Effective three-way media strategy

What is owned media?

Owned media is exactly what it sounds like, properties that you fully own and control. These properties include things like your website, mobile applications and email database. This includes methods of communicating with customers through these properties, such as website design, creative advertising, email marketing and SMS-based marketing.

What is paid media?

Paid media refers to selling your way to get the most exposure. For most startups, this includes things like paid ads (e.g. Google, Microsoft), paid social ads (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter), paid shopping lists and cross-site display ads or cross-programmatic ad networks. Internet.

What is earned media?

Earned media involves taking actions, other than paid advertising, that lead to the promotion of your business on third-party websites. This includes things like search engine optimization to get organic traffic, press releases that get picked up by other publishers, content marketing on your blog that gets indexed by search engines, affiliate marketing and social media outreach or influencer marketing that gets shared virally across networks. Social.

A comprehensive integrated approach that extends across all three media channels

If you're only sending your message through one of the three channels above, you're leaving a lot of potential growth opportunities out of the way. It's important for every campaign you run to include a strategy and budget for the three channels above, as the real marketing magic happens when running in sync across all three channels.

How to manage this

Large companies usually have departments of people who perform each of these required tasks. But in small businesses, they don't have that luxury. They often have to rely on agencies that can help them with each of the above needs.

However, in all cases, it is vital that you identify clear successful KPIs, and measure them faithfully. This could be by setting bottom-of-the-funnel goals such as leads, conversions or sales. Or it could be setting top-of-funnel goals such as brand awareness, brand intent or customer database growth.

Concluding comments

Hopefully many of you are doing a lot of this in your current marketing efforts. But, for those who don't, effective management of each of the three channels are basically today's prerequisites for setting up a successful marketing campaign.