Our Earned Digital Marketing Services
We offer the full range of marketing services because we believe a holistic approach to marketing is better for your business and your bottom line.
What is Earned Media Marketing?
Earned media is free marketing. This type of marketing is not something you produce internally or you pay for.
Earned Media Marketing Services
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As a digital agency this is what we can do for your earned media.
Just some of what we can do with Our Digital Marketing Services
Content
- We can seamlessly integrate all of your channels visual to increase conversions.
- Content is critical in conveying your important message to your customers and guests as it is to be visible on the web.
- Content is still ing when it comes to digital marketing services.
Innovative Experiences
- A website is more that what it appears to be. We make sure your website is mobile-friendly, has responsive web design. We want your website to look its best no matter what device someone is on.
- SEO is often misunderstood, we design a website with it's ability to be "searched" in mind. We use a technical SEO checklist to ensure your website is optimized for search.
Keywords
- We can write great content for your website that will implement a keyword strategy to raise your website's visibility.
- We will research and create a keyword strategy that is in-tune with your business objectives.
Link Building
- Backlinks are links to your website on other websites. These are an important factor in how search engines rank your page.
- We can identify your backlinks, those of your competitors and formulate a strategy to build your backlinks.
Improved Rankings
- We conduct keyword research to make sure you appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- We use on-page and off-page tactics to improve your relevance.
Content Strategy
- We can create a social media strategy and content calendar to help you leverage your presence online into meaningful returns.
- Creating winning content on social media doesn't have to be hard. We go beyond the hashtags to get you maximum visibility.
Are we the full service digital agency for you? Let's talk about your earned marketing needs
Talk to us today! Absolutely free, no high-pressured sales tactics.
How effective is earned media?
In short, very. Today’s consumers are influenced greatly by family, friends, and what they read and see online. People no longer share the good, the bad, and the ugly of brands exclusively at the water cooler — they share it with everyone they’re connected with online, which can include hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of people.
And a lot of those people listen and use those stories to make buying decisions. In fact, according to HubSpot Research, 57% of people in the U.S. trust what they hear from friends and family the most when they discover a new product. About one third of U.S. buyers prefer what information they can find from a Google search.
As digital marketing and social media continue to evolve, so will earned media — and departments other than public relations, like marketing and customer service, will become more responsible for capturing earned media attention.
To make sure you’re caught up on this “web 2.0” version of an old-school term, let’s dive into what earned media means today and the various ways you can use it in your marketing.
Earned Media Examples
You may have heard of earned media as compared with paid media and owned media. As we hinted to above, there are pretty thick lines between paid media, owned media, and earned media: You “pay” for paid media, you “own” owned media, and you “earn” earned media. To show you what this looks like in practice, here are some common examples of earned media today.
TV News Segment
If your business makes a big-enough splash in its industry, you can still expect to see earned media in the form of a 90-second news spot on a local (or national) station. This is some of the oldest earned media out there, and it still occurs today.
For example, a business that relocates its headquarters to a new city — and promotes that relocation online — might capture an interview opportunity with the city’s local news station about some of the new jobs it will be hiring for.
Newspaper Article
Newspapers, both in print and online, constantly share big community developments that impact people both locally and nationally. So, just like a story on TV about a new business development, local newspapers can just as easily pick this story up and write it down for online readers.
Tweet
Twitter might revolve around trending topics worldwide, but there are also countless smaller communities of Twitter users who broadcast their thoughts on issues related to their industry. A tweet, therefore, is a tiny instance of earned media. But it depends on whom the tweet comes from.
For example, if a business starts using new lead-generation software to help their marketing team, and an employee tweets, “Just started using @HubSpot and it’s helped us deliver amazing leads to our sales team!” We here at HubSpot might call that a positive dose of earned media.
Article on a Trade Publication
Smaller business developments might not earn the attention of major media conglomerates, but they very well could capture the interest of a trade publication focused on their industry. This, too, is earned media.
For example, an environmental business that creates a new method of composting might get overlooked by the evening news, but a magazine all about sustainability is likely to want to write an article about this innovative method for its niche audience.
