What Is Earned Media?
It may seem that getting your business’s name out there organically is impossible. But when you break it down, it becomes much more achievable. Earned media is one of the ways your brand can get more reach. You may not know it but you are probably already cultivating earned media through your current social media posting strategy. In fact, you personally have probably participated in earned media before without realizing it.
What Is Earned Media?
Earned media is the organic coverage and promotion of your business or brand. Earned media is unique because you don’t have direct control over it as you do with owned or paid media. It can be the toughest kind of media to get but for that very reason, it is highly coveted. This is because consumers trust their friends and family, third-party review sites, and unpaid social media posts when they’re looking for product or service recommendations.
Examples of Earned Media
There are many different types of earned media, but all of them will need to build up over time. These are just a few examples you could start encouraging today.
- Reviews Sites: Honest and positive reviews from sites like Yelp and Google My Business are extremely effective pieces of earned media. Nearly 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a company’s website, making them an important part of the purchase decision.
- Media Coverage: The type of media coverage that counts as earned media is any time you receive media coverage without paying anyone for it. For example, a beauty company’s product might get mentioned in an online gift guide.
- Social Media Shoutouts: Social media shoutouts can happen in a variety of ways. First, a customer could have had such a great experience with your company that they felt they had to share it with their friends. Or maybe your product solved a customer’s persistent problem, so they knew they wanted to recommend it to others. As with all types of earned media, you can’t control who posts shoutouts or when, but you can certainly influence them with your online behavior. The more you share past shoutouts, the more it encourages others to do so in the future.
Tips to Get Earned Media for Your Business
Now that you’re familiar with different examples of earned media, we’ll give you some tips to help you increase the chances of gaining earned media.
Maintain Relationships Online
Whether you interact with other businesses, journalists, or influencers, you should maintain positive relationships with every person you interact with online. Even if they don’t need your services at the moment, they may think of you when someone else needs what you offer or when they need it in the future.
Create Great Content
A starting point for receiving earned media is creating content people want to engage with and share. Remember a share or a mention is a form of earned media. The most shared content online is entertaining or informative. Promotional content is good for getting more sales, but those posts are rarely shared. Make sure you have a good mix of both, so you are able to reap the unique benefits of both.
Expose Your Business on All Channels
You should try to reach as many people across as many different platforms as you can. For example, don’t rely on social media exclusively. You should also try methods like newsletters, TV commercials, and more. This will help reach different audiences who might not be active on social media.
Demonstrate Your Expertise
If your goal is to be named in publications, you need to showcase your authority in your industry. Make it clear why people should trust what you have to say about the industry. Some ways you can begin doing this is with blog posts and social media posts. Over time, you will become a go-to source for anybody interested in your industry.
Create an Earned Media Strategy
Earned media is something every business wants but doesn’t always know how to get. They may quickly become discouraged when they don’t see immediate results, leading them to abandon the strategy altogether. While the efforts above don’t guarantee that you will receive earned media, they definitely increase your chances. It is worth the effort to create an earned media strategy because it is some of the most influential coverage you can get.
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Have any questions?
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Can you help me grow Instagram followers?
We partner with Socialboost to help build Instagram followers. Click the link below to enroll. Plans start at $59/mo.
What photos or videos do you use?
By default, we can use the photos you have on your website as well as utilizing the plethora of photos available to us within our royalty free library.
If you have photos or videos for us to use, depending on your subscription, we welcome you to upload them into a Google Drive folder and share that link with us!
Looking for custom videos? Some of our plans include videos or you can add them to any plan starting at $98/mo!
How do you mimic my branding colors and style?
As mentioned above, depending on your plan, we can use whatever you’d like to provide us! If not, we’ll resort to using your website or our royalty free library.
That being said, we can come up with custom graphics that suit your branding style as an add-on to your posting subscription.
$98/month for 3 custom graphics each week
$148/month for 5 custom graphics each week
Note: The cost of custom graphics is on top of your monthly subscription cost
What is content review & approval?
Content review and approval is where your social media content creator sends you a weeks worth of posts, prior to their designated publication time the following week.
This way, you will have the chance to give us feedback on each post in case you’d like us to make a minor edit.
Note: One round of editing per post permitted, depending on your plan.
What are the results I can expect from your posting services?
The idea behind consistent posting onto your social media pages is to keep them active with content that promotes your business solutions, educates your audience to showcase your expertise and to also keep things lighthearted, it’s social media after all!
There’s nothing worse for a business than to earn someone looking into what you do, only for them to see a barren social media page. To them, it may appear that you are out of business or potentially a scam.
We are often asked about growing followers and generating sales or leads. These are great goals to have but please understand that those goals are better obtained through paid advertising campaigns.
For more information on paid advertising, please visit our paid advertising services.
Do you use a posting scheduler and how do you get access to my business pages?
We are fortunate to be partnered with CloudCampaign.com to utilize their excellent scheduling platform.
By signing up for our content services, we will set you up with your own Cloud Campaign workspace depending on your plan.
During onboarding we request admin access to your social accounts using a secure platform. This allows us to manage the occasional disconnect when the platforms push out updates.
Furthermore, with your own workspace you are welcome to view and edit content at your leisure!
Why do my posts say “Posted by Cloud Campaign”
We use Cloud Campaign, which is a 3rd party app, to scale social media management and posting. When a post says “Posted by Cloud Campaign”, it is only the admins of your company page that can see this and not your followers.