If you want to have an advertising and are confused between paid Vs. earned media strategy. Then it is high time you should know about Earned media Vs. Paid media.

While coming to the media strategy, it all started with the word PESO is what everyone remembers. However, PESO stands for Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media. Until some time all these four things were essential in any media strategy.

As years passed the idea of the PESO in the media strategies also changed. The PESO idea has evolved gradually, and it looks as:

  • Paid marketing was primarily focusing on native advertising agencies.
  • Earned media marketing is just for publicity.
  • While coming, to Shared and Owned media both are major for nothing.

Digital marketing is a significant revolution in the present time, according to this, digital advertising agencies claim that social agencies lack the ideology of the brand perspective. Now the situation is like the social advertising agencies are ignoring to manage the long-term engagement. All these things are leading to the loss of opportunities for social media.

This article contains all the details only regarding Earned media Vs. Paid media.

What is earned and paid media?

Earned and paid media are the very important aspects everyone should remember in media marketing strategies. Below, we explain about earned media and paid media in brief.

Earned Media

Free media or Organic marketing is the other name of the Earned press; it even does the publicity of the brand makes the brand name visible in the marketing.

Word of mouth, buzz, reviews, comments, feedbacks, impression, news coverage, likes, shares, mentions, and all other promotional events that will increase the brand visibility, on the other way we can say that Earned media primary work is publicity gaining.

Earned media Vs paid media

Paid Media

This refers to the external marketing efforts that will involve a paid placement. The Key or the significant role here plays is the PPC native advertising, all the display ads and the branded content. If you want to grow your revenue and increase brand awareness in the market then Paid marketing is the best solution.

Paid media is somewhat very close to Traditional marketing. Paid media channel directly refers to the paid communication to impart the information to a wide range of audience. You get the paid publicity, attention and driving the whole traffic to your website by using the influencers, advertisements, and integrating brands.

Is SEO owned or earned media?

If you have a digital marketing strategy for your brand then combination on paid, owned, and earned in SEO will deliver you the best result. All these three things mutually rely upon each other and have to work together. With so many aspects to take care of in digital marketing, it is so typical that things will overlap on each other.

social media

While coming to SEO the significant part of SEO marketing involves on page effort. As, we know there are a lot of things that have to keep in mind like website content, tags, titles, keywords are very relevant. The owned media categorize this On-page SEO to optimize a page.

However, when we go for the off-page SEO. It emphasizes on the website and the positioning in the search rankings. If you want your company to be visible then should rank high at any cost.

Getting the higher ranking in the search engine involves organic searches, unpaid mentions from all those other credible sites. For accomplishing all these things earned media plays a major role.

Is PR earned media?

Earned media means publicity it gains the attention from the backlinks from reputable sites, word of mouth, online reviews, blogging, press focusing and influencers marketing. Having a third-party endorsement for your brand is essential.

PR or Public Relations media and earned media, as explained above, earned media means publicity and publicity involve connecting with the people and grabbing the attention. This at the end means PR or the public relation.

The number one secret of earned media marketing is to focus on other people. While the most important thing is building a reputation, and reaching people, this includes the most simple things like:

  • Connecting with the bloggers by appreciating them and by sharing the posts.
  • Give information about your business which will attract the audience to your customers.
  • Interact with the influencers in all the social media site so that they promote you.
  • Join groups related to your work and participate in the discussion.

By doing all these things your hard work will pay off. If you focus on the audience, it will improve your credibility, and thoughts process this is the peak and the highest point of good PR. Once the reputation is built in the market, you will be known to everyone and people will take to be as trustworthy businesspersons.

What brands have done paid and earned media well?

Brands that are using earned media or the earned media examples for the advertisement:

  • Share coke campaign where coke launched the cans customized with the names of the people on it last summer. It was a massive hit and people loved it a lot, this was a successful earned media campaign.
  • Dove soap a beauty product research about “The Truth of Beauty” this campaign received a significant response as the study showed that only 2% of the women though they are beautiful and the YouTube Video got 65million views.
  • Salesforce made a video on B2B earned media strategy for cloud computing. It just did nothing but simply explained cloud computing. However, this video got 1.6 million organic marketing views on YouTube.

