It’s important to develop an owned media strategy for all your internet-controlled media. This is especially crucial if you want to connect with your target audience as well as grow your audience. Owned media is critical for establishing a brand and attracting new customers. Your owned media should be combined with earned and paid content to enhance engagement and revenue creation to form a media strategy.
What is owned media?
All the content that your company is responsible for creating and maintaining is considered owned media. A brand’s digital owned media used to be mainly on the company’s website and little more. There are now many more elements to owned media on the modern internet. For starters, email campaigns are now a common way to stay in touch with clients or to locate new clients by collecting email addresses via opt-in boxes in advertising funnels. Most businesses now also have social media accounts, and some even have video channels. All of these different social media accounts are considered owned media.
To optimize its ability to grab the attention of potential customers, a corporation should establish a diversified portfolio of owned media. Whatever owned media routes your firm chooses, they all must fit into a more prominent branding and marketing strategy. You can change the tone and style depending on the platform and audience. However, to get the most out of your brand’s owned media, all activities you undertake across your different platforms must be conscious components of your overall plan.
The following are examples of popular forms of owned media:
1) Websites
Since it is frequently the first thing potential customers see from you, your company’s website is the most significant aspect of your owned media. A well-designed webpage will supply your visitors with any information they may require from your business. The specific details will vary depending on the type of business you operate. For example, if you have a retail brand, your website should have an online store to enable online sales. In contrast, a contractor’s site may simply contain pages showing the various services available, client reviews, and information on scheduling a consultation. Regardless of your industry, the purpose of your website should be to increase income by delivering everything a visitor requires.
2) Social media
One of the most rapidly growing marketing fields is social media marketing. Brands with social media accounts are nearly as popular as companies with websites these days. For this reason, you should take advantage of this chance to create compelling content and expand your brand. The content you upload should be consistent with your company’s branding and identity, just as is the case with your website.
3) Media channels
Using other media platforms is another option to broaden your brand’s reach, helping you to attract new clients and strengthen your relationship with existing clients. Using a video is one of the most common ways to build a media presence. You can use your channel to broadcast videos marketing your company with the possibility of monetizing the videos. If you establish a large enough following, these videos serve as direct marketing and can help with search engine optimization. Podcasts are another popular avenue that organizations may use to tell their narrative and cultivate a larger, more loyal audience. Nevertheless, you need to apply the podcast format strategically depending on the industry.
4) Email lists
To boost engagement with potential clients, you can employ numerous mailing lists. If you’re using marketing funnels to attract customers, opt-in requirements can help you collect email addresses. These leads can be added to a separate list for potential clients, in addition to a list for existing clients. Your firm can develop a set of emails geared to optimize engagement with prospective clients. You can set it up to automatically trigger for everyone who opts in with their email address by integrating email lists with an automated mailing system.
5) Newsletters
Although print media is losing favor, several businesses still send out tangible newsletters to their customers. Like an email list, a newsletter allows a company to deliver communications to clients while maintaining complete control over content messaging.
Advantages of owned media
The advantage of having your owned media is that you have complete control over it. Since you are in charge of all content on your owned media, you also have complete control over the message that you deliver at no extra cost.
Paid media also gives you control over the message you’re sending out, and earned media is free. Only your owned media gives you both of those benefits.
It’s critical to have a unified branding and marketing plan for your business. Your owned media is at the heart of any successful strategy because of your capacity to adjust it to match whatever you need to reach your objectives.
Generating traffic to owned media
While our primary focus in this article is on owned media, this is just one of three types of media that your company can use. A well-executed marketing strategy should use other media to help increase traffic to your owned media accounts. This can be done in various ways:
- Paid media includes any platform that requires money to get your content in front of potential clients. Digital advertising, most typically on social media sites, is the most common paid medium in modern marketing. Designing engaging videos that attract a viewer’s attention and stop them from scrolling is the most popular way to advertise on social media. You can use paid media to boost brand awareness and drive traffic to your owned media to provide further information to potential customers. This is effective when combined with adverts that link directly to sales pitches.
