Case Overview

If you are into marketing, you must have caught the buzz around paid, owned and earned media. If you are not, and wondering what the fuss is about, stick with us and you will know everything about them. Think of them as three pillars of digital marketing – that contribute to the complete digital marketing strategy. It is important to note that the three are not completely disjoint, and there are some overlaps between the three. It is therefore useful to understand the difference and how to measure your efforts in each one and come to understand how they affect each other.

Paid Media

Paid media is as the name suggests – any marketing that has been paid for. For offline marketing, this would include TV advertisements, Print Ads, Radio Spots and OOH among multiple others.

For digital marketing, there are a few variations:

a. Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads

b. Search engine Ads

c. Promoted Content on Social Media

Owned Media

Owned media, as the name suggests is the content created by a brand and published through a channel owned by the business. This includes the website, blogs, ebooks and white papers. Podcasts are a newer medium of owned media. Brand owned social pages also come under owned media.

Owned media is focused on content driven marketing, and SEO is the primary focus of owned media.

Earned Media

Earned media is the content and conversations generated by third party around your brand and products. These content is generally published on third party platforms e.g. a news channel talking about how your brand donated $s to the government emergency fund for Covid. Generally, earned media is driven by your paid and owned media marketing efforts, and the activity is picked up by some news website, blogger or a journalist. Product reviews, social media mentions and press coverage are included under earned media.

Of all the three, earned media is most impactful, as it is generated by people who talk about you – and have their own sphere of influence and trust. It is therefore better placed to generate organic reach for a brand. Just imagine a potential buyer of a smart phone looking at product review websites, and reading positive feedback of your product OR someone asking his friend for a suggestion on best phone to buy, and he/she recommends your brand.

When planning a marketing strategy (primarily Digital), it is important to understand the role of paid media, owned media and earned media in the marketing mix. And as with any investment, your marketing mix effectiveness should be able to measure the return on investment (RoI) from each – to optimize the future media strategy.

Write to us if you want to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in terms of paid media, owned media and earned media.

Xtage Labs is an advanced analytics and machine learning based decision insights company. We work with businesses to derive insights from data, and improve the decision making processes. Get in touch with us to find out what we can do for you.