Paid Media vs. Earned Media: Learn to Boost Your Business Effectively

If you want to survive and strive in the marketing industry, you’d have to get your head around terms like paid media vs. earned media. Well, you may have heard of them before — these are not terms you’d easily pass on — they are must-know terms in the marketing industry.

In this guide, you’ll get a good grasp of what paid media vs. earned media are, their differences, and how they relate to each other. A solid understanding of these terms will help you revamp your current marketing strategy, and also forecast where the opportunities lie in the future.

Finally, you’d get a robust way of measuring your marketing efforts. This way, you’d know the media types that are working for your business, and the ones that are not working. A good understanding of what’s working helps you know what to focus on, and what to ignore.

Before diving into the paid media vs. earned media debate, let’s start with the basics — what is paid media?

What is Paid Media?

Any marketing that cannot be done for free is termed paid media. It includes traditional advertising like billboards, think print, or TV and radio ads. Online, paid media includes ads on search engine results pages, social media ads, and display ads that are found on web pages. Paid marketing comes with advanced targeting options to help you reach your potential customers. Whether you opt for paid social or paid search, there are benefits to incorporating paid marketing into your digital marketing strategy.

Here are some examples of paid media to help you get a good grasp of the concept.

What is an Example of Paid Media?

Just as the name implies, paid media pretty much involves when a company makes a payment for promoting their messages on external platforms. With advertisements or paid media, the company has to invest lots of resources to widen its impressions and reach. On the upside, marketing professionals can easily track their performance and adjust their strategy with paid media. Some of the most common examples of paid media include social media ads, Google Ads, and traditional advertisement models like print ads, billboards, and television commercials.

But what is the importance of paid media? Well, here’s what you need to know.

What is the Importance of Paid Media?

Paid media is a vital piece of a good digital marketing strategy. With paid media, you get to identify where your customers spend the most time and pretty much reach out to them on these third-party platforms. If you play the right cards, paid media would help you boost your brand awareness, engage with your target audience, and also generate more sales and revenue.

Why Use Paid Media?

If you’re like most people, you probably think that paid media is of no good. Yes, what’s the essence of paid media when you can generate exposure for your brand by merely using social media and web marketing. This way, you get to avoid the pitfalls that come with paid media.

Well, all these are true, but here is why you should use paid media.

• Paid media can work in sync with owned and earned media to boost your business growth.
• Paid media is arguably the quickest way of generating traffic for your brand.
• Paid media helps to open the door, no matter how small, for your business.
• Sponsored posts or tweets can help in generating new customers for your brand. Regardless of the kind of business you manage or how long you have in the marketplace, an opportunity to broadcast your brand is one you should grab with both hands.
• Whether your content is paid for or not, great content always generates engagement, followers, and clicks. But it’s much easier to track paid content than organic content.
• You can always view the statistics of paid content on various social media platforms. Whether you desire to see the number of impressions, leads or clicks your content generates, there’s always a way — the same cannot be said of organic content.
• Sponsored content does not translate to valuable content. The world of social media and the internet is somewhat mysterious — and there are no clear-cut metrics to pinpoint the piece of content that would go viral or not. Sometimes, it’s just the vibe of the moment that makes content go viral.
• Regardless of the purpose of your content, sponsoring it could help get it showcased in front of many people. This way, you’d most likely generate more clicks and shares. In the long run, it could reach the right influencers.

Enough of paid media! What is earned media, and what is the importance of earned media?

What is Earned Media?

There are instances where people spread news, awareness, feedback, and other vital information about a company — that’s called earned media. And the major benefit of earned media is increased credibility and expanded reach — and these are somewhat difficult to achieve without external influences. On the flip side, earned media pretty much requires extensive effort and time to gather data. And there is the risk of negative messaging.

Some experts view earned media as owned media. Regardless of the term you choose to go with, the meaning pretty much remains the same. Moving on, you can argue that social media falls into earned media — but it depends on the elements involved in the distribution and sharing of the content. Prominent examples include articles, reviews, news stories, and reposted or shared social media content.

But what are the examples of earned media? Here is what you need to know.

What are the Examples of Earned Media?