Product Roundup
There are always content creators out there who are writing “roundup” articles, which list the best of a particular type of product for customers who seek high-quality items. If you build a product, and it’s good enough, getting included in somebody’s roundup is a form of earned media.
For example, a tent maker that develops a new one-person tent for a low price could wind up in an article called “The 10 Best One-Person Tents for Campers on a Budget.”
Organic Traffic
This example is a tricky one to define. Earned media usually comes in the form of content, either in written or video form. But if you create your own content, and “earn” traffic to this content from ranking highly on search engines, the traffic you receive to this content is, in some ways, earned media. But let’s be clear: There’s an important difference between SEO and organic traffic …
For example, if you write a blog post — a form of owned media — and conduct keyword research on this blog post to optimize it for Google Search, your blue linked result shown on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) is an “earned” ranking. This makes the traffic you get from people who click on this result earned media attention.
Customer Review
One of the biggest things to change in the world of earned media over the last decade is how customers express their feelings about a product they’ve used. Gone are the days where your clients’ opinions of you are limited to phone calls and dinner conversations. When people love or a hate a product, they make it known in writing via reviews on sites like Yelp, Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, Amazon, and more. Every review about you is earned media.
Word of Mouth
You might not think of “word of mouth” as an example of earned media, but today, it continues to be as free and impactful as a tweet or Yelp review.
Every time your business affects a customer, whether that effect is good or bad, you earn a place in day-to-day conversation. This means departments like marketing and customer service are just as critical to the tone of that conversation as the product itself.
For example, when a marketing team creates helpful or entertaining content for its audience, it’s making potential customers happy. When a customer service team solves a critical problem for someone, it’s making current customers happy. And the happier your customers, the more positive earned media you’ll get the next time they’re chatting with someone who’s looking to buy a product like yours.
Of course, the lines between earned and paid media can blur at times. Take viral videos, for example. A video doesn’t just go viral by accident — most of the time, there is a lot of careful planning involved to kick start the video’s exposure with paid media, and at some point the paid media stops once earned media picks up.
The lines can blur between earned and owned media, as well. A blog post you write featuring your own industry research, for example, could get picked up by other bloggers and media outlets. Similarly, a press release you write following a product launch serves to encourage others in the industry to share your news on other publications. So, while earned media isn’t always a direct result of owned media, owned media can help you get more attention from third parties.
The key to understanding the difference between the three is this: Unlike paid and owned media, earned media isn’t controlled by brands, which makes it less biased and more trusted.
How do you “earn” earned media?
Because earned media is owned by third parties, it may seem like it’s out of your hands — but that’s actually not true. Marketers have the tools to influence some (not all) conversations about their brands. Here are three of the best ways to do just that:
1. Create content worth sharing.
Get people to want to share your content with one another by … drum roll please … creating awesome content worth sharing! Shareable content tends to be either really useful or really funny, and in the form of a list, infographic, or video. There’s even a science to what makes content shareable. Also, make it easy for people to actually share your content by placing social share buttons where appropriate.
2. Invest plenty of time in interacting on social media.
Without social media, you and your potential customers are basically strangers. That’s the really cool thing about social media: It brings you so much closer to consumers. To have an impact on them and to encourage them to talk about your brand, you should spend plenty of time and energy interacting with them individually online.
Set up filters in your social monitoring tools to help monitor conversations about your brand, and jump in when you can add something to the conversations. Ask your followers questions about their daily lives or about their experiences with your brand. Give your biggest fans a shout out from your account. Your willingness to show people you care enough about them, about their experience, and about your own business to respond to their posts can elicit positive emotions about your brand, and those positive emotions are share-worthy.
3. Make your customers really, really happy.
All customers don’t automatically become brand promoters — you have to put the work in to not only meet their expectations, but exceed them. When you go above and beyond for your customers, you become a lovable brand. And when customers love you, they are more likely to give referrals, share good things about you on social media, give testimonials, and remain loyal to your brand for a long time.
According to research published by Oberlo, 54% of people on social media are researching products they’re interested in. Product sentiment can spread virally through social media sites like Facebook — and that positive vibes spread faster than negative ones. Create cool content, interact with people, and delight your customers — and you can bet they’ll spread the word.
