- Earning the attention of an existing audience
is one of the best ways of getting your content seen
by the right people.
And that's exactly what you should be doing
with earned and paid media
to guide the distribution of your content.
As a key component of the PESO model,
which stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media,
earned media is any content produced about a company
that they didn't produce themselves
or paid to have created.
It's often the result of free publicity
from publications, bloggers, podcasts,
influencers, and other news sources.
Earned media can come in the form of a news article,
mentions on social media from influential accounts,
a cable news segment, podcast interviews,
or even a customer's review.
Think of earned media as the ability
to get your company's own content
in front of an audience
who's already interested in the same topic.
An example of this is pitching your content
for coverage in the press.
So you've just released
a new research study on your industry,
which is your owned media.
In order to gain earned media about that study,
start pitching it to relevant trade publications
to see if they're interested in covering it
in an article to highlight its key findings.
Pitching and building relationships
with credible players in your industry
that have their own audience
are some of the best techniques
for gaining earned media.
Paid media, on the other hand,
is when your organization pays to have its content amplified
amongst a wider audience
or pays to have content created by a third party.
There's many types of paid media you can invest in,
from pay-per-click advertising,
influencer marketing, social media ads,
native advertising, podcast ads,
display advertising, and more.
Paid media allows you to boost your content
to reach more of the right people,
which can be less intrusive
than paying to push promotional messaging to customers.
A good example of this
is when a client of mine embraced the PESO model,
significantly increasing the viewership of their content
and growing sales in the process.
We worked together to produce
a range of educational and entertaining articles
comparing their products to leading competitors,
breaking down the pros and cons of each.
Over time, their own content
began to rank higher in Google searches
for product comparisons of their top sellers.
To further dominate in search,
the organization sent its products
to YouTube influencers in the industry
with a prompt and a pitch
to compare their offerings to leading competitors.
A few influencers published video reviews of their product,
which is earned media,
driving attention to their brand in the short-term,
and months later, increasing their visibility in search.
To boost the effectiveness of this owned and earned media,
we decided to also spend some funds on paid media
to advertise their content on YouTube and Facebook,
introducing their product to even more people.
Whether pitching or paying to reach more customers,
get your content to go further
by adopting an integrated approach to distribution.