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Tag: Earned Media

  • What is Earned Media & What is its Value

    The entirety of the media rests on three main pillars – Earned Media, Paid Media, and Owned Media. Paid media refers to digital and analog advertising that includes social media, newspapers, and billboards. Owned media is any material that is published directly by the brand either as the company’s blog or through its social media channels. Earned Media is a term that refers to the publicity that is gained through efforts that are promotional in nature. The material is usually filtered through third parties like journalists, bloggers or end consumers.

    Examples of Earned Media in the offline space include news media coverage, ratings and reviews in traditional media outlets, consumer-to-consumer conversations about products including advice and referrals, or product demonstrations by consumers to other consumers. Online earned media include publicity mentions in digital media outlets, online WOM (word of mouth) referrals, posting on online communities or social networks, and online ratings and reviews.

    Benefits of Earned Media
    Challenges of Earned Media
    Earned Media Value(EMV) and Why it Matters
    EMV Calculation
    Effective Usage of Earned Media Value
    Conclusion

    Benefits of Earned Media

    There are many considerable benefits of earned media. Some key advantages include –

    Brand Exposure

    Earned media can boost organic brand exposure through word-of-mouth communication, cross-channel engagement, further research through search engines or social media, and last but not least conversion. Earned media has the added advantage of converting a customer even after the passage of time after consuming content.

    Word-Of-Mouth Advertising: Connecting Consumers
    Word-of-mouth advertising is the most important and valuable form of marketing that cannot be neglected in the e-commerce era. Read the full article to know more about word-of-mouth advertising.
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    Brand Loyalty

    Existing customers of a brand feel an enhanced connection with it after reading positive coverage and reviews thus converting them to organic ambassadors that further endorse the brand.

    Brand Credibility

    Positive reviews, organic brand endorsements, and brand representation in authoritative outlets lend further credibility and trustworthiness to it. It legitimizes the brand’s position in the market

    SEO Advantage

    The search engine rankings of the brand receive a substantial boost as brands earn backlinks on credible sites with a high domain or page authority.

    Earned Media: What Is It and How Do You Get It?

    Challenges of Earned Media

    The many advantages of earned media are also peppered with a few challenges. There is ample traffic on the web, hence making it difficult to cut through the noise with a compelling brand-centric story that contributes in terms of ROI (Return of Interest). Secondly, it becomes difficult to track the individual sentiments of each reader without conducting in-depth interviews to understand their takeaway from the PR material. Hence, quantitative results for earned media are difficult to demonstrate.

    Earned Media Value(EMV) and Why it Matters

    Earned Media Value or EMV is a metric that helps brands to quantify the monetary value of their marketing and PR activity. It also helps companies to evaluate the effectiveness of their earned media initiatives. This evaluation considers users’ social interaction with brands, including shares, likes, and comments on social media, blog posts, and ratings on review sites.

    EMV Calculation

    There is no standardized way to calculate earned media value. However, one common method to calculate EMV is to apply the formula that multiplies the total number of impressions by the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) by an adjustable variable like recall rate or the number of likes and shares. The word ‘impressions’ refers to when a user sees the campaign. Hence the formula for calculating the earned media value would be –

    💡EMV = Impressions x CPM x Adjustable Variable

    Effective Usage of Earned Media Value

    Earned media value is an important KPI when tracked along with other metrics like influencer community size and share of voice. It can be used by marketers to benchmark the impact of individual posts, influencers, products, and campaigns on brand awareness and reputation. It is the single most established metric for performance benchmarking within the creator economy and the social media marketing space. Earned Media Value provides companies and brands with invaluable data that helps in making business decisions that improve strategy and approach contributing to lasting growth.

    Conclusion

    Although considered by many as a vanity metric, earned media value is especially important to brands because it captures all earned media and all content that is not created by the brand itself. Earned media has the capacity to increase trust among consumers and drive serious sales conversions. In addition, the creator economy is growing and so is the importance of influencer marketing. Robust influencer programs seem to be the most effective way to increase the volume of earned media, subsequently increasing the earned media value.

    FAQs

    What is earned media, and how does it differ from owned and paid media?

    Earned media is unpaid publicity, owned media is content a brand controls, and paid media refers to digital and analog advertising.

    What are some examples of earned media?

    Some examples of earned media include:

    • Media coverage
    • Social media mentions or shares of a brand
    • Featuring reviews or photos on social media
    • Influencer endorsements
    • Word-of-mouth referrals or recommendations from satisfied customers or clients

    What role does social media play in earned media?

    Social media enables users to share opinions and experiences about a brand, which can lead to earned media.

    How can you measure the effectiveness of earned media?

    There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of earned media:

    • Media coverage
    • Social media mentions
    • Website traffic
    • SEO performance
    • Brand reputation
    • Sales or conversions

  • Boost Your Content Distribution Plan With These Pro Tips

    Do you know that 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day.We all know that the first rule of marketing  is “provide value.” However, the second part is “distribution of content to the people who will find it valuable.” All you time and energy to create content will be in vain if you don’t reach an audience who cares about what you want to say.

    “If you wrote a blog
    And no one came to read it
    Did you write a blog?”