Somewhere throughout your career you’ve probably heard the saying “content is king.” While this is true in some regards, it does not paint the entire picture. If you’ve been diligently crafting content for your website after taking this saying to heart and still wondering why you aren’t budging in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it may be time to rethink your earned media strategy and reassess how it fits into your overall marketing plan.
What is earned media?
Earned media is defined as any publicity or media that is not generated by your company or agents of your company, but rather by organic methods via customers, social media fans, journalists or bloggers. It’s any publicity that you have not commissioned or paid for, is created by a third party and is not published on a site that you own. Some examples of earned media are:
- Customer reviews and testimonials
- Mentions on any social media platforms
- Word-of-mouth recommendations both in person and digital
- Shares/retweets of your content or any content about your brand or business
- Blog posts about your business or product
- Magazine and newspaper articles
Image Credit: Titan SEO
What’s the value of earned media?
Gone are the days of people sharing the good, bad and the ugly of a business around the water cooler at work. The rise of social media and platforms like Yelp have made it possible for people around the world to voice their opinion about specific businesses or products to a huge audience, and that audience is listening. Consumers are researching products and services now more than ever, and this research has a significant influence on their buying decisions. A study by inPowered and Nielsen found the following:
- 85% of consumers regularly or occasionally seek trusted expert content—credible, third-party articles and reviews—when considering a purchase.
- 67% of consumers agree an endorsement from an unbiased expert makes them more likely to consider purchasing.
- 69% of consumers like to read product reviews written by trusted experts before making a purchase.
The above research highlights the importance of earned media and the perception and credibility of unbiased third-party content. Earned media’s value is worth its weight in gold. It’s by far the best kind of PR your business can receive and can mean the difference between a consumer buying from you or your competitor.
Earned media value through SEO
There are also secondary benefits of earned media in the form of SEO. Google loves fresh content. They’ve even told us when releasing their “Google Freshness Update,” which uses a “freshness” score to influence where you show up in the search engine results page. Earned media can be a great source of fresh, recurring content about your product or service. It can also help you earn higher quality backlinks (sites with high domain authority, page authority, page rank), which strengthens off-page SEO signals and can help you rank higher.
For example, let’s say your company is about to launch a new product. You write about the launch on your blog and share your blog post on social media where it’s shared and retweeted by your loyal fans. Not only is every share and retweet considered a piece of “fresh” earned media, but it also increases the chance that news of your launch will land in front of other bloggers, authors or journalists. If your launch is something that is of interest to them, they may themselves write about it on their blog or website and link back to you. If these new links are coming from sites that have a high DA and PA, it can work wonders on moving your website up in the SERPs.
The search engines can see when the article gets published, and once indexed, it can factor into how Bambu’s position in the SERPs is calculated.
Wait, can’t I Just pay for that?
The short answer here is no. While they do have some overlap, paid media and earned media are two separate entities. Like its name implies, paid media is media is defined as media that you’ve paid for. It can be anything from newspaper ads, sponsored tweets, an AdWords PPC campaign or a Facebook sponsored story. Paid media is a very effective catalyst to earned media, and should play a part in your overall convergent media marketing strategy.
Step-by-step earned media strategy
While every earned media strategy will vary from industry to industry, they all are similar in terms of the foundation of the strategy itself. Here are some steps to help you create a unique earned media strategy that is right for your business.
Clearly define your objectives.
What’s the goal of your strategy? Are you trying to gain exposure for a new product launch? Are you trying to drive traffic to your website? Figure out what it is you want to accomplish with your earned media push. Understanding the underlying goal can be extremely beneficial in hashing out the overall look and feel of the campaign and will allow you to better identify and measure your KPIs.
Identify your target demographic.
Before you say, “I want to target everyone,” really take some time to create your “buyer personas.” You want to narrow your demographic down to the type of people that your content is suited best for. It’s all about getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time. Every piece of content you produce will resonate differently between groups of individuals. Understanding who those individuals are makes for successful campaigns in comparison to those who are targeting to the masses.
