Owned media is part of the PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned) framework, which is a planning tool for digital marketing and PR professionals.
As its name suggests, owned media is a form of media that you own. It is a channel that you create, control and can leverage to your advantage in a range of different ways for brand awareness, search visibility and thought leadership.
Owned media is split into two main channels:
- Content you host (website, blogs)
- Content you share (social media, email marketing)
Although you are not paying for this content to be presented to your audience, the control you have over owned media is a smart investment in any marketing and PR strategy as it has staying power. The content on your website, in marketing emails and across social media reaffirms key messages to your audience, helping to increase brand awareness and association, as well as encouraging consumers to maintain a commitment to you.
Why is owned media important?
Owned media is important in both PR and digital marketing for a multitude of reasons. As mentioned above, it has staying power which works alongside brand awareness and association, but it can also be used to increase your search visibility, helping you to reach new audiences, and allows you to promote your own news and messages.
One of the main advantages of owned media is the complete control you have over it. Unlike shared or earned media, you are in charge of the content that is communicated to your audience. You can use your owned media to demonstrate thought leadership and share industry insights, announce news and information. This control allows you to ensure that communications are in line with and demonstrate your business messaging.
Content hosted on your website can do wonders for your SEO. By using keywords in content throughout your website and writing blog posts about relevant topics, you can increase organic traffic to your website. Increasing your website’s search visibility for certain keywords and topics through your owned media is an important part of brand awareness, as it helps reinforce key messages and helps audiences to align your brand with relevant sectors, it also enables new consumers to discover your website when searching for specific key words by increasing your share of voice.
If you have news to shout about, the best place to share it first is with your audience. Publishing the news in blog post or sharing it via email marketing and on social media keeps the communication channels with your audience open. It keeps them updated with business developments, making sure audiences feel involved and up to date. It will also help to increase audience interest in your brand if you are constantly updating them, furthering that staying power.
Social media is often confused as owned media. However, social media is not an owned asset. the only people who own social media content are the big tech social media websites. They can remove this content whenever they want, which is why building your own private owned assets is important.
Is there a downside to using owned media?
Blogging can be a slow process and sometimes results can take time to build over months and years.
Owned media helps you to reaffirm controlled messages to your existing audience, but may not be enough on its own to acquire new ones without traffic being sent to the asset via Google search or other PESO tactics.
Posted by
