A good owned media strategy can build your reputation both as a brand and as a thought leader. Not only does using your owned media build trust, but it also boosts your overall media outreach efforts. For this reason, a good media outreach campaign should always include plans for your owned media.
What is owned media?
Your owned media are any media channels that your brand controls. You decide what content to produce and when. Owned media also gives you direct access to your target audience, without relying on someone else to tell your story.
Do you need help producing content for your owned media channels? An agency like Pressfarm can help with that.
Some examples of owned media channels
- Company website: Your website is one of the first places someone curious about you will go for more information. For this reason, you should invest effort in keeping it updated and educational.
- Email campaigns: Sending regular updates to people on your mailing list is a great way to keep them plugged into what’s going on with your company. The people who open and read these emails are likely to be interested in news about your company.
- Social media channels: 62.6% of the world’s population are active on social media. Your social media channels are an effective place to build long-term relationships with the public and cultivate thought leadership.
- Video channels, blogs, and podcasts: Use these platforms to share valuable content. Speak about topics that people want to learn more about so that you can build a reputation as a trusted source of information in your industry. In particular, video channels can be useful for sharing tutorials on your products or services. Using these channels consistently will help you establish yourself as a thought leader over time.
- Physical newsletters: Some companies still mail physical newsletters to their clients. This is especially useful if your target audience consists of older people. As with email campaigns, physical newsletters are an effective way to keep clients in the loop of what is going on.
Regardless of how you adapt your content for each platform, your owned media channels should be consistent with your overall brand. In addition, they should support your broader media strategy.
Advantages of owned media
- It’s within your control: With these media channels, you can control the story being told about your brand. You can also change your strategy as your needs change.
- There is no extra cost: Since you’re running your owned media channels, you don’t have to spend money on an owned media strategy.
Paid media gives you control over the brand story being told and earned media comes at no extra cost. With owned media, you can enjoy the best of both worlds.
- It can generate earned media: A successful owned media strategy can help your brand go viral. In other words, you get free media coverage and mentions when you capture attention online. This is especially true if you spark interest among influencers and thought leaders in your industry.
Overall, a good owned media strategy is key because it helps to build your brand image. Your reputation influences your success as a brand. For this reason, it is worthwhile to make your owned media a central part of your overall outreach strategy.
So, how do you build a successful owned media outreach strategy?
Developing a good owned media strategy isn’t complicated once you know what you need. Let’s break this down into 7 practical steps:
1. Assess your needs
The first step of any successful media outreach strategy is analyzing your needs. Most of the time, your needs will be determined by the challenges you’re experiencing, your audience, and the platforms you’re using. Your needs can change with time, depending on your target audience and your owned media platforms.
Assessing your needs will help you develop goals for your owned media strategy. Developing goals will make it easier to evaluate the results of your media efforts later on.
2. Define your target audience
To produce valuable content, define your target audience and what matters to them. If they are tech gurus tinkering with new products, they would appreciate tech advice and updates. If they’re interested in industry trends, share industry reports and news with them.
The only way you will know what kind of content your audience wants to see from you is to build a profile of your target audience. What kind of people does this audience consist of? What is their everyday life like and what do they care about?
3. Create good quality content
Once you know your target audience, you can be more confident about producing content that they will value.
How do you create valuable content?
a) Share information that people will care about
Produce valuable content for social media and your other owned media channels. Valuable content is:
- Meaningful: Meet the needs of your target audience.
- Objective: Focus on sharing information rather than increasing sales.
- Educational: Teach your audience something new.
- Visual: Don’t just tell, show. Offer visuals like videos and infographics to illustrate your points.
- Unique: Don’t just repackage the same information your competitors are sharing. Say something new that people haven’t heard before, in a form they’ve never seen before. If you can do this, then you’ll stand out from the crowd.
- Conversational: Invite dialogue. Initiating conversations will help you connect with your audience. Go a step further by replying to comments from your audience – this will help them feel heard and strengthen your connection.
- Consistent: Produce content regularly to build interest. This content should also be consistent with your overall branding. You should feel free to adjust the style to fit the needs of different platforms. Overall, have one cohesive brand voice.
b) Create a central content hub
In most cases, your central content hub will be your website. This is where you post the majority of your content before you repurpose it for use elsewhere. For example, you could give blog articles, videos, and infographics a home on different pages on your website. Once you have built a central home for this content, you can decide how to distribute it to the rest of your platforms.
Many brands also have online newsrooms on their website. These make good content hubs. With an online newsroom, you can share information that journalists and your target audience find useful. For example, you can share the history of your company and details about the team behind it. You can also share press releases and details of any previous press coverage your company has earned. Proof of press release coverage is a good source of social proof for any journalists considering writing a story about you in the present.
Having a home for this content makes it easier for curious website visitors to find information. It also increases the chances that they will stumble upon content related to their original search. In addition, a central content hub increases your SEO optimization by helping search engines find and rank your content.
Essentially, a central hub of content can help a SEO agency for education build a strong and loyal audience. By consistently sharing valuable and well-optimized information, the agency positions itself as a trusted source that educational institutions can turn to for insights, strategy, and long-term digital growth.
c) Experiment with different strategies
Consistency is key, but it’s also important to experiment so you can find a formula that works for you. Test the effectiveness of different types of content (text and visuals) and different posting times on social media.
Try different strategies for engaging different segments of your audience. For example, in a mailing list, you can send a special offer to people who aren’t engaging anymore. You can also target your messaging by posting in special interest groups.
d) Collaborate with other content creators
Partnering with other thought leaders to create valuable content widens your professional network and helps you reach a wider audience. You can collaborate with other thought leaders by creating an eBook, developing a white paper, or hosting a webinar. You can also partner with another thought leader to publish guest posts on their site.
Collaborating with another content creator helps to generate curiosity about your brand among their audience. As such, you can drive more traffic to your website over time.
e) Optimize your media
Tailor your content to reach an online audience. Use search engine optimization to develop keywords that search engines can pick up. Another way to do this is by adjusting your content for different platforms.
Optimizing your content for each platform will help you connect effectively with your target audience on each platform.
f) Drive traffic
It is also important to drive traffic to your owned media to maximize your exposure. Paid media like online advertisements can help spark curiosity in your brand and direct people to your owned media channels for more information.
g) Evaluate the results
At the end of any media campaign, it is crucial to evaluate your results. Measure your outcomes against the goals you had set in the beginning. In doing so, you can gauge the success of your efforts.
h) Refine your approach
Adjust your future strategy accordingly. Build upon what works and tweak what hasn’t until you have a foolproof strategy for your owned media marketing.
As you can see, developing a successful owned media strategy isn’t difficult. On the contrary, telling your story and connecting directly with your target audience should be fun and exciting.
Some of Pressfarm’s packages can help you create content like eye-catching media kits and engaging feature stories for your owned media. In addition, curated media lists and a media database of over 1 million journalists can help you do media outreach for your owned media channels, thus boosting your web traffic. Check these packages out and let us help with your media strategy.