Figure out what types of content your audience wants to see.
Now that you’ve identified your target demographic, you need to figure out what types of content they want to consume. This can easily be achieved by figuring out what 3rd-party media sites your demographic visits, and analyzing top-performing content on them. You can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to identify top-performing content based on specific topics or keywords. Use your research to craft content that bridges the gap between what you do and what your audience cares about.
Form a solid distribution strategy.
There are countless amazing pieces of content on the Web that no one reads. This usually happens due to the lack of a distribution strategy. Every business already has an effective but seldom used distribution network: their employees. Earned media and employee advocacy programs go hand in hand. Cumulatively, your employees have a larger digital footprint than your business alone, so why not use them to your advantage? Your employees are a low cost distribution network, and by utilizing an employee advocacy platform like Bambu, you can effectively push new content to staff members who can easily re-share with their own social media networks. Involving your employees is one of the most cost-effective ways to distribute your content. The money saved by utilizing your employees can then be appropriated into your paid media strategy through Facebook ads, sponsored tweets, or promoted stories.
In addition to your employees, you should also utilize influencers to spread your message. Influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing and most effective online acquisition channel. It’s been found that 92% of consumers turn to people they know for referrals above any other source. Identify the major influencers in your industry and utilize them to help get your content in front of a large, targeted audience who trusts and takes advice from them on products or services that they vouch for.
Measure your efforts.
Tracking success with earned media can sometimes be difficult depending on the goals you set in step one. A few metrics you could be tracking are: number of mentions in relation to a specific piece of content, number of backlinks gained, the number of unique visits to promoted content vs. non-promoted content or number of social shares. Measuring your efforts will allow you to gauge the success of your efforts and allow you to fine tune your strategy<./li>
Methods of acquiring earned media
Now that you have a solid grasp of what your strategy should look like, we wanted to tell you about straightforward methods of acquiring earned media.
Reach out to reporters or journalists.
Previously, finding the contact information of individual reporters at different media sources could prove elusive. Luckily, services like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) exist for the sole purpose of connecting the journalists with sources. Another great method to identify journalists is through a simple Twitter search. Tag journalists on your tweets while using hashtags like #PRRequest or #JournoRequest to find hidden opportunities. Keep your requests short and to the point. Provide them with a summary content brief and why you think it would be beneficial for them to write about it.
Incorporate industry influencers in your content.
Identify various influencers in your industry that you’d like to showcase on your site. Reach out to each one with a personalized message asking them for for a quick interview or comment. Weave their responses into the content you’re promoting and feature it prominently on your site. This helps promote the influencer as an industry expert while boosting consumer trust of your product or service that would otherwise not be there.
Do something newsworthy.
Bloggers and press alike love writing about newsworthy items. Support a noble cause or hold a fundraiser for a charity. These kinds of feel-good stories are frequently picked up by agents of the press and can be a significant driver of brand exposure both online and off.
Be the expert.
The business world tends to be a very dynamic environment. Whether it’s technology, methodology or best practices, industries change all the time. Position yourself as an expert and offer insight into various topics in your industry. Although this is an easy method to acquire earned media, it’s important to be consistent with your efforts. You probably won’t be considered an “expert” right out of the gate. Good things come to those who wait, so keep at it, and people will eventually start to notice.
Use social media.
Although posting content on your social profiles falls under “owned media,” it can play a pivotal part to help you gain earned media. Identify and share content that is of value to your audience and they will happily share that content on their own networks. This is also true for your employees!. Utilizing your own social media presence as well as your employees can be a quick and effective method of not only distributing your content, but can also help facilitate the acquisition of future earned media opportunities.
As with any PR, you want the story to show you and your business in a positive light. Always craft your content to be light, informational and positive, as that type of content performs better. Earned media should be used in conjunction with owned and paid media to form a comprehensive convergent marketing strategy. All three types of media work together to form a symbiotic relationship that, if implemented correctly, can have a tremendous impact on your overall marketing goals and ultimately your bottom line.
What’s your strategy for acquiring earned media? Do you have a specific earned media strategy that has been particularly successful? Let us know what you think in the comments below!