How To Effectively Use Owned, Paid, & Earned Media In Your Content Strategy

When creating a campaign to market your business or a particular aspect of your business, your content is at the mercy of your strategy. Building an effective content strategy that leverages the benefits of owned, paid, and earned media helps you tap into resources you already own while getting a boost from advertising and positive word of mouth.

So, let’s take a closer look at the differences among these three forms of media.

Owned Media

Owned media is content that you own and are responsible for maintaining. So that’s your company website and blog, social media posts, eBooks and white papers, and so on.

It’s basically buckets of your messaging that you use to tell people who you are, what you stand for, and how you help. They will, in turn, use your owned media to determine if they want to work with you.

Knowing the stakes, the pressure is on to produce quality content. Understanding your audience and identifying your tone of voice are two key factors to keep in mind as you develop content to publish across your owned media channels.

Paid Media

Paid media is exactly that – paid for. This form of media gives you an avenue to promote your content, for a cost, in such a way that it reaches a broader audience.

Better known as advertising, paid media comes in various forms, from pay per click to social media ads. But one thing is certain, it is easy to overspend here and never see a return, especially if you lack strategy and fail to tie your campaign back to a targeted business goal.  In other words, don’t spend just to spend.

Owned & Paid make a dynamic duo!

Owned and paid media are the best of friends and thus, often work best when paired together. So create your content – a blog post, for example – and share it on social media. After setting a budget, amplify your blog post through a targeted Facebook ad or sponsored update on LinkedIn to increase the visibility of your post on that social media platform. Don’t forget to identify the metrics for success and track your results to see if you hit your mark.

Earned Media

Finally, there’s earned media. Think of it as validation of a job well done on both owned and paid media. The ultimate goal of your content marketing strategy is to create and deliver useful, relevant information into the hands of readers who you hope to convert to customers, over time.

So when you shared and promoted that blog post on social media, the readers action – i.e. like, share, comment, is a metaphorical high five for knocking the cover off the content ball.

Earned media is your audience’s chance to share positive sentiment through reviews, endorsements, and other public signals of approval. Unlike paid media, earned media is free to you but can have a big impact on your credibility.

Effective content strategy uses a good mix of all three forms of media.

The sweet spot for your content marketing strategy is where all three forms of media converge – in the middle. Use owned media to publish content rich in utility and amplify that content through paid media sources that align with your target market and budget. Over time, that consistent effort will garner praise from your audience that boosts your credibility and likelihood of ultimately getting the sale.