Earned media could be online, offline, on-air, or in print. Simply put, earned media are in various flavors, sizes, or shapes. Regardless of the source of earned media, it’s quite valuable, and here are some examples.

• Social media posts during a pandemic. These social media posts could be in the form of “this is the best home workout boot”.
• Yelp reviews showering praises on the HVAC company. The reviews could be in the form of “affordable and fast”.
• A finance blog recommending a mobile app for tracking daily expenses.
• Radio news report about a novel healthcare treatment.
• A written blog that praises a company’s product or service offering.
• Invitation to “like” or “share” a company’s Facebook page or social media content.
• Amazon reviews.
• TripAdvisor reviews, especially reviews that have eye catchy photographs attached to it.
• Media recommendation of restaurants that offer free meals to COVID-19 healthcare workers.

If you’ve read up to this point, you may be wondering what the importance of earned media is. Well, here is some importance of earned media.

What is the Importance of Earned Media?

• It’s an avenue for customers to use and promote your products or services on their YouTube channel.
• Earned media is almost always free. Therefore, the return on investment (ROI) tends to be higher than that of other media investment. It also offers an organic way of building your credibility and brand awareness. This way, your brand would come across as genuine.
• Most customers tend to see through the false praises that are published by the company, and sponsored content tends to come across as untrustworthy. On the flip side, earned media are seen as trustworthy, unbiased, and tend to carry more weight in the eyes of the customers. In a nutshell, about 85% of potential customers seek out trusted third-party before making a buying decision. Furthermore, earned media helps you to reach people who may not fall under your target audience.
• When it comes to earned media, you cannot control the narrative — and that’s not good for business. Why? Because if someone doesn’t like your brand, it could likely generate negative publicity for your business. Furthermore, generating earned media is quite tricky and takes lots of time and effort, because of this you still cannot the importance of earned media because you need to prepare to keep you safe from negative remarks from haters.

Now you’ve gained a good grasp of paid media and earned media, it’s time to dive right into the paid media vs. earned media debate. You can get started by knowing the answer that always surfaces during the paid media vs. earned media debate — what is the difference between paid media and earned media?

What is The Difference Between Paid Media and Earned Media?

When it comes to the paid media vs. earned media debate, one of the key things to know is the difference between the two terms.

The primary difference between paid media and earned media is that you’ve got to pay before paid media gains exposure. On the flip side, earned media is usually content created without the brand’s direct involvement. In the world of digital marketing, channels that help to boost engagement, performance, and visibility can be categorized into various parts. Nowadays, these channels may overlap in some instances.

Let’s say your sponsored post boosts the engagement and sharing of earned media — that’s an overlap of paid media and earned media. Furthermore, when you drive traffic to your website using PPC ads and social media ads, it counts as an overlap of paid media and earned media.

• There is always a cash-out flow when it comes to paid media. Yes, initial payments are always involved in paid media. But earned media is entirely different — no payment is involved.
• Paid media can be measured and scaled to generate an immediate result, but owned media takes time, is cost-effective, offers quality visits, and offers easy targeting. That’s not all, earned media generates loyalty and pretty much builds trust among your target audience.
• The brand has a level of control of the media in paid media. However, the case is entirely different in earned media, where the brand has little to no control of the media.

It doesn’t have to end with the paid media vs. earned media debate, you’ve got to discover how third-party tools like the PPC Signal tool plays a role here.

To get started, you’ve got to figure out how to optimize your PPC campaigns using the PPC Signal tool.

How PPC Signal can Help you Optimize Your Paid Media Campaigns?

By effectively optimizing your campaign, you’re sure of generating much ROI regardless of the media type you choose — whether paid media or earned media. If you want to grow your revenue using paid media or earned media, running good PPC campaigns is probably your best shot.

Setting your campaigns is good, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ve got to optimize it to generate the results you desire. And if you’re managing multiple PPC campaigns, then you need a good tool to help you manage all your campaigns from one spot.

To win in the PPC game, you’ve got to know which areas to focus on and the ones to forgo. You’ve got to closely monitor your campaigns, and take swift action when the need arises. The action should be geared toward generating more results for you. Optimizing and effectively managing your PPC campaign is somewhat impossible without a tool like the PPC Signal tool.

