What is Earned Media and How it Can Help Your Brand?

Marketers across the globe rely on their audience’s reaction to set the future marketing road plan for the company. Some brands may stick to traditional paid advertising, while others might explore the organic path. One of the most sought-after ways to connect with your potential customers without spending a dollar is through earned media. But, what is earned media?

If you wonder what is earned media — it is the coverage of you or your business done by a third party, including influencers and media publications. According to reports, 83% of the customers tend to go by digital word-of-mouth for a brand instead of direct advertisers. This makes it essential for businesses to leverage the power of earned media and use it to their advantage.

One of the distinguishing features of earned media is that it is an unpaid channel. This helps to establish a closer connection with your audience and gain popularity in an organic way. To understand what is earned media in a nutshell, consider your customers to be the marketing channel.

More often than not, there comes a time when paid media tends to saturate. Pushed advertisements can drive your customers away and make them unresponsive. On the contrary, earned media is based on the engagement level of the clients with the brand. This is one of the reasons it continues to grow with time.

What is Earned Media and Its Advantages?

Synonymous to terms including viral, buzz, or word of mouth — earned media helps measure the publicity of your product. It is immensely efficient in tracking how the customers love your brand and taps into organic promotions.

To ultimately unveil what is earned media and how it can help your business, you must identify the impact of public relations on your company. Branding efforts also boost your earned media segment and help in strengthening it further. To simplify it — any article, piece of news, review, and feedback on your brand add to your earned media.

The channel also effectively builds credibility around your business and attracts prospects with ease. Many a time, earned media is weaved into and considered a part of the customer journey. This is mainly because you have no role to play on what content goes on the Internet by your consumers. Thus, you must always strive to make it a perfect experience for them!

Owing to its popularity in recent times, earned media has many advantages over other channels. Let’s explore them!

Improved Return-On-Investment

Earned media demands relationship-building unlike paid media, where you are required to invest huge sums of money. Your brand’s online presence is primarily based on your rapport with the journalists and influencers. The more you connect with your customers, the better they talk about your brand.

Must read: Influencer Outreach: The Ultimate Guide in 2021

By simply making an effort to cater to your clients’ needs, you are rewarded with increased sales and revenues. Interesting, isn’t it?

Effective Brand Recall

While exploring what is earned media, it is essential to discover how significantly it affects your online popularity. When a lot of people talk about your business, it helps in getting an improved brand recall. Your customers remember you well and trust your services.

Source: socialmediatoday.com

​​Earned media enables you to build a firm reputation in the industry. It is also an opportunity to display your brand values and be known for them.

Makes Your Brand Reliable

Public relations activities, including interviews, podcasts, and guest blogging, make you a thought leader in your domain. This powers your business to appear more reliable and trustworthy. People believe in your product and are convinced that you know your job well!

Types of Earned Media

Since now you are well aware of what is earned media and how it can help you, let’s dig deep into its types.

#1 News Coverage & PR Mentions

In this type of earned media, a journalist usually mentions your brand either in different social media stories or includes you in their full-blown blogs and articles.

There are a lot of channels where you can actually find press mentions and new coverages. These primarily include magazines, TV channels, radios, and much more.

#2 Interviews

A newspaper, trade publication, blog, podcast, or any similar type of high-impact media generally interviews internal stakeholders within a company to share information. This data can be about any specific product or any latest brand development that reaches their audience.

Since a specific neutral party conducts all these interviews, they intend to be non-promotional, i.e., earned media. Interviews are a reliable source of information, and so they can attract a lot of potential customers towards your brand.

#3 Product Reviews and Feedback

The internet is a vast space for everyone to share their personal experiences and reviews about any product or brand. A journalist, a blogger, and a customer can quickly mention your social media handles and share their product reviews.

A positive review calls for appreciation, whereas a negative one derives improvement. While thinking of what is earned media, product reviews and feedback can be considered perfect examples for the same.

For instance, a blogger either mentions your brand in their blog or records a video about your product. This is how you can actually get to know what is earned media.

People share their experiences and feedback after shopping with your brand. This way, your company can gain immense popularity and easily increase its brand visibility.

#4 Influencer Shoutouts

Social media channels have become a valuable medium to conveniently connect people from various parts of the world. Various people have become social media influencers who have a huge amount of audience following them.

You might think, what is earned media in real terms? It is a type of media where people take genuine initiatives to appreciate your brand — similar to influencer shoutouts.

If you provide these people with better service, your brand can get more customers since they usually mention their day-to-day activities in their stories. This is not typical influencer marketing but a unique and efficient way through which your brand can earn media.

The way these influencers mention your brand in their social media stories, it can be called influencer shoutouts without any affiliation. Its effectiveness highly depends on the effect that a certain influencer has on its community.

#5 Organic and Direct Traffic

Your website is solely a paid media through which your company attracts customers, but you need to “earn” organic traffic to increase the reach of your business.

When people find your content highly valuable-your site ranking improves on search engines, increasing the reliability of your brand. Direct traffic is an outcome of how well aware are people of your brand.

Source: tintup.com

It is when people especially put in efforts to find your website and buy a product since they really trust your brand. You will automatically attract people to buy your products if you make them valuable and worth purchasing. This is how your company can actually experience what is earned media and derive qualitative and direct traffic to your brand.

#6 Brand Synonymity

To explore what is earned media, brand synonymity is a perfect example since it is the true pinnacle of earned media. When people start using your brand name in place of some white label solutions, consider your business value to have reached its peak.

People can use brand names to define a core process just as Xerox is referred for getting a photocopy. Another example is asking people to Google it when searching for something.

Mainly pioneering businesses, that are first in their line, can achieve brand synonymity. As and when the industry becomes more exposed to new players, it gets challenging to find a spot for yourself like this.

How Can Mentionlytics Help in Boosting Your Earned Media?

Tracking your brand’s presence in the online world is vital for growing it further. From keeping up with your social mentions to finding out what the media is saying about you — you must be on top of it all. This is precisely where Mentionlytics can help you!

A trusted social media monitoring tool, Mentionlytics is an efficient platform for analyzing your earned media. We also help you better track the press feedback and notify wherever someone mentions your brand.

You can thank your fans and address the issues raised by people while giving reviews of your product or services. With Mentionlytics, you never miss catering to your customer’s needs and requirements.

In your journey of understanding what is earned media and effectively using it for growing your business, we assist you in joining conversations about your brand online.

Additionally, we also help spot the top influencers who vouch for your brand and all those who mention you over the Internet. Whether it is the worldwide search, automated email notifications, or effective sentiment analysis — Mentionlytics covers you in all aspects!

Connect with us and get your free trial today!

We hope you find this post helpful and valuable. Stay tuned to our website for more such content!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/brand-earned-media