earned media

Invest in your own media

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When it comes to communicating your marketing message, there are three types of media channels you can use:

  1. Paid media
  2. Earned media
  3. Owned media 

The differences are simple. Paid media is paid advertising, such as paying for an ad in a newspaper. Earned media is when you get some free PR from a newspaper or TV news show about something that you’re doing. For example: getting some coverage from a press release about a new product you’ve launched. Owned media are media channels that you own, like your website or blog.

The big difference between paid and owned media is control. Yes, you control what ad copy you submit to the paper, but you don’t own the channel. You can’t control where the ad ends up in the paper. And you can’t control the distribution of the newspaper either.

You may want to consider investing more of your marketing resources into your owned media. That way, you have full control over the distribution, audience and message. What would be more effective for your business: Investing $200 in a print ad, or spending $200 to improve your website? How about spending $200 to start a blog or hire someone to write for you?

Your business can be a publisher. If you have great content to share with your audience, you don’t have to pay someone to distribute it. You can publish it with your own media.

And don’t forget earned media. Sending out a well written press release about a product or event that is newsworthy could help you reach a large audience for little to no cost.

Investing in paid media may be necessary for your business to reach your customers. But consider having content that shows ownership. An idea a former manager of mine had was with radio. Instead of just airing 30 second radio spots, he wanted to have a weekly 60 second radio show. It would be company-branded and focus on answering questions our customers had. So it was still paid media, but the content was uniquely ours. We just had to pay for the channel.

In my next blog post, we’ll look a little bit more into how focusing on digital and social channels that you own can help your business.

What do you think about these different types of media? What will you be focusing on for your business?