One of the primary benefits of managing your campaign is that you get to direct your energies and resources into the right areas.

This way, actions taken will not drain your budget.

If you’re to manually monitor your campaigns, you may end up not drawing the right insights — and in the long run, will not be able to run successful campaigns.

Speaking of the PPC Signal tool, it helps you manage your campaigns and also lets you know what’s working and what’s not.

Let’s say you’re managing a campaign, but it’s not going as planned. And you want to optimize the campaign’s cost per conversion.

The first step is to navigate to the PPC Signal tool dashboard and select the cost per conversion icon. After that, the automated signal will be displayed on your screen in real-time. From the signals displayed on your screen, you get to draw insights into the cost-per-conversion metrics of your campaign. This way, you get to see the trends, outliers, anomalies, and shifts in your data. Furthermore, there is an option to generate more details by merely exploring the signals in your campaign. To explore the signals, you’ve got to click on the Explore icon.

By clicking on the explore button, your campaign gets to be represented in a graphical format. From the graphical representation, you get to see the details of your campaign, and also figure out the changes in your cost per conversion.

You can add multiple metrics at the same time to analyze them side by side.

There is also an option of showcasing your data in tabular form. This way, you get to see other metrics that are probably affecting the cost per conversion of your campaign.

From the results in the automated signal, you’ve got to make solid decisions to help you generate better results for your campaign. If you’re in doubt about how to position yourself for more results, here are some valuable tips to help you get started.

• Use compelling, clickable PPC ads that are relevant to your target audience and search (or keyword) query. And if you generate better results, you should target high-intent long-tail and mid-tail keywords that focus on customers who are late to the buying cycle — because these customer types are more likely to convert
• Your ads and landing pages should maintain a high level of relevance. As a general rule of thumb, your landing page should always deliver on your ad’s call-to-action. This way, it would be easier for your customers to complete your desired action. And these actions could be downloading a white paper, signing up for your newsletter, or pretty much buying your product
• Always test the landing page design. Yes, perform A/B testing to figure out the right copy, layout, and color for your landing page. By figuring out the right elements of your landing page, you’d easily push more website visitors to call in, fill out your form, or pretty much convert them into loyal paying customers.

FAQs:

Why is earned media better than paid?

One of the things you’ve got to consider when it comes to paid media vs. earned media is if earned media is better than paid media.

Earned media is pretty much exposure that has not been paid for or created by a company. Earned media could be a story idea that’s newsworthy or entertaining that generates enough engagement and usage on its merit. Alternatively, earned media could be a creative campaign that generates viral engagement across multiple social media platforms.

Are influencers paid or earned media?

As a business owner who’s contemplating the benefits and drawbacks of paid media vs. earned media, you’ve got to figure out whether influencers are paid or earned media.

Getting influencers to publish or discuss your content could be considered earned media. If you’re considering influencer marketing, you’ve got to opt for an influencer with a personality that matches your industry, target demographics, and goals. This way, they would easily create relevant and engaging content that promotes your brand.

What is the goal of earned digital media?

Earned media is synonymous with online word of mouth — and it’s one of the sure ways to drive engagement, sentiment, and traffic around your brand. There are various ways of gaining earned digital media, but good SEO and content strategies still top the list.

What’s the difference between paid media and earned media?

Paid media usually comes in the form of a sponsored post — and you’ve got to make some payment before getting your content out. However, there is no direct involvement of the brand when it comes to earned media. That is, earned media are usually created and publicized by third parties — and the brand is not always involved in the content creation and distribution process.

Wrap Up:

The primary difference between earned media and paid media lies in its potential to generate revenue for the business. Experts argue that earned media is worth four times more than paid media. Why? Because the public value of earned media is a mix of its inherent value plus the add-on in terms of the validation it gains from media outlets that share or publish the content.

An understanding of earned and paid media will go a long way in settling the paid media vs. earned media debate — and that would pretty much set you up for some marketing campaign success.

Now you know what earned media and paid media are, how would you use the strategies outlined in this guide to generate more results for your brand?