How-to: Maximize Earned Media

If you have a sound earned media strategy, it can help not only build your brand but also grow your reach exponentially.

Marketing (n.): The action or business of promoting and selling products or services. In it’s original form, “marketing” was akin to a recommendation by a family member or friend. Since then, it has evolved into a machine of advertising, the Internet, display targeting, email, apps, and beyond. But a core aspect of marketing remains that captures its original form: earned media. An individual or community willing to speak to or share about your brand, in order to reach, influence, and activate other individuals and communities.

Digital marketing can be broken down into three categories: owned media, earned median and paid media. Owned media consists of your owned web presence, including your website and social media pages. Earned media includes the shares, mentions, reposts, articles, and recommendations by your network of supporters. Finally paid media, which includes display ads, retargeting ads, and paid influencers, helps to drive traffic and exposure for both your owned and earned media.

While there is often times an individual or team dedicated to managing your owned media channels, and your organization can choose to spend a tangible budget on paid media efforts, earned media is often left as the last or forgotten priority. This is because it is the most difficult to measure, and at it’s core it is a very organic channel of media exposure. We’ve become overly reliant on paid media to reach our audience, but earned media is essentially the online equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing. Without it you cannot achieve the level of involvement and engagement necessary to grow your company brand or cause.

You can build your earned media through various avenues including press mentions, a good SEO strategy to get in front of the right audience, and getting reposts, positive reviews, and recommendations from your current users or followers. If you have a sound earned media strategy, it can help not only build your brand but also grow your reach exponentially. In this paper, you will learn about some of the core aspects of earned media, and how to cultivate and maximize it for your organization.

Find Your “Unpaid Influencers”

When you think about your company or brand, think about the problem you are trying to solve or the need you serve. What current communities and individuals exist in these areas? What is the topic or issue-area that, when it comes up in conversation, you want people to instantly think about your organization? Identify and start to contribute to what’s already happening in that space.

Encourage & Facilitate Social Sharing

People are twice as likely to trust friends or family recommendations than brands and ads. The validation and viral exposure that comes from increased social sharing is invaluable.

Be a Share-Worthy Company

A seemingly obvious but often overlooked strategy for earned media is to be an organization people want to share about and are willing to tie their name to! In the same way we often help people we care about, we are inclined to help brands when we feel like we know them.

Join the Conversation

The most successful digital marketing efforts take on a human-approach: identifying the causes and topics people care about, and having real, honest interactions with those communities.

Want to read the full report? Get your copy of “The Top 10 Tips to Maximize Earned Media” here.