Although many marketers, including experts, consistently repeat the line “content is king” they tend to leave out essential details and hide helpful advice that business owners should be following.
Plenty of businesses consistently create website content that’s interesting and valuable, yet they don’t move up on search engine results pages (SERPs) which often ends up proving their efforts almost meaningless.
This is why earned media — any media coverage or publicity that’s not generated by the company itself or its employees and collaborators — is so important. This type of content is created by the company’s customers, fans on social media, bloggers, or journalists. Essentially, it’s all content that the company itself didn’t commission or otherwise pay for, created by a third party, and not published primarily on the company’s website.
This type of content is reviews and testimonials from customers, mentions from them on social media platforms, word of mouth recommendations, blog posts as well as magazine and newspaper articles.
Value of Earned Media
These days it’s easier than ever for people to share their opinion about a company or its products and services to a large number of people due to social media platforms. Additionally, customers are frequently researching the products or services they’re looking to purchase, which greatly impacts their buying decisions.
Customers will look for content from credible third-party sources when considering approaches, or they will look for endorsements of that product or service from an unbiased third party. This might include simply reading product reviews before they make a purchase.
Although blog posts and newspaper articles are also considered a part of earned media they can also be a part of paid media. The difference between the two is stated in the name itself — paid media is the content that companies pay for such as ads in media outlets, or search engines, or social media platforms.
Goals of Earned Media
When creating an earned media strategy companies should first define the goals of that strategy. It can be to gain exposure for the brand or a specific product, or to drive traffic to the company’s website. Figuring out that goal is also very useful in the other steps of creating that strategy as well as identifying and measuring the KPIs..
Earned Media Target Audience
The next step in creating an earned media strategy is to create buyer personas. With these buyer personas, companies can narrow down the demographic of the target audience to specifically target segments of the audience more effectively. This means getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time.
Earned Media Distribution
One way that companies can distribute great content to bigger audiences is through their employees. This is because employees sometimes have a bigger audience than the company itself plus, are a way to distribute that content at a lower cost.
Another way would be to utilize influencer marketing which is a very effective digital acquisition channel, as customers frequently tend to look towards people they’re familiar with compared to other sources of information.
