Pay Attention To Your “Owned Media”

Are you using all media at your disposal to promote your product, service or organization?

Naturally, you must pay attention to “paid media,” mostly defined as advertising, including paid search engine marketing.

Equally important to your promotional efforts is “earned media,” those publicity and other media relations efforts that fall under the broad category of public relations.

But, you should be paying similar, if not more, attention to “owned media.”  Owned media are the communications channels you control, and they vary from the actual product and its packaging to websites and social media sites.

As Tim Williams, of Ignition Consulting Group, points out, “Large well-known brands are beginning to realize that the media they own are more powerful than the media they buy.”

Owned media are ubiquitous.  They’re as varied as the signs on your building or on your vehicles, what you display in your store, or what literature you use to promote your organization.  In this digital age, owned media has come to include your web site and blogs, Facebook and Linked In presence, email marketing and mobile apps.

Some important benefits of owned media:  (1) you control the content, (2) it builds brand loyalty, and (3) it can easily be integrated with your paid and earned media programs.

An ancillary benefit is that the use of owned media lowers the overall cost of marketing because expensive media buys can be reduced.  While it may be relatively expensive to develop some owned media, once the up-front work is done, they can keep working continually with little tweaking.

As Tim Williams further points out, “Owned media are not only more credible and effective than paid media, but they actually sometimes have better reach and frequency.”  As an example, he cites Pepsi’s promotional use of its own vending machines, which number in the hundreds of thousands.

While you probably don’t have hundreds of thousands of sign posts out there, you may be surprised by how many marketing opportunities you have through your “owned media.”  Integrating them with your “paid” and “earned” media makes for a more powerful marketing mix.

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