Earned Media

What is Earned Media?

And How Does Earned Media Fit into the Three Media Types in Online Marketing?

In online marketing, especially in the Social Web, there are three different media types: owned media, paid media and earned media. They all aim to reach their target groups and together form an essential part of the online marketing strategy that companies are always pursuing.

Owned media is the used term to describe the company’s communication channels, i.e., those that belong to the company, such as its an Instagram account or website. Paid media includes paid advertising for the most part. These can include display ads, paid influencers, and or social media ads. These two types of media are quite easy to control and monitor, but their credibility is moderate to low.

The Earned Media, however, are neither one’s channels nor can they be bought or paid for. One must literally “earn” this type of media since here users voluntarily spread the reach of a company, this could be, for example in the form of customer reviews of a product, in Amazon, or a discussion in a forum about a company or a product. Also, an article or a mention in a third-party blog. All this can be assigned to Earned Media. This type of marketing not only conveys a positive image of the company, but it also increases its visibility enormously. (Besides this communication channel is very trustworthy) There is, however, a challenge with this method: One has little to non-control over Earned Media, meaning that also negative messages and comments are possible. On the other hand, this method could be just as expensive as Owned or Paid Media, since good content and SEO optimizations require a lot of time and expertise.

The Importance of Earned Media for Companies

As Well as Its Relation to Online Shops Such as Amazon

Earned media play an essential role for companies because of its positive characteristics and should be part of the online marketing strategy. First, one must create value for the user to share the content of the voluntarily. For example, valuable content could be delivered in the form of a funny and or a fantastic video on your website, which is so good, that goes viral on social platforms. If a video or other media goes viral, this will increase enormously the company’s exposure.

On the other hand, the search engine optimization of one or more products and websites also creates added value for the user. Through targeted campaigns, content becomes attractive for the Internet user, making him or her share the content on his or her initiative. The search engine, by turn, recognizes that certain contents/products are often accessed and thus enhances the ranking. On platforms such as Amazon, the seller rank can also be enormously improved, leading in the process to more sales.

On Amazon, there is also something like Earned Media, which is customer product reviews. Reviews help other customers with the buying process, and with positive ratings, the company image improves. Particularly the “Customer Questions & Answers” section, since it acts as a forum for the exchange of customers among each other or between customer and company, here, too, the content of the company is shared voluntarily.

So, this is precisely where the Amazon SEO agency Intomarkets comes into play. As marketing experts, we prepare your products for Amazon in such an optimal way, that they offer added value to the user while being systematically optimized, increasing the product sales exponentially.  You can find more information about Amazon Optimization here: https://www.intomarkets.com/amazon-optimization/