[This is a transcription from the Clickx Marketing Hack of the Day video series.]
Hey, I am Solomon with Clickx. In this video I am going to go over earned, owned, and paid media and how you should be thinking about growing your business using all three at the same time. Sounds good? Let’s get started!
Get Full Control With Owned Media
First, I want talk with your owned media. Your owned media is your website, your blog, some social media profiles that has your company name on it, that is your owned media. This is the thing that you really want to make sure that you got a good handle on. You can control this fully because it is in your control. You have the logins to it, you built the website, you have your designers, your developers, you have your branding; all of that right here!
Generate Free Traffic With Earned Media
So, if you have not gotten started on it or if you are not really sure where to start; owned media is the first place you should start. And once you have this nailed, you want to go into earned, because that is your next free social media platform that is your next free thing that you want be working on. You want to figure out how you are going to get your platform that you have profiles in, get people to share the content, you want to get reviews on it, you want to get reposts, you want to get as much of that free traffic as possible. This is going to get you a lot longer. This is your word of mouth that you hear all the time! How do you get word of mouth? Work on that earned media in your company! Alright?
Drive Exposure With Paid Media
Finally, the stuff that is going to cost you money, there is nothing wrong with doing, that’s paid media. Let me tell you, I do it all day, every day! I have been doing it for 10 years. Paid media is your pay per click, it’s social ads, it is your retargeting ads, and it is your display ads. It is paying somebody to write an article about your company.
You pay somebody, here is your promoted content, put my name in it and give me a link to it! That is the paid media! And what you really have to get a handle on is how I execute all three at the same time! So in the middle part, that is really a sweet spot.
Measure Everything You Do
Figuring out what is going to work for you. Now, you got to measure everything that you are doing. You got to measure your traffic over here in the paid media or over you got to measure your traffic in your own media; how much traffic are you getting? How much of the traffic is really converting? What is the bounce rate? How long is the average time that people are spending on your website? That is a huge deal.
There you got to look at is your social media profile, is that growing over time? Do you have more likes and shares over time? Are you growing in that? So measure that excessively, measure that as much as you can. Figure out if it’s the paid part; anything that you are paying dollars out for ten dollars to click twenty dollars a click. I know campaigns that are seventy dollars to click.
Are you getting the ROI that you want? Right! Are you getting the ROI that you are getting from the paid part that is what you need to think about; not that these things are sort of working independently they work together as a whole.
Invest Time In Providing Value
In the owned media part, this is where you need to really invest a lot of your time, your resources, your people, add other people if you need to, work with a consultant if you have to, because this is where you really want to make sure that you shine.
You want to make sure that you do the best job, you can maintain this part!
A lot of people have abandoned their websites! They literally have stopped maintaining the website. They stopped doing things because at some point in time they made that not priority for them and they wonder, “Why is my marketing not working?” And that is sort of the first issue is to figure out: how that could be solved first? That is the easiest one if you ask me.
Receive Some Recognition
The second thing to work out is your earned media. It is the word of mouth part. It is when they look up your brand online, what do they see? What is the first thing that they see? Is there engagement? Is it abandoned that no one is ever been there? Are you not posting anything that you are going to get anybody to share in the first place?
Figure out what do you have to do, what how much time and money do you need to invest in your organization to figure out how you are going to get that to be better than it is today, how that is going to help you drive traffic to your own media. How is this going to help you get more visits to your website, how is it going to get you more engagements, how is it going to get you more awareness of your brand!
Pay To Promote Content
Now the last one and my favorite ones, if you ask me, is paid media. How you would actually use this today is, you have got a great piece of content that you post it on your social media profile. People liked it. Now I am going to feel some fire into that one, using paid media. What do I mean by that, is to promote that content. You are going to get more views, more likes, more visits to your website, and you can generate more traffics and leads, because you are going to go pay! You are going to use LinkedIn sponsored post, you are going to use Facebook sponsored posts, and you are going to use whatever you can!
So, if you can really think about that, I know it is a lot of information at first, sometimes people something Solomon just like a fire hose just throwing all at me! And I understand that it could be a lot of information at first, if you are not in marketing, if you are not in this every single day, if you have never heard of this concept; it could be a lot of information, but a lot of people are not really putting it together. They sort of work in silos at this moment and the whole reason that we built a whole platform is to measure all three of them. We measure organic stuff, we measure how much traffic is coming to this one, we measure all the social media activities anything social analytics we measure that, and we certainly measured by crazy, are paid stuff! We want to know what works, what does not work and if we are going to do it, we are going to do it. Of course there is merit in investing money just for branding. I am all for it, I spent plenty of money on branding, but at the same time if you are going to really convert, if this piece of content you created is going to help you get the leads for your quarter or this year then you need to make sure that you obsessively measured that and see if that is helping you, see if that is helping you generate the goals that you set in the first place.
So think about how you can use the content that you create, put it on social media and get those visits that you need to get, get the traffic that you need to get maybe organically in social media you are not going to get much. You are definitely going to get a lot, if you have very low followers, if you barely have any engagement, if you have no one going there; you are not going to get a lot. So you are going to have to use paid. There is no way you are going to grow organically. In your social precedence and grow that earned part, if you are not going to invest a lot of them and money into it. And a lot of people, today, if you are smart, and if you have a short window; you have a very short window of course your market should be long run, but you are trying to make this quarter, you want to try to make the best you can with this little piece of content while still hot go paid. That is my strategy for you. Do not wait for your organic to get built up. Do not worry about getting your followers yet; go paid all the way. Alright!
See What You Can Accomplish With Your Budget
Now, every time you should be using paid, but if you are definitely hungry and you want to make this thing happen as quickly as possible; find out the most amount of budget that you can get on this campaign and put into it and see how that is going to help you grow!
If you do not get the leads that you want to get from your paid media, alright! You say, “Hey Solomon, I spent ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand, a million, I spend a million dollars in my pain; I did not get the return that I thought I was going to get.” Then I would really implore you to take a look at your own media. Have you invested everything to get it as flawless? Do you see anything that is going to get people to not like your brand? Oh! If that is not it, take a look at your own media. How is that looking? Is it really abandoned or are you really engaging with the people? Are you replying those comments? Are you right there with them, with your fans, your loyal people, and your local fans!
So think about that. Right, because you have to work together. It does not work in silos anymore! We cannot. That was the old marketing, it does not work anymore! Now there is even other one. There is even other one there is a shared media, there is so many things this is changing so you have to get with the program road is today so you can get ready for the next generation.
Use Your Metrics To Make Better Decisions
Here is the action item: create the content on your website, whatever it is on your blog post anything else shared on social media and fire it up with some budget for your paid ads, for social ads, whether sponsored post or LinkedIn post; that is what is going to get you the ROI you are looking at. Do not work on these in silos. So think about that employee to take a look at it. Start with your metrics. That is what I really start with, I start with metrics. I look at how the free can I track everything that is happening here, and get some meaningful data of it. That is going to help me make better decisions.
How much do we invite? Do we double down? Do we go 5x? Do we go 10x? How much money do we need? How much money can we spend? What is the threshold in which that I am not going to get that diminishing return anymore. So think about in that sense. I hope that gave you some insight as to how you should be thinking about your earned media, your own media, your paid media and how do you allocate the resources and the budget that it requires to get you the satisfaction, to get you the momentum, to get you the profit that you really are looking for in growing your business!
Thank you for watching another edition of Marketing Hack of the Day!
