Creating Marketing Balance with Owned, Paid Media and Earned Media

Understanding how your audience interacts, shares and responds to your messages is a critical component to any marketing strategy. When determining your marketing strategy, consider planning tactics in three categories to extend the reach of your message and generate scalable ROI:

• Owned Media is a channel you control. Examples of owned media include your website, blog, twitter account, Facebook page, or mobile site. Owned media allows you communicate directly with consumers who want to engage with your brand through long-term relationships.
• Paid Media continues to drive the majority of tactical marketing activity. Examples of paid media include display ads, paid search ads, and other sponsored content. Paid media provides an immediate, controllable and scalable channel to reach an audience. Paid media can be used effectively as a catalyst to feed Owned Media or to drive earned media.
• Earned Media is not a new marketing concept. It has traditionally been used to describe stories, brand mentions, or articles that were not “paid” for through advertising.  Today, Earned Media has evolved to include more transparent and word-of-mouth sharing that is being created through social media. In many ways, every marketing message has the potential to “earn media.” Smart marketers are learning how to create, monitor, and respond to both positive and negative earned media to drive engagement online.

Here are five tips to help spread your messages via Earned Media

1. Enable sharing within Paid and Owned Media – Facebook’s recent expansion ofsocial plugins and introduction of the Like button make sharing paid and owned content easy.
2. Create helpful content – How-to’s and tips are great ways to provide useful content to your audience that is likely to be endorsed and shared. HRBlock engages in question and answer sessions with their customers during tax season.
3. Enable Personalization – Allow your audience to use pictures, videos or audio to interact with your messages and add a personal touch that is likely to be shared. Sponsored applications like Elf Yourselfand Facebook applications like Bike Yourself from New Belgium Brewing Company allow users to have fun participating and sharing a message.
4. Use incentives – Coupons are a great way to entice people to share and interact with your messages.  Einstein Bros Bagels uses their Facebook page to offer coupons and exclusive offers.
5. Humor – Old Spice promotes humor in their paid media and directs consumers to share their messages via their YouTube channel. The result was millions of views and measurable Earned Media across online and offline channels.

The more interesting you make your content in Owned and Paid Media, the more your ideas will spread via Earned Media. views and conversation!