In today’s digital landscape, marketers have countless strategies for promoting their brand and connecting with customers. However, when it comes to getting your message out there, three channels reign supreme: paid, owned, and earned media.
Understanding the differences between paid, owned, and earned media is crucial for developing an effective omni-channel marketing strategy. By leveraging the unique benefits of each, you can maximize brand exposure through a diverse mix of content and community engagement.
Paid Media: Buying Visibility
Paid media refers to any advertising channels where you pay to display or promote your content This includes
- Social media ads
- Pay-per-click ads
- Native advertising
- Print and TV ads
- Paid search ads
- Sponsorships
- Direct mail
With paid media, you have complete control over your messaging, placement, timing, and the audience who sees it The investment comes from the money and resources required to conceptualize, produce, and distribute ad content.
The major benefits of paid media include:
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Targeting – You can laser focus paid ads on your ideal buyer personas based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
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Scale – Paid ads allow you to reach a much larger audience than you could organically.
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Tracking – Detailed analytics provide insight on paid content performance and optimization opportunities.
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Speed – You can launch paid campaigns quickly to align with strategies and trends.
According to a Cision survey, marketers spend an average of 25% of their digital marketing budgets on paid media. That investment provides control over brand messaging delivered at scale.
Owned Media: Expanding Your Presence
Owned media encompasses all brand-created content distributed through properties you own and control. This includes:
- Your company website
- Blog
- Social media channels
- Email lists and newsletters
- Apps and tools
- Presentations and whitepapers
- Videos
- Podcasts
Since you own it, you have complete control over your content strategy, messaging, aesthetics, production, and distribution. But you also bear all the costs for creating and optimizing owned properties to attract and engage audiences.
Benefits of owned media include:
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Branding – Consistent visual identity and messaging communicated across properties.
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Authority – Position your brand as an industry leader with high-quality owned content.
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Audience access – Build direct relationships with audiences through owned platforms.
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SEO – Well-optimized owned content improves search visibility and organic reach.
Per Cision, marketers allocate around 32% of digital marketing budgets to fuel owned media initiatives. The investment pays dividends through expanded brand presence and audience engagement.
Earned Media: Capitalizing on Word-of-Mouth
Earned media refers to publicity gained through promotional efforts beyond your direct control. This includes:
- Word-of-mouth recommendations
- Social media shares and mentions
- Reviews and ratings
- Press and media coverage
- Influencer endorsements
- Industry awards and recognition
- Customer testimonials
You earn mediaCoverage comes organically from audiences and third parties, not paid placements. But you can influence what is said about your brand by providing shareworthy content, cultivating brand advocates, and pitching media.
Benefits of earned media include:
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Credibility – Third-party endorsements add trust and authority to your brand.
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Awareness – Earned media helps more people discover and learn about your brand.
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Reputation – Positive earned media improves brand image and sentiment.
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Cost – Media coverage and advocacy are free.
Per Cision’s survey, earned media receives around 24% of digital marketing spend as brands invest in assets and relationships that drive shares and engagement.
Combining Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
An effective marketing strategy requires a presence across paid, owned, and earned channels. Each complements the others to collectively enhance results.
Paid and owned media work together by:
- Driving traffic from paid ads to owned properties
- Using paid ads to promote new owned content
- Aligning messaging and visuals across paid and owned
Owned and earned media work together by:
- Providing owned platforms where audiences can engage
- Creating high-quality content that audiences want to share
- Monitoring owned media for social conversations to amplify
Paid and earned media work together by:
- Running paid ads to reach audiences beyond your organic reach
- Promoting and boosting positive earned media
- Using paid ads to access new earned opportunities
No single media channel is sufficient on its own. Paid media rapidly scales reach but lacks authenticity. Owned media establishes brand identity but requires resources to produce. Earned media drives credibility but can’t be controlled.
An integrated paid, owned, earned media strategy enables you to:
- Increase brand awareness through reach and discovery
- Engage audiences by offering value on owned platforms
- Influence audience opinions and preferences
- Drive conversions across the marketing funnel
Developing an Effective Media Mix
There is no perfect formula for allocating budget and resources across paid, owned, and earned media. Brands must test different mixes to determine optimal balance.
However, these best practices apply when developing an omni-channel strategy:
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Audit your current media presence and identify gaps.
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Set specific KPIs to measure success for each channel.
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Map owned, earned, and paid strategies to funnel stages.
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Test content across channels and analyze performance.
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Adapt budgets based on ROI but maintain diverse mix.
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Keep messaging consistent but creative tailored.
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Leverage influencers to expanded earned reach.
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Promote owned and earned assets through paid and vice versa.
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Stay on top of media consumption and platform algorithm changes.
Achieving an effective paid, owned, earned media mix requires constant optimization. But the payoff is reaching, engaging, and converting more customers across the marketing funnel.
Key Takeaways
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Paid media offers control over messaging through ad placements but requires ongoing investment.