    You might think that you have created a good and SEO friendly content, then why should you worry about relevant traffic. Right, but as we all know SEO takes time to rank your site, So it should not be the only tool to gain users. Also if you only depend on the user from the organic search you might be loosing so many users who need your service but can’t find you.

    There you need to be proactive in distribution of content to them, Here are some of the Content distribution channels which you can use to deliver your content.

    Type of content distribution channel

    Channels for Distribution of Content
    Channels for Distribution of Content

    1. Owned Media

    These are those platforms on which you can control the content.  You must have heard: Don’t build your house on rented land. So, first of all, publish your content on your own platform.

    2. Earned and Paid Media

    Paid content distribution is a way- where you pay someone to share your messages in their channel. 82% of consumers proactively seek referrals from peers before making a purchase. You can combine your owned content with paid and earned media to direct new audience back to your owned content. Use your own content to captivate, entertain, share your knowledge, and provide massive amounts of value i.e in short your audience must feel any type of value addition after looking your content. So that once a new user lands on your platform it becomes forever yours.

    3. Not Owned or earned

    Earned media is when you get a mention on a platform you don’t own as the result of your efforts to create awareness. You can also earn attention when the industry notices you and essentially endorses you.  It’s hard to get better than a customer turning into a vocal advocate of your content or brand. There’s trust among your audience seeing a peer vouch for your business.It brings credibility to everything you’ve talked about. Because, sure, you say your content, product, and service is excellent, but now someone’s actually telling others you follow through on your promises.And, that testimonial—depending on where or how it was shared—has the potential to live on for a long time. You can see the effect of shared media with the fact that, ‘Every minute, Tumblr owners share approximately 27778 new blog posts‘.

    Also Read: What are different channels to advertise a start-up digitally?

    Goal Selection

    Goal Selection before Distribution of Content
    Goal Selection before Distribution of Content

    Different distribution channels meet different goals. Ask yourself who are you trying to reach? Your own community or a broader audience? People with written goals are 50% more likely to achieve than people without goals. What do you care most about or what you want at the end — visits, signups, conversions, social shares, followers, or brand awareness? Then only select the best distribution channel for you.

    Ask someone in your network with similar goals what has worked for them. Pay attention on the audience engagement with the content i.e. what content your audience is sharing, and where they are sharing it. You can use media monitoring and social listening for this. However, the same thing might not work for you what has worked for others so test and iterate until you’ve found what works for your content mix. So, it is very important to decide a goal before distribution of  content.

    Also Read: 8 Steps of Effective Planning for Every Business

    The ways of distribution of content

    1. Owned Not Owned
    2. Sponsored advertisement (Ad-Words)
    3. Presentations
    4. News apps
    5. Sponsorship to any event
    6. White Papers
    7. Earned Paid Blog post
    8. Guest posts
    9. Sponsored post
    10. Webinars
    11. Mainstream media
    12. Communities and Discussion forum
    13. Supporting any noble cause
    14. eBooks
    15. Social media groups
    16. Paid influencers
    17. Info-graphics
    18. Reviews
    19. Paid content
    20. Discovery services
    21. Guide
    22. Mentions
    23. Videos and Podcasts
    24. Word of Mouth

    Also Read: How to Get Media’s Attention Towards your Startup?

    Some Pro Tips and Content Distribution Platforms

    1. Build your own Content Distribution network.
    2. You can build and join the group on Facebook and LinkedIn.
    3. Tweet to any famous personalities/ influencer on twitter and ask them to promote your brand on their channel.
    4. Reach out to bloggers to share their article and develop a relationship. They are more likely to share yours.
    5. Comment on the relevant blog with your blog links.
    6. Share your latest piece of content automatically within your email signature.
    7. No content distribution strategy is complete without email. Grow Your own subscriber’s list and mail.
    8. Apply social share and plugins like click to tweet.
    9. Write on Medium LinkedIn Publisher and Facebook Notes: These allow you to create and share longer content that has wider appeal, based on the format and design.
    10. Ask your employees, to share he brand on their social profile.
    11. Create content for Slide share. You will be surprised to see the organic reach from this platform.
    12. Create a network of a group of people whom you can notify about a new piece of content you just created so they’ll immediately promote it to their own audience. This is great to get the initial traction going, particularly if you don’t have an audience on your website.Your network should consist of people from your industry.
    13. Social media is the hands-on tool for distributing content . Create account on all major social media platform and continuously share the new launches of the brand to the followers , to keep them excited and on board.
    14. Reddit works well for our tech posts, growth hackers.com works well for inbound-related content, and Twitter is our strongest social network.
    15. Use personal hashtags to engage the followers to share your content on their social media profiles . Organize contests and referral programs , as a way to distribute the content by your followers . This will expand the range of the distribution of the content.

    Conclusion

    Distribution of content is not something like learn and do. The important thing is to always be testing,  searching  and find what works best for you. Remember that you’re writing for and communicating with humans, so treat them that way.

    Comment below the ways through which you like to distribute the content and works the best for you , in the comment section  Mentions some more ways to distribute content ,which works the best for you.