Owned Media Vs Earned Media - Understanding Content Marketing

Owned media is used for your long-term mar­ket­ing objectives. Earned media is used for your short-term mar­ket­ing purposes.

Marketing must have a sound approach to it, and you must first provide valid content to your customer base. Useful content that feeds your audience and helps answer questions they are asking or entertain them. You are not going to talk about cooking steak to a vegan.

What is content?

First content is not just to get links or shares or retweets …it is to provide something useful to your audience. Whether to make them laugh or make them cry or to answer a question or help them make a decision…IT IS TO HELP.

The function of content is

-       Goal identification

-       Audience research

-       Messaging and positioning

-       Channel research

-       Content creation

-       Campaign execution

-       Measuring results

Content is simply the vehicle that contains a anticipated marketing significance that is then conveyed via a channel to an audience.

The different types of content

In overall, there is owned media and earned media. (There is also paid media, but that mainly means to pay to get earned content placement on a website.)

• Owned media is content you publish on outlets you own (e.g., your website)
• Earned media is content other outlets freely give you (e.g., bylined articles and news coverage)

When should you use owned versus earned media? In other words: Say you create a great piece of content. When should you publish it on your website and when should you publish it somewhere else?

My feelings is only publish a portion else where and bring the user back to your site to finishing reading, watching, listening or digesting the rest of the content.

Why you should use owned media

1. You will own the content forever. If you publish, say, a blog post on your company website, then you will own and have access to that document for as long as you own your website. However, you have no guarantee of how long your content will remain on another website.
2. Your website can rank in the search engines. Why should another website receive the search benefits of your hard work? If I write an e-book that targets a keyword theme addressing informational queries, I want my website to rank for those search terms for the foreseeable future to generate top-of-the-funnel awareness.
3. It enhances brand building. The more you pub­lish (and promote), the more your brand authority will grow over time as the content gets traf­fic, news coverage, men­tions, and ­links. 

Why you should use earned media

1. You can use someone else's audience. A bylined article or news coverage about you on a website or publication read by 100,000 people provides invaluable exposure.
2. You can earn links.  you should not be submitting countless, short guest posts to random websites to get links. A targeted post on a respected website can gain numerous links for your brand. 
3. You can likely build brand awareness more quickly. Building a brand on your own can take a long time, especially if you are a new business or startup with few readers and social followers. At my prior agency, we got an unknown CEO interviewed or published in what the public relations industry refers to as "Tier 3 outlets." Then, we took those interviews to "Tier 2 outlets" as proof that he was an influencer worthy to quote or be published in their outlets. From there we went to "Tier 1 outlets" for coverage. This had a tremendous positive impact for the business overall. 

Owned media

• Is it an attempt to rank highly in search results for a certain keyword theme over time? An example would be an essay that addresses a pain point your target customers have, one they would attempt to address by searching Google. At my prior agency, I wrote a guide to international SEO a few years ago. Last I checked, the agency still ranked in the top four for searches relating to "international SEO strategy" because of that document.
• Is it part of your sales funnel? Perhaps the sidebar of your website includes a call-to-action to download an e-book. Of course, people would have to provide an e-mail address, and the e-book could contain links to product pages and sales representatives.

Earned media

• Is it meant to introduce and/or brand yourself to a targeted audience? A client at my prior agency was a mobile advertising network. We had gotten bylined opinion articles for the CEO on major websites that are all about mobile devices and Internet advertising. Over time, the CEO received more and more attention from larger and larger publications, which helped his personal brand and that of the company's as well. (This is the real reason for so-called guest posting.)
• Is it meant to generate more immediate sales and/or social media followers? If your company is in a B2B industry, for example, then LinkedIn is an obvious platform on which to publish. By posting on LinkedIn Pulse, you can get more followers of the author's profile (see an important thought below on company versus individual branding) business connections, leads, and thought leadership. 

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