Digital marketing can be a key driver of business success. Beyond a well-defined, measurable strategy, excelling at it requires using three media types: earned, paid, and owned.
Each type can give you insight into how customers learn, interact, and communicate with your brand. As a result, it’s crucial to employ a balanced media strategy. According to a survey by public relations software company Cision, marketers spend approximately 24 percent of their digital marketing budgets on earned media, 25 percent on paid media, and 32 percent on owned media.
If you want to help your organization engage and retain customers, here’s an overview of paid, owned, and earned media and how to incorporate each into your digital marketing plan.
Free E-Book: Your Guide to Online Learning Success
Access your free e-book today.
DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Paid Media?
Paid media is any marketing effort that involves paying to display promotional content across social media, search engines, or websites. According to the online course Digital Marketing Strategy, paid media comprises two categories: paid search and display advertising.
- Paid search: Ads that appear in response to consumers actively searching for your products, services, or brand
- Display ads: Ads shown to consumers who might be interested in your products or services but aren’t actively searching for them
Using these approaches, you can better reach your target audience, improve conversion rates, and maximize your digital marketing budget’s efficiency.
Among the content you can use to engage customers, paid video social ads can be highly effective.
According to Digital Marketing Strategy, that’s because:
- Technology has become more accessible.
- Consumers spend more time watching videos.
“This has led platforms like Instagram and Facebook to focus more on video,” says HBS Professor Sunil Gupta, who teaches the course. “It’s also allowed newer video-based platforms like TikTok to gain significant momentum.”
Data reinforces that point. According to Google, paid YouTube mobile advertising is 84 percent more likely to receive viewers’ attention than traditional TV advertising.
What Is Owned Media?
Owned media is digital content your company creates, including its website, blog, emails, and social media posts. Its goal is to increase brand awareness outside of paid efforts.
“One of the primary goals of owned media strategy is to improve the odds that your site shows up at or near the top of the organic links shown by search engines like Google,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “Being on the first page of results makes it more likely for someone to click on your link—and being at the top of the first page increases the likelihood even more.”
You can improve your site’s ranking by applying search engine optimization best practices, incorporating valuable keywords in content, and improving the user experience.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, Kate Laliberte, head of e-commerce at footwear company OOFOS, shares her team’s owned media approach.
“For us, owned media is focusing on our organic search, organic social, and email, but you can extend it as well,” Laliberte says. “Our website, the blog postings we have on our website, some of the direct mail pieces that we’re just getting into–that’s our owned media as well. So we really have control of that media. We have control of the placement, who we’re targeting, and what the story we’re telling them is.”
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. “In other words, this is media that’s neither paid for by a company nor owned by it. Instead, it’s media that a company has ‘earned’ from its consumers.”
Earned media has exploded with the rise of social media and review-based websites that give customers free platforms to share their opinions and ratings.
“Digital technology allows consumers to actively engage with firms and each other,” Gupta says in the course. “This has made owned and earned media key aspects of digital marketing.”
Earned media is also effective because consumers often trust personal recommendations versus advertisements. According to Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising survey, 88 percent of respondents said they most trust recommendations from people they know.
As such, earned media can help amplify your brand’s messaging and credibility at no cost.
What’s the Difference Between Earned, Owned, and Paid Media?
Control
Control is a key differentiator between earned, owned, and paid media.
“In general, owned media provides a company greater control over the content that its consumers encounter and how they interact with the brand,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
Paid media offers a similar level of control, but it's limited by how much you spend on paid ads.
A high level of control in paid and owned media is vital because it allows you to establish your brand’s unique tone, look, and feel—which is particularly important considering the rise of earned media channels.
“Brands no longer have complete control over their message,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “Consumers have the liberty to share their views about brands on social media, and these positive or negative views can get amplified and even go viral.”
That doesn’t mean earned media can’t be effective for your digital marketing strategy. It still lends authenticity and credibility to your brand through unbiased customer endorsements.
Cost
Cost is crucial to consider when comparing media types.
For instance, paid media often gets a bad rap for its significant financial investment. However, all three media types come at a cost—even earned media.
For example, while your customers create earned media, content like influencer partnerships can be costly. According to a report by social media monitoring company Meltwater, more than 11 percent of marketers spend over $500,000 on influencer marketing, while 22 percent spend between $10,000 and $50,000.
Owned media has financial considerations, too. For one, it’s often limited by your company’s time and resources. It also requires an initial financial commitment to produce content that engages your target audience, which can be work-intensive and slow to generate a return. However, when done right, it can reap similar benefits as paid advertisements.
Impact
Impact is another differentiator among the three media types. It refers to how your content effectively reaches, engages, and influences your target customers and drives them to convert.
Each type has a different level of impact throughout the marketing funnel’s three customer stages:
- Awareness: Introducing potential customers to your brand or product to address a problem they may have
- Consideration: Making customers aware of your brand or product while they evaluate it against alternatives
- Decision: Influencing consumers’ purchasing decisions using information you gather during the previous stages
For example, paid media is useful for boosting brand awareness at the top of the funnel. It can acquire potential customers quickly and ensure you get a lot of visibility.
Earned media makes a bigger impact further down the funnel since personal recommendations can be the deciding factor in customers’ purchasing decisions.
Owned media is a little different.
“When it comes to the marketing funnel stage, owned media can work at all stages of the funnel,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “As a top-of-the-funnel tactic, it can help brand discovery through organic search. At the mid- to lower-stages of the funnel, it can improve conversion by providing consumers with relevant, persuasive, and informative content.”
Take Control of Your Digital Marketing Strategy
When comparing earned versus paid versus owned media, remember: Your digital marketing strategy shouldn’t solely focus on just one.
“These three types of media often have synergy,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “For example, when a company discovers someone promoting their products for free and decides to enlist them as a paid influencer, a combination of earned and paid media is at work.”
By taking an online marketing course, such as Digital Marketing Strategy, you can learn how to balance these media types in your digital marketing plan. Through real-world cases and an interactive, online learning experience, you can discover approaches for achieving your short- and long-term marketing goals.
Do you want to learn more about earned, owned, and paid media? Explore Digital Marketing Strategy to explore how to use each to acquire and retain customers. If you’re interested in furthering your education via an online course but aren’t sure where to start, download our free guide to online learning success.
