Combination of all the three owned media, paid media and earned media helps to attract and nurture leads. And when it comes to strategy part the trio plays a pivotal role in getting right track set.
Content is the most important and efficient term in the digital marketing world. The content is as important as fuel in the automobile like fuel drives the automobile similarly content is the driving force behind the digital marketing.
The content is quite a general term it is noteworthy that there are different types of media that can be leveraged in the process of digital marketing. And being in the business of digital marketing it is handy of you to know the difference between the different types of media, as it helps to plan you accordingly and helps to set your strategy and improvise on content to earn more and more business and get more customers and views.
Benefits of knowing the difference between these
As content is a term that attracts more likes and needs to be updated every now and then in order to retain and engage more customers, a digital marketer must understand the difference between different types of media so he can reach to masses better and easier with conventional means.
Combination of all the three owned media paid media and earned media helps to attract and nurture leads. And when it comes to strategy part the trio plays a pivotal role in getting right track set. All the three media efforts are vital to the overall goals and one must converge them into strategies together for his benefit but these three are poles apart and one needs to understand the variation between all the three types.
The relevance of Various types of Media
Paid Media, Earned Media and Owned Media support different elements present in the funnel metrics. And even a marginal gap in any one of the areas can damage the integration of all your digital marketing strategy. Marketers usually focus more on creating a good content but fail to promote it to the masses. As a content marketer, you need to ensure that not only content is able to grab the eyeballs but also ensure that you are building a consistent storyline across these channels.
Owned Media
Owned media – Includes web properties owned by the business
a. Website
b. Mobile Site
c. Blog
d. Social Media Sites
Roles: Builds long-term relationship with customers, Provides information about your brand
Benefits: Greater self-control, cost-effective, versatile, longevity and niche audience
Challenges: Requires greater time, Do not provide the guarantee, cannot be trusted totally
Owned media is the content that you are in full control of; these are the content assets that are owned or wholly controlled by the brand; it includes all the contents including your website content on your company website, your blogs, and all your posts on social media accounts. The channels like social media and blogs are extensions of your website. All the three are together extensions of your website and the more owned media you have, the better are the chances of your standing in the digital media world.
The owned media content takes a variety of forms which includes whitepapers, blog posts, and case studies etc. The primary goal is to provide continuous values to leads as the leads go down the funnel metrics. These content provide all the relevant information about you and your firm. These are assets which offer a more controlled and vital information but not overly promotional.
And if you are looking for the warm leads that you have generated with earned media, it is very important for you to focus on these educational and valuable resources. This content helps your customers to distinguish if or not they should work with you.
Owned media helps in building a long-term relationship with your existing prospects. It helps in creating niche audiences and is cost-efficient. The major challenge is that owned media requires more time, it requires greater time to scale and cannot be trusted if company information is not genuine. There are no guarantees associated with this media as this is brand oriented and depends on the brand.
Paid Media
Paid Media – Includes Advertising
a. Pay-per-click
b. Display ads
c. Retargeting
d. Paid content promotion
e. Sponsored initiatives
f. Social Media Ads
g. Paid influencers
Roles: Shift from foundation to catalyst that feeds owned media and creates earned media
Benefits: In demand, immediate control, can be measured and scaled
Challenges: Clutter and poor credibility
Paid media serves as a method for promoting content and driving exposure. There are a variety of
paid media techniques used for amplifying your own media needs and help you win more of free media. It is a good way to promote your content which in return drives earned media to your website. Paying to promote the content gets you more eyeballs rolling and provides a better and greater exposure to your content in the digital sphere.
The social media sites like facebook twitter and LinkedIn provides advertising opportunities that potentially helps to boost your content as well as your website. Another way to gain likes is to pay the influencers to share your links or website to reach the masses. Pay per click and display ads are the efficient and effective ways to drive searchers to your owned media websites and get more likes and helps to increase the traffic conversion rates.
It is the easiest of the three ways to get to grips as this simply means any of the exposure that you have paid for. Most commonly paid media is used to refer to both online and offline advertising for your brand or product.
Paid media does not need to represent a huge sponsor or an ongoing effort; it is simply the sponsored post on facebook, a single promoted tweet on twitter or a prompt youtube advertisement that you have to watch before your video plays.
Social media platforms are better ways to target more audiences for your paid media and it depends on what section of the masses you are focusing on as your target audience. Also, you need to strategize on where your target audience is focused and what are the keywords they are looking for. That makes it easy to grab their attention through paid media.
Earned Media
Earned Media – Includes social sharing or other activities
a. Mentions
b. Shares
c. Reposts
d. Recommendations
e. Reviews
Roles: Listen and respond, the result of well executed and well co-ordinated paid and owned media.
Benefits: Most credible, transparent and lives on, a key role in most sales.
Challenges: No controls; can be negative and hard to scale and measure.
Earned media refers to the media that you have earned through word-of-mouth. It can be the fantastic content that you have served to the customers, your SEO efforts or the better services or hyperlinks you have used. Or it may be a combo of all these three that you have used to get recognition among the masses.
Before the era of digital marketing, the earned media was limited to a mention in the newspaper or on radio or television but today it has a broader term it includes all the hashtags and trending topics that you are included in and the keyword and SEO optimization helps you get better-earned media based on the content and strategy followed by you.
The most important thing is that you don’t have a control over the earned media and it lies squarely in third-party hands by the fans members of press and customers. One of the most effective driving forces of earned media is a combined result of strong organic rankings on the Search engines and content distributed by the brand. First page rankings mean that contents are the good drivers and being on the first page of searches helps in getting higher engagement and better shares.
Converging Media
The ideal form of marketing is a convergence media using the blend of two or more owned media, earned media or paid media. There is no limit to what percentage or proportions they should be in and there is not a theoretical ratio for the different types as it depends on the various factors including market conditions, your strategy, and your form of business and varies according to your goals, targets and focus.
Deploying media strategy
While each of the types of media entities is distinct as we learned in this blog. But there are lots of blurred lines and intersections among the three pillars of media. The digital marketer needs to deploy a better media strategy to get better results.
You can use different ways to attract traffic on the website by your knowledge about different types of media and planning a proper strategy. You can use either video or a customized user-prompt post to see how much is your reach among the masses and then you can plan to promote it among more people by using the paid media techniques. A strong content marketing strategy will help you to boost your brand and your business.
Focusing on the customer requirement is most important before the content generation. You must study the trends and patterns that your target audience is looking for and then write a unique and effective content that is able to attract the eyeballs of the customers and viewers and thus you can increase your traffic using the paid media strategy.