PR teams often use three significant types of media coverage to reach their target audience and connect with them. These media coverage are owned media, paid media and earned media.
Owned media refers to the brand creating content and publishing it by themselves. Paid media refers to other types of media coverage, such as ads, that they have to pay before running it. Lastly, earned media refers to other media coverage that is unpaid. It is primarily content that other people create and publish about your brand.
The most crucial step to getting media attention and putting your brand name on people’s lips is to use owned media and paid media. These strategies open you up to the media world. However, earned media strategy ensures that your brand is experiencing fast and positive growth.
In many cases, marketers tend to make the mistake of overlooking earned media. Some marketers think it’s not in their hands, so they disregard it and rule it off their marketing plans. Bandwidth is a problem for small businesses and is why they may struggle to maximize the potentials of earned media. While these situations are understandable, they cause the company or brand to lose massive opportunities to connect with their audience and get valuable feedback. In addition, it may hinder the brand’s effort to create awareness.
You must never underestimate how vital earned media is.
Why you should invest in earned media
Word-of-mouth recommendation is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness. If you have a service or product that is as excellent as you claim it is, then people are going to pick it up quickly and will be willing to recommend it to other people. So, if you can get your audience to talk, other people will jump on your product or service much quicker.
People trust earned media. According to a report, 83% of consumers trust other people’s recommendations than content or ads by advertisers.
Additionally, there’s so much for you to learn from what people say about your brand, product, or service. Tracking these feedbacks will help you understand the general sentiment towards your brand, and you will be able to make informed decisions and adjust your strategy accordingly.
How to successfully create earned media
There are several steps to take to create earned media for your brand:
1. Set goals
An excellent place to start is your brand goals and how you can use PR to achieve them. This determines your target audience and the outlets or influencers you must connect with to reach your audience successfully.
2. Define value
You must determine how valuable earned media is for your brand before you can effectively monitor and track your efforts.
3. Make a plan
A crucial part of your earned media plan is to build relationships to help you connect with the right individuals and organizations. To achieve this, you have to try different methods, and some of these are:
- Tagging relevant handles on social media, asking the right questions, and having a social presence on the right social platforms. In addition, use relevant hashtags on your social media posts.
- Create high-quality pitches. Make sure your pitch is value-driven for outlets or reporters you’re reaching to. Let them see how the content you are sending to them benefits them.
- Engage journalists respectively on social media, and be sure to follow producers and reports in your industry that you may be willing to pitch to.
- Networking is an effective strategy that you can use to create earned media, apart from pitching.
If you want people to mention your brand and be known in places you haven’t reached, you must learn to develop relationships. Also, you must ensure that your social media presence is in line with your brand and your earned media strategy.
4. Put plans into action.
After all the efforts that you have put into planning, this is the point where you start to act on them, and you begin by initiating conversations.
People are going to start talking about your brand sooner or later. When this happens, you must ensure that you don’t lose that momentum. So you must learn to use social platforms to connect with organizations and individuals to amplify your earned media. You must never be afraid to blow your trumpet. No one is going to do it for you if you don’t do it yourself. What’s important is that you get a good rhythm. As much as you create posts championing your cause, offset it with other selfless posts to keep your audience glued to the journey.
5. Track your earned media
You must track the earned media that your brand is getting. This helps you keep up with the conversations about you, and the only way to do this is to invest in a tool or software that allows you to monitor conversations and mentions. For example, you can invest in a cloud-based monitoring platform that monitors all media types online, social, print, and broadcast media. This will ensure you’re efficient in tracking your media coverage.
Conclusion
Earned media is more important for your brand than you give it credit for. Unfortunately, many marketers tend to overlook this type of media coverage, which is astonishing because of its effectiveness. Your business can grow tremendously with earned media, and you don’t have to pay to promote it. Having to pitch your brand may be a little intimidating, but this is a skill that you must learn because it will come in handy at different points in your career.
Author Bio
Sherri Carrier is a professional content writer with previous experience providing dissertation assistance for BrillAsignment and Proessaywriting. She is also an active member of several writing clubs in New York. She has written several songs since he was a child. She gets inspiration from the live concerts he does in front of close friends and family members.