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Owned media provides branding, authority, and audience access via brand-owned channels.
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Earned media brings credibility through third-party endorsements and advocacy.
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An integrated paid, owned, earned strategy maximizes awareness, engagement, and conversions.
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Test channel mixes and allocation based on performance data and KPIs.
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Consistent messaging and promotion across media types enhances impact.
In today’s crowded marketplace, brands must leverage paid, owned and earned media together to break through. By developing an omni-channel strategy combining their unique strengths, you can achieve greater brand exposure. The three media types work synergistically to reach, engage, and influence audiences across the marketing funnel.
Current definitions of paid, earned, and owned media
In short – paid media means the content distribution has been paid for, whereas earned and owned media are both free. Earned media, similar to traditional word of mouth is content about you shared by others, whereas owned media means the channels and platforms created and controlled by you. Read the full definitions below.
- Defining paid media is the most simple. Paid or bought media are media where there is investment to pay for visitors, reach or conversions through search, display ad networks or affiliate marketing.
- Offline traditional paid media like print and TV advertising and direct mail remain important accounting for a large share of paid media spend.
- Digital diffusion means we are seeing more and more opportunities for targeted digital paid media such as online streaming and in-app ads.
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- Traditionally, earned media has been the name given to publicity generated through PR invested in targeting influencers to increase awareness about a brand.
- Of course, it’s still an investment – whether time or money, or both. But this type of investment, when done well, has the most potential to instill customer trust through recommendations/advocacy.
- Earned media also includes word-of-mouth that can be stimulated through viral and social media marketing and includes conversations in social networks, blogs and other communities.
- It’s useful to think of earned media as developed through different types of partners such as publishers, bloggers and other influencers including customer advocates. Think of earned media as different forms of conversations occurring both online and offline.
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It’s a positive move since it poses questions about how best to measure the returns from social media and set the investment at the right level. Now, with ever increasing marketing budget cuts, businesses need to reevaluate the value of earned media in particular within their social strategy for meeting their objectives at a lower cost per acquisition.
These useful infographics demonstrate the growing number of platforms and engagement types marketers must consider when optimizing their earned media strategies.
Within engagement types, it is generally agreed that some engagement forms are more valuable than others. For example, shares/repins/retweets increase social value and advocacy which in turn expands your reach even further.
In some sectors, there may be a tendency to focus more on the typically higher-cost paid media or lower-cost earned and owned media, but we recommend a balanced approach will often work best for “always-on” media activities, while for campaign objectives you may choose to dial up a particular media/channel depending on your objectives. Core Module
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- This is media owned by the brand. Online this includes a company’s own websites, blogs, mobile apps or their social presence on Facebook, Linked In or Twitter. Offline owned media may include brochures or retails stores.
- It’s useful to think of a company’s own presence as media in the sense that they are an alternative investment to other media and they offer opportunities to promote products using similar ad or editorial formats to other media. It emphasizes the need for all organizations to become multi-channel publishers.
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- Each of the 3 media types offers todays digital marketer a plethora of approaches, and channels. As always, we recommend planning your goals and objectives before diving head-first into the world of media.
- As well as planning your own activity, setting clear digital marketing goals and objectives will help you get buy-in from colleagues and brief agencies better.
- Moreover, if you need to expand your paid media budget, you will need to have a clear justification to do so, and planning can help you produce the numbers to back this up.
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Paid, owned, earned Venn diagram
- As you can see, there is overlap between the three different types of media. It is important to note this since achieving this overlap requires the integration of campaigns, resources and infrastructure throughout your multichannel marketing strategy.
- A popular multichannel marketing tactic includes planning content on a content hub or site being broken down (atomized) and shared into other paid and earned media types.
- With the right budget, this activity could even be powered by APIs and widgets, taking the labour out of the task at hand. Clearly, multichannel marketing is key to unleashing the full power of your media content.
Earned media vs. paid media vs. owned media EXPLAINED
What’s the difference between paid and owned media?
As of January 2024, 62% of the world’s population uses social media. It’s fair to say that paid, earned, and owned media offer marketers a never-ending array of new opportunities to win and retain more customers. In short – paid media means the content distribution has been paid for, whereas earned and owned media are both free.
What is the difference between paid media and earned media?
Paid, earned and owned media have key distinctions and similarities that are important for marketing professionals to understand. Here are a few main differences between the three types: While each type of marketing comes with a price, the overall cost of each one may vary. Paid media costs change based on the type of marketing you buy.
What is owned media vs earned media?
Unlike earned media, owned media is created by your business. Owned media channels include things like your website, content marketing, organic social media posts, email marketing assets, and so forth. Earned media is not created by your business like owned media. Instead, it’s created by a third party, like a customer or journalist.
What is earned media?
Earned media is public exposure through word of mouth, customer reviews, social media mentions, or media coverage resulting from your content or services’ quality and relevancy. “Unlike paid and owned media, earned media originates organically outside the company,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
