What is earned media

Shared media: This is when someone shares a video or article of yours across social media without you prompting them to do so. For instance, if an unpaid influencer tweets their thoughts on a blog post that you wrote on issues related to your industry, that is an example of shared media. Paid media: This is also known as bought media. Online, paid media is where you invest in paying for reach, visitors, or conversions through a variety of methods, including search, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing , display ad networks, etc.

Offline, it can include traditional media such as TV advertising, print advertising, direct mail, etc. Unlike owned and paid media, earned media is not controlled by brands , and this makes it a lot less biased — and ultimately more trusted by customers. Important Note: Sometimes the lines between earned, owned, and paid media can be blurred. As you can see from the image below, theories often overlap between the different media categories:.

Another great example of how owned and earned media can overlap is if you write a blog post that gets picked up by media outlets and other bloggers in your industry. Earned media has gone far beyond the traditional media outlets. Now, the pool of potential amplifiers includes public relations combined with different types of user-generated content UGC and sharing.

This means that everyone in your community can be a source of earned media by tweeting, reviewing, embedding, sharing, commenting, liking, and curating any of your owned or paid media elements. Everyone is so connected these days, and what they share about a brand good, bad, or ugly can be seen by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. And , many of these people listen to those stories and use them in making buying decisions. In fact, if brands then proactively build processes and campaigns to convert earned media amplifiers into subscribers, participants, attendees, and ultimately customers, they can create a powerful lead generation machine.

They also showcase how important monitoring earned media is in and why PR pros should be monitoring it. Instead of sharing content that your brand has created, customers or fans of your company may promote your brand for free by writing about their experience with your product or service in an original social media post.

Now, when people come across a product whether they love or hate it , they make it known to the world by writing reviews on websites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, Google Reviews, and more. Each one of those reviews about your business is earned media. Reviews about your products or services call attention to your brand and let potential customers know about you.

If they are positive reviews, they can lead directly to increased sales. Conversely, bad reviews can negatively impact your bottom line. If that post is viewed and shared by tens of thousands of people, it can significantly boost your profits.

When earned media comes as a result of press coverage, it will often be in the form of a direct reference to your business or brand. This is especially beneficial if the video or image shows the participants in a great environment or having a good time using or simply in the presence of your products or brand.

Word-of-mouth is yet another example of earned media. Holistically, it is used to promote content in order to drive earned media, as well as direct traffic to owned media properties. Paying to promote content can help get the ball rolling and create more exposure. Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn offer paid media advertising that could potentially help boost your content as well as your website.

Another way to gain more exposure for your content is to pay influencers to rep your products or services, impacting the reach and recognition your pieces receive. While each element has its own role, using Earned, Owned and Paid Media all together will make your digital media strategy that much more effective. Need help with your digital strategy? Contact us! For example, your product is listed on a gift guide or your company did something newsworthy and it was covered on a TV segment.

This is where PR work comes in. There are a few ways that social media shoutouts happen. Or your product filled a consumer need and they want to recommend it to others. Or you posted something sensational on Instagram and it just had to be reshared to others.

How your brand behaves, how good your product is and how interesting your content is are all things that you can control. Including user-generated content as part of your content marketing strategy is one way to encourage more of these shoutouts.

Search engine optimization SEO plays a role in earned media. Every time you create content for your website, search engines take note. Try to align with the search intent and interests of your marketing personas to create findable and share-worthy content for your audience. Now that you know some of the different types of earned media, here are some tips to increase your chances of obtaining earned media. Many of these tips cross platforms and channels, which means you can target boosting different types of earned media from just one of these tactics.

When you think about talking to journalists and media people, do you think about only talking to them when you need something to be done? Media relationships are like any other relationship: you need to nurture them and build trust. Social media and PR work in tandem with each other since they allow both brands and journalists to keep track of what the other is doing. Part of content marketing success is having content worth engaging with and sharing.

If it strikes the right chord with the audience, they feel compelled to share it. Retweets and reshares count as earned media as well as accounts sharing content on their own. In this case, it counts as earned media for Domo. Are you getting your content out in all possible ways?

Send your content out in your newsletter and ask your employees to share it. To make this easier for you, utilize an employee advocacy strategy to send out your best content to the people who are already big fans of your company.

Think of your employees as another type of brand ambassador and a way for your customers to personally connect to your company.