To have a real impact in business today, your brand needs to generate a variety of earned media, which consumers find to be more trustworthy and authentic. If you just rely on ad messaging, you may get plenty of visibility, but next to no credibility.
Understanding Earned Media in the Digital Landscape
To leverage the power of earned media, it is important to understand what earned media means in the digital world. This is content that you get from third parties, the nature of which may be beyond your control.
Some common earned media examples include user-generated content, guest posts on other websites, reviews from users, mentions in the media, and word-of-mouth marketing.
Strategies to Maximize Earned Media Impact
An important aspect of earned media strategy is to leverage its power in your marketing and PR efforts to amplify that content, which can help you reach a broader customer base and build authentic brand awareness.
Here are some key ways you can maximize the impact of earned media:
- One key focus should be building long-term relationships with journalists and influencers. These valuable relationships can help you get consistent coverage. An AI Assistant can streamline the process of monitoring earned media impact by analyzing trends, identifying key influencers, and automating media outreach for enhanced brand visibility.
- In order to get proper engagement and increase the shareability of content, it is advisable to make it visually interesting. You can use eye-catching illustrations, photos, video and 3D design.
- It is also important that you practice SEO and optimize your posts for search returns.
- Building strong customer relationships fosters positive brand reviews and stories. You can find these on different platforms like Google Business Pages and Help.
- Leveraging the power of influencer marketing can also be beneficial. 8 in 10 marketers believe that influencer marketing can help the growth of their business.
Integrating Earned Media with Your Overall Marketing Strategy
Some of the key benefits of integrating earned media with marketing strategy include:
- Earned media can play an important role in raising brand awareness as it goes beyond ad messaging to bring attention more authentically.
- Earned media examples like positive reviews can be one of the best ways for increasing traffic and conversions.
- Earned media is social proof for your business, establishing consumer trust. This social proof should be a key goal of your business’ content strategy.
- Earned media is a free form of marketing. Even if you spend, it will be less than paid media or organic media.
- Word of mouth marketing from influencers and customers can help to foster conversations, and 36% say it is one of the main sources of discovery.
- To enhance visibility for mobile applications, integrating app store optimization tools can be beneficial.
Challenges in Earned Media
Earned media has its own set of challenges—the main one being that your team has no real control of the tone of content generated. Often, the content is not interesting enough to drive engagement, and negative reviews steer consumers away. Also, it can be challenging to get reporters and influencers to write about your brand or product—getting coverage requires skills that are learned over time and practice. A sharp PR team or agency is essential to tackling these challenges.
Conclusion
Earned media plays an important role in today’s digital world where credibility and trust are so important. Consumers are wary of paid media, so authentic articles and reviews go a long way in building that trust. Encourage your customers to share reviews about your business. This can help create a positive image about your business.
