practice approach would include utilizing a full-funnel marketing attribution model to evaluate and optimize the contribution each media is making to conversions.
Cost is also an important factor when considering these three media types. Paid media is often cited for its significant financial investment, but all three media types come with their own costs.
For example, within the earned media category you may have to invest time and resources in managing your reputation online, including responding to customer complaints in the public forum. As well, influencer partnerships, considered both among paid and earned media, can be an expensive investment.
Owned media comes with cost as well including investment and resources in maintaining your website, optimizing for SEO, and content creation.
A balanced strategy is best. Data supporting the need to balance owned, earned and paid media comes from the idea that each type of media serves a different purpose and contributes uniquely to brand awareness, engagement, and credibility, with the most effective marketing strategies leveraging all three in a coordinated manner. According to a survey by Cision, successful marketers spend approximately 24% of their digital marketing budgets on earned media, 25% percent on paid media, and 32% on owned media.
If you’d like to learn more about leveraging these three types of media into your marketing strategy, please give us a call or email us here at Sentinel Solutions. We are experts in media and effectively incorporating these tactics into the marketing mix. We can help you build a compelling campaign that engages your audience and drives sales.
Give us a call if we can help at 603-352-5896 or e-mail to Advertising@SentinelDigitalSolutions.com. We’re here to help you succeed.
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