What Is Earned Media? Everything to Know

Digital marketing strategies have far-reaching results, reaping immense value for industries. Earned media is a prominent digital marketing strategy that enables customers to learn more about their chosen brands. Social media marketing is incomplete without Earned media. It is essential to highlight that social media plays a key role in informing customers looking for various products. 

Digital marketing has made it possible for marketers to meet diverse global demands. Earned media is always incorporated within an effective marketing strategy that helps connect brands with target customers. You must incorporate earned media in your digital marketing strategies if you manage social media sites. 

Briefly stating earned media is quite different from paid or owned media. It refers to publicity or fame that is accumulated apart from paid advertising. Earned media is nothing but the publicity of a brand from one’s mouth. Generally, this task is achieved through reviews, recommendations, or professional blogs, indicating that all media is content that customers or propagandists have picked up. Moreover, better rankings in search engines also help divert the target audience’s attention to the brands. 

Google ranking is essential to own credibility as it places one’s social media sites along with content links on the first search engine results page leading to higher engagement levels. In addition, an effective content strategy helps gain value from earned media, implementing it towards improving strategies.

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Earned Media, Owned Media, And Paid Media

Digital marketing is one of the most important factors when leveraging customer-brand and customer-marketer relationships. Nowadays, the world relies on digital marketing to receive information on new brands. Social media channels are coming up with a plethora of information to benefit myriads of people worldwide. Social media’s emergence is the cause why digital marketing has become a hot topic, and people are enjoying its farsighted results. 

Effective digital marketing strategy is essential for all. Earned media, owned media, and paid media can be considered the three imperative parts of digital marketing, without which an effective and strong digital marketing strategy is impossible. Let’s find out more about these core parts of digital marketing!

Paid Media

Paid content is a media form where marketers pay for the audience. In addition to this, a brand also pays or asks for sponsorship. In paid media, one pays to drive traffic to their social media sites and reach their target audience in real-time. When it comes to marketing, paid media owns great exposure and promotion with the right quality of content. A variety of social media channels help boost content along with their website. Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter also offer paid advertising that enables leveraging social media websites and scaling their profit margins. 

The assistance of social media influencers is one of the most rapidly growing forms of paid content. Brands pay influencers with an enormous following to review their products or services. Paid influencer marketing works effectively as their word of mouth convinces their long-following audiences to advance and try the referred services. However, social media is a vast platform with diverse channels for paid media execution. Advertising through pay-per-click, social media Ads, retargeting, displaying ads and paid influencers, and paid content promotion are some of the widely used paid media advertising forms. Among these, display and pay-per-click ads help direct more traffic to social media sites. 

Owned Media

Owned media channels refer to the branded channels with a complete hold of the parent company over them. Blog sites and social media channels fall under the category of owned media. Blogs and a wide number of social media channels are nothing but extensions of the brand’s websites, and these three work together to promote the brand. Brands leverage these blog pages to create informative content and generate an audience, eventually promoting a brand while reaping value from it. Owned media channels sow brand awareness among audiences through blogs to raise brand awareness. Owned media incorporate web properties, blog sites, mobile sites, and social media channels, and all of these can be used to drive a brand’s traffic. 

Earned Media

Earned media is unique and completely different from paid and owned media. It refers to the exposure gained from third-party sites. Earned media also uses influencer recommendations to drive target audiences and achieve a better ranking in search engines. 

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Best Practices And Examples Of Earned Media

The large sphere of digital marketing comprises earned media as its essential part. Without earned media, digital marketing strategies are not perfect. Digital marketers always use owned, paid, and earned media to connect with the customers and spread brand awareness. Earned media is advertising through word of mouth; one common example is any viral ad that brings a crowd of followers with its popularity campaign. Here are different types of earned media channels-

Interviews

Blogs, newspapers, news channels, podcasts, and trade publications can interview stakeholders to provide more information about the service product. Brands can also interview the target audience to learn about their experience and for promotional purposes. 

Press Mentions

When it comes to news coverage, a journalist may cover your brand story or write a detailed article. Press mentions can help to share more information regarding the service, following which brands can spread immense awareness, leading products and services to become a part of the mainstream market. These include magazines, radio, television, newspapers, blogs, and articles. 

Reviews of products or services 

Product review is an effective way to leverage loyal followers of Influencers, bloggers, journalists, or even customers to voice their opinions and experiences about a product or service. Customers often share their product experiences through social media channels, which either bring customers or result in losing customers. 

Influencer recommendation

Nowadays, influencer marketing is very much in vogue. An influencer discusses and mentions the brand once through their post or 24-hour story, which can create a sudden wave of attention to the brand. If your product or service is worth it, you can also retain customers.

Direct traffic

Content development helps provide value to a brand by improving search engine ranking with organic audience accumulation. Businesses can often generate direct traffic through valued information shared on official brand pages, social media channels, and websites. As a result, the product or services offered by that website is met with great response. 

In A Nutshell

When it comes to earned media, it is something when the customers turn out to be the channel. With the help of customer participation, diverse media spaces like influencers, review recommendations, or a campaign, a product can find its target audience. Numerous earned media strategies are strengthening digital marketing platforms to reach success. Hence, keeping up with the earned media trends is a sure-shot way to achieve successful marketing endeavors.

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