Brands that have used paid media channel or examples of paid media for an advertisement:

  • Nike, the famous sports shoe brand, made a big stunt in the social media with its video. Nike now mastered the idea of the authenticity in product launching. The video “Nike- Dream crazy” became very famous and inspirational to all.
  • Dominos Pizza used Social media in a very fine way, it used a customized bot which allowed the users to enter the website and create their own pizza, later can name it and share on the social media site. Back in time, it used the PR technique in which the number of tweets will make your Pizza price so much cheaper. Recently this year September Domino’s used the Instagram very nicely to promote the brand.
Instagram AD

Source: Instagram Dominos

How to measure earned media value?

Earned media is what you get for your brand through Publicity. It involves some essential tactics which are mentioned below to measure the earned media value:

Impressions in the Online platform

Here, you measure the media using the digital marketing platform and the mentions you got from all your ads. This shows your targets, your audience and will accordingly help form the advertisement.

Once you get a certain group of people those who are following you regularly it is the best news that you will get because using these bunch of people you can increase your business and can reach more number of people.

It is like a whole cycle to influence commitment and achieve the engagements. It doesn’t take one thing into the foreground and the other into the background while keeping every impression in an equal place.

Resonating messages

If you have included your most desirable keys in your media coverage, then media resonating messages becomes very important to measure the earned media value. Select one or two succinct keys and regulate all the blogs, articles, that are present in your website to check all the keyphrase and the resonating messages present in the content.

Initially, this metric is useful for determining whether or not the media has understood the entire idea behind the launch of the critical resonating messages. While software is not yet reliable enough to deliver the desired result. Otherwise, the trained human analyst can easily identify all the resonating and key phrases in the content.

SOV or Share of Voice

A share of Voice compares the mentions in the internet media platform with the competitors. Suppose there are a total of 100 mentions of you and your competitors in a total and then your site is observed in 35 percent out of the whole then you share is 35%.

Whereas this necessary computation doesn’t reveal the readership publication data or if the impressions are positive or negative. Only if we dig deep into the data, then we will get the information regarding everything.

What is earned media and paid media strategy?

The earned media strategies and the paid media strategies are quite similar, like both the media platform requires the attention of the people and gain publicity.

Identify your objectives and set the targets

Know what is your goal and where you want to reach? Your aim of the business should be crystal clear and should be answerable to all the critical questions like are launching your website or brand in the public? Are your concentrating on just the products? Understanding your goal and underlying it accordingly is very crucial.

target reach

All these things involve a tremendous background work; the first thing is to know about is your target audience and the demographic area.

It is imperative because every person doesn’t like all the products and brands available make sure you know who are your audience like male or female, age groups suitable. This will help you increase your engagements in the business.

Distribute your ad in different channels

The first step here is to figure out what type of content does your audience like, and the customers link. Then frame a full advertisement accordingly which will interact with the people.

While posting it never and ever forget to post the ad in all the social media platform and, the online platform. Post on all those platforms where you think people stay active and all your focused audience also gather.

If you miss the social media platform, then you are going to lose a big chunk from your marketing aspects. Earned media definition means publicity and publicity mean reaching the people anyhow. Even Paid media channel also focuses on the Social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn so on.

influencers

Facebook has even recently said that it would promote the paid ads more than the organic. So concentrating on of the social media platform to get tremendous results. Here the trick is the influencers, these days if you promote your Advertisement or brand with the help of the Influencers then you can get a lot of increased results.

Check efforts

While you release the advertisement in the online platform remember to track the success rate. For both, the earned marketing which is organic marketing and the paid media channel which is bought both the things requires checking the growth rate. Some metrics would be some views, likes, shares, bounce rate, subscribers, unique visits to the site.

take feedback

All these things are critical to check the efforts while you are going through a media planning strategy.

CONCLUSION

Paid media Vs. Earned media both things are critical in digital marketing aspect. Both are equally very important for the native advertising and increasing the visibility in the online media. It is you who have to decide which one you are selecting for your marketing tactics.

While there are a lot of questions, people get in their mind while talking about the earned media vs paid media. If you are also confused and have some queries like this, then feel free to write to us. We will surely help you!

Varshita Muddana

Varshita works as Content Writer at Soft Script Solutions Pvt. Ltd. She writes about e-commerce, market trends, social media trends, and SEO. Her interests outside work are Exploring, Travelling, and Reading