- Earned media occurs when your company is promoted or mentioned in media that you do not control or pay for. It can take on many different forms, including social media posts, news coverage, and even recommendations from friends. Although earned media rarely links directly to sales pages, it is common for whoever is sharing the content about you to include links to your website or social media account. Gaining earned media in the form of relevant shares and reposts is the primary goal of developing an active presence on social media. The more consumers talk about your company, the more attention will be drawn to your owned media where you have complete control over the message.
You can get the most out of all three if you use your paid and earned media in tandem with your owned media.
How to combine media formats into one strategy
Let us now combine all three media types to create an overall strategy that works for your business.
1) Analyze your needs
The first step in creating good owned media is determining your objectives for each media type. You might have various goals and tones across several platforms, all in service of the same bigger goal.
2) Find your audience
You need to know whom you’re targeting to create compelling content for your owned media. Every piece of earned media you produce should have a specific target demographic in mind. Your target audience can be as broad or as narrow as you’d like it to be. However, if your target audience is focused, then you’re more likely to understand them. What’s more, the better your understanding of your target audience is, the easier it will be to produce content that appeals to them.
3) Create your content
You can start creating content after you know what you want to achieve with a piece of media and whom you want to reach. To direct your content creation, use your needs and audience as a guide. Consider engaging an outside contractor, such as a professional copywriter to create written content for your company’s website, if necessary.
How Pressfarm can help with this
Creating effective content for a brand can take a lot of time and effort, especially if your plate is already full of other responsibilities like product development. For this reason, it might help to partner with a PR agency like Pressfarm. The Pressfarm team is filled with experts who can help you to create quality content that will appeal to media professionals and direct their attention to your brand. With a professional press release, an eye-catching media kit, and a few engaging guest posts, you can capture media attention. Beyond that, you can generate curiosity among your target audience.
Pressfarm goes one step further to distribute this content widely, ensuring that your target audience sees it when it matters most. By submitting your brand to the right startup directories, media outlets, and professional networks, Pressfarm can boost your online presence across search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing!
As a client, you also get custom media lists containing the best contacts in your niche. This is in addition to year-long access to a media database of 1 million+ journalists, bloggers, and influencers. With all these media contacts, you can build mutually beneficial relationships with members of the media. Furthermore, you can do extended media outreach for your brand long after the team at Pressfarm has wrapped up your campaign.
4) Optimize your media
Any media strategy should include tactics aimed at generating earned media from owned media. This can take several forms, the most prominent of which are search engine optimization strategies that ensure your website ranks highly, as well as social media postings that visitors will want to share. This allows you to increase your reach without having to pay for it.
5) Promote your owned media
A digital marketing campaign is a great way to get more people to visit your website. You can do digital marketing by crafting an appealing advertising video connecting to your site. If this video is so entertaining that it generates natural shares in addition to your paid reach, you can use all three kinds of media. With just one piece of media, you can generate both earned and paid media attention for your owned media.
6) Analyze the results
You should evaluate the success of your media strategy, no matter how well-planned it is. Keep an eye on your performance measures for evidence that your efforts are yielding better outcomes. Even if your business grows due to your media strategy, you can still tweak your strategy and improve performance even further.
7) Refine your approach
Once you’ve studied your data, you can find places where your existing strategies aren’t functioning and make modifications to improve your overall performance. To stay on top of competitors, you should always be looking for ways to enhance the placement and performance of your owned media.
Maintaining the optimal performance of your owned media takes time and effort, but it will be pretty beneficial in the end. Controlling your company’s messaging is essential for presenting your best pitch to potential customers and growing your client base.
Conclusion
Owned media has gotten more important not only for B2C firms but also for B2B companies and startups. It’s time to invest in a plan that puts pen to paper and sets the cameras rolling. A well-executed owned media plan can be the driving force behind your company’s digital expansion. Similarly, your in-house content can be the differentiator between you and your competition. You may also utilize digital PR to gain valuable earned media and expand your exposure to a broader target audience. Once your in-house content is up to par, you will establish brand loyalty and trust.