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What is earned media?
When we talk about Earned Media, we refer to those that have been achieved thanks to the behavior of the brand, i.e., as a result of the efforts and resources dedicated to owned and paid media, which are media or channels that do not involve the effective payment of the same. They are not owned by the brand but help to achieve its objectives.
They are closely related to good practices in public relations, communication and marketing, users or customers become a brand’s own channel, creating content, communicating and sharing it without incurring additional costs.
Types of earned media
In general, we can find those derived from public relations work, social media and SEO:
- User’s post.
- Tweets.
- User reviews of your products.
- Photos, videos and other multimedia material that gives visibility to your brand.
- Comments and references in forums or user communities.
- Comments, likes , retweets, favorites, pins, shares or shared content, +1 etc. on social channels as a result of your marketing, social or communication actions.
- Posts from influential people in your community or influencers.
- Links to branded content.
- The external viralization of own content, in short, the traditional word of mouth.
Objective of earned media
They do not have a specific objective, as they do not depend on us, although the idea is that with our investment and development of our own means and even paid ones, motivate users to perform these actions in their social networks, platforms and digital media, leading to increased awareness, reputation and achievement of objectives, reducing investment in paid media.
The aim is to achieve much greater credibility, as an external source, and to achieve benefits in addition to those generated by our own resources or those paid for.
Advantages of earned media
These are free media, generated by the good work of our communication and sales strategy. In addition, as mentioned above, as they come from independent agents, they bring greater credibility, trust for third parties and a reinforced image and reputation for the brand.
Earned media has the potential to go viral, providing a scalable benefit and impacting the improvement of sales, visits, or other conversion goals in a positive and free way.
Disadvantages of earned media
The main stumbling block is that since they are alien to us, they are not controllable. They are beyond our ability to act and can sometimes become counterproductive or harmful if they are not well interpreted or used to damage the brand image by third parties.
Today we have many social listening tools, but sometimes it is difficult to measure the impact of earned media, as they are generated on different platforms and formats, which makes them unmanageable in their globality for analysis.
The optimal online marketing strategy will be the one that combines earned, owned and paid media and achieves a positive convergence of results. They feed back on each other, since a good work through own media, together with a good use of paid media, leads to the creation of earned media which will generate resources for the previous ones.
