Blog Post The Three Pillars Of Media: Paid, Owned, and Earned
Knowing and understanding paid, owned, and earned media is pivotal for any marketing strategy and campaign as it is key for engagement and customer reach. Paid, owned, and earned media are inter-complimentary, and each plays an essential role in the success of a marketing strategy. Delivering content in these three ways has proven to optimize marketing by folds. However, the cross-channeling of owned, paid, and earned media is important to form a winning strategy.
For decades, Paid Media has dominated major marketing strategies. However, the recent pandemic has shifted the focus more towards owned and earned media owing to the rapid growth of digital marketing. Earned media is the most constructive way to promote a brand as, unlike the other two, it is not perceived as self-promotion, so the customers tend to believe in it more.
All three are necessary for a successful marketing campaign. However, it comes down to finding the right combination of weightage of each media you should include in your marketing strategy, for the maximum benefit, unique to your business goals and needs.
What is paid media?
Paid media is the content that you need to pay for to promote your business. This process usually involves a third party that acts as a marketing channel. In this type, you directly dominate and influence the content you want people to reach. The host or the platform you pay for broadcasts and promotes your company, and thus, the reach is completely dependent on them. The control you have as a business will be limited only to the content and not the target audience.
There are many kinds of paid media, but the most common ones include advertorials, search ads, paid social, display ads, radio TV and podcast ads paid influencers and collaborations, content promotion in Social Media Marketing, and Search Engines Optimization. The most used forms of paid media are online, social media advertising, and pay-per-click (PPC).
Paid media is essential for brand promotion and awareness across all platforms. Through paid media, you can reach customers whom you cannot reach through your media. When starting, it is a great option to boost your business reach and exposure.
What has owned media?
Owned media is pretty self-explanatory. It is the content you create and own yourself as a business, seen on your company’s website or any such resources unique to your brand. To put it simply, if you have made the content in-company, then it is owned media. The responsibility for creating, controlling, and maintaining the media is in the company’s hands. Hence the total power resides within the company.
A company’s website, blog, email newsletters, and social media channels are a few examples of owned media.
Owned media is the best way to build a connection between your business and the customers, and the more owned media platforms a company has the more digital footprint.
What is earned media?
Earned media represents the content created by a third party voluntarily about your business that promotes it. Earned media is like someone talking and promoting your business for free. Unlike paid collaborations, earned media is acquired organically without any transactional exchange involved.
Earned media comprises backlinks, features in listicles and roundups, press coverage, shares, mentions, reviews, and reposts or recommendations from an external party. Editorial gained in media outlets from newspapers, blogs, TV, and radio also count as earned media.
Among the three media, earned media is the most effective as it is the most authentic way of promotion. As it says, earned media is “earned,” and thus, people find reviews of earned media more trustworthy and reliable. All in all, earned media is undoubtedly the most fundamental way of gaining exposure, as organic traffic is steered your way.
The Convergence of the three medias
Leveraging paid, owned, and paired media together in a cohesive manner will ensure a full-proof marketing strategy. Another important aspect is understanding which media strategy works the best for your business and thus, allocating your resources accordingly.
You can try new combinations and use these three media to increase your reach and target audience. Knowing the metrics to measure each media is also necessary for its understanding and implementation. Hence, these three media types are crucial for a business to keep prospering and increasing exposure. With the rising competition in the market, a cohesive marketing strategy consisting of a combination of owned paid and earned media that is unique to your brand is a non-negotiable need for a company’s growth.
Pitch-
Paid Media pays a third party or host to promote your business through advertorial, sponsorships, social media collaborations, etc. Owned Media is like self-promotion. It simply implies the content that your business creates and promotes themselves on their own. Earned Media is very different from the two and means exposure gained, without any transaction, through news and features.
