What is earned media? 5 Tips for a successful earned media strategy

We’ve all participated in earned media. If you’ve ever posted about the shoes you just bought or retweeted a brand’s hilarious meme, that was earned media for the brand.

Of course, you don’t just randomly post about brands. Something has to happen to encourage you to share, like a product is high quality or a blog post is super informative, to push you to post. So, just because you can’t completely control the earned media you receive from audiences, you also can’t just sit back and get it without effort. Like most parts of marketing, it takes a lot of work to perfect your earned media strategy to boost your brand's reputation.

What is earned media?

Earned media is coverage or promotion of your brand through organic means. It’s a very effective form of content marketing and is also the toughest media type to get.

Credit: Codedeisgn

There are three types of media: earned, owned and paid.

Paid media is anything you paid for, such as a sponsored post in a magazine, a social media ad or an influencer’s post.

Owned media is content that you’ve created or distribution channels that you control. For example, a blog post on your website, a social media post from your account or a newsletter.

Earned media stands out from these two because it’s media that you don’t and can’t control. Examples of earned media include an Instagram mention when someone visits your shop, an unsolicited Yelp review and even a reshare of your blog post.

As you develop your earned media strategy, remember that it works best when integrated with robust owned channels that have demonstrable owned media value.

Why earned media is important for brands

Consumers trust friends and family for recommendations, online review sites and unpaid social media influencer posts. All of these are earned media and are influential in building your brand’s reputation.

Examples of earned media

There are several common types of earned media, and they all take time to build up. A lot of these are the natural result of community building and an effective press strategy.

Review sites

Earned media from review sites covers the feedback you receive from places like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google My Business. Honest and positive reviews are earned media gold.

According to a Brightlocal study on consumer behavior around reviews, 87% of them read online reviews for local businesses and only 48% would consider using a business with less than four stars.

It’s not enough to know how consumers engage with reviews, it’s also important to know what they do after reading them. After reading a positive review of a local business, 31% visit the business’ website and 28% continue to look for more reviews. The average consumer will read 10 reviews before they’re feeling ready to trust a business.

As you can see, reviews are important to a consumer’s purchase decision. An effective online review management strategy is needed if you want to stay on top of them.

Media coverage

You might be thinking that media coverage falls under paid media, which is true for certain types. Advertising spots or sponsored articles are media coverage that your brand pays for and controls.

The media coverage that counts as earned media is when you are mentioned or written about without paying anyone to do so. For example, your product is listed on a gift guide or your company did something newsworthy and it was covered on a TV segment.

This is where PR work comes in. You can certainly do outreach with press releases but it’s not up to you when or where coverage takes place.

Social media shoutouts

There are a few ways that social media shoutouts happen. The customer could’ve had such an amazing experience at your restaurant that they had to share about it. Or your product filled a consumer need and they want to recommend it to others. Or you posted something sensational on Instagram and it just had to be reshared to others.

You can’t control what people post on social media but you can definitely influence them. How your brand behaves, how good your product is and how interesting your content is are all things that you can control. The more you do these things on a consistent basis, the more likely you’ll receive social media shoutouts.

today's PSA 🗣 https://t.co/iklo4Hs7kv

— Red Bull (@redbull) September 29, 2021