Earned Media
Imagine you’re at an auction. The next item up for sale is 3,000 people who want to know more about your business or product. The guy in front of you shoots his hand in the air and bids low. A woman on the other side of the room outbids him and the bidding war is on. This goes on for what seems like an eternity, and eventually those 3,000 potential consumers are sold for several thousand dollars. Social media is a new frontier, and despite whatever sentiments you’ve heard to the contrary, it ain’t free.
I know what you’re thinking. “Why am I at an auction?” Well, what you should be wondering is why social media would cost so much. Let me define a few things for you to help you understand. There’s paid media, earned media, and owned media.
Paid media is advertisements that agencies purchase to place on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This also includes pay-per-click which means an agency would pay whomever published the advertisement for your brand each time it is clicked on by a consumer. Some agencies use pay-per-click as a means for speedy increase in brand exposure, but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes, agencies are able to provide recognizable results through earned media because of its hands-on nature. However, a bit of paid media for a startup business that no one knows about can be a good thing.
Earned media and owned media go hand-in-hand. Earned media is essentially online word of mouth, usually seen in the form of ‘viral’ tendencies, mentions, shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations, or content picked up by 3rd party sites. One of the most effective driving forces of earned media is usually a combined result of strong organic rankings on Search Engines, and content distributed by the brand. Owned media, most commonly a brand’s website and blog, is the launchpad for earned media.
Big or small, the best recipe is a tiny bit of paid media and a whole bunch of earned media. Technology has taken over and consumer-generated reviews, likes, and reposts are going to determine the ultimate successful exposure of your brand. If you’d like to learn more about putting these different forms of media to work for your business, call us at 800-420-5115 or email [email protected].
Tags: marketing, media, organic, ownedmedia, paidmedia, socialmediaCategorized in: Articles, Featured, Marketing, Social Media