Don’t Panic, It’s Organic
If you’ve got it, flaunt it: explore the power of leveraging owned assets for marketing and branding growth.
Above image: James Tissot (1836-1902), The Newspaper (1883), etching and drypoint in black on ivory laid paper, Gift of Bob and Moya Chase, The Art Institute of Chicago
As many seasoned marketing practitioners know, launching a campaign on only one channel is typically not the best idea. It’s like hanging up an event poster at the local Starbucks and running away quickly while hoping for the best and enjoying a well-deserved treat for all your hard work.
Another mistake that many brands make is not developing their own website and instead becoming overly reliant on using social media as their sole information channel to convey messages to target audiences.
It’s important to convey your message as widely as possible in order to make the greatest impact. The key to any successful integrated marketing and communications plan is a strategy that includes the creation and leveraging of “organic,” or “owned” media on “paid” and “earned” channels.
Organic Media: The Foundation of Integrated Communications and Marketing
Organic media is central to successful marketing strategies and the most important component of any brand marketing or PR campaign or launch. There are multiple types of organic media, or owned media, including:
Logos and Trademarks
Websites: the window to your brand! The fact is you simply have no marketing plan if you do not have an accessible and engaging website to drive to.
Social media channels
Email and print newsletters
Videos: According to Brightcove, video increases organic search by 157% and video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year, according to Optinmonster
Podcasts
Brochures, letters, envelopes, stationery, white papers, printed publications, direct mail, newsletters, annual reports, and printed other brand collateral
Blog posts and website articles
Signage
Email signatures and voicemail greetings
In other words, if you and/or company or brand creates a brand asset, it is now your “owned” media to distribute organically across channels so that you can grow your reach and impact. Blogging and posting web articles is a proven way to drive traffic and leads: HubSpot found that 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
Paid Media: Show Me the Money
This is a bit more self-explanatory: paid media is anything that you put money behind in order to achieve a certain goal, such as greater brand awareness, increased sales or donations, new leads, website visits, video views, new followers, or other pertinent engagement and growth goals.
Paid media can include:
Radio and podcast ads
TV/Streaming ads
Digital ads (paid search/SEO, display ads)
Social media ads, especially Facebook and YouTube
Print ads
Outdoor ads and other experiential promotions
Event sponsorships
Paid email campaigns
Content partnerships and sponsorships with relevant brands, influencers, content creators, and celebrities
A truly integrated marketing strategy always leverages owned assets across targeted paid media, no matter the size of the budget or the scope of the campaign. You can run micro-campaigns for under $500 or $1,000 and still generate real results.
Earned Media: The Best Ads in Life Are Free
I started out in journalism school studying public relations nearly 25 years ago when getting press could only happen via targeted outreach to journalists via snail mail and/or telephone communications, maybe even on a land line. Now, the entire field of public relations has been turned upside down into what I can only term earned media reach and influence value, which encompasses the vast universe of social and digital influence that has erupted in recent decades.
Earned media is content published about a brand or person by a third party without any payment to the publisher (i.e. being interviewed on the news and major media outlets; content shared by news outlets online and on streaming, etc). Positive earned media growth leads to brand credibility and trustworthiness. And despite the “there’s no such thing as bad press” school of thought, negative earned media is bad in that it can ruin your reputation quickly in today’s “cancel culture” world and your “cancellation” can hurt a lot more if it goes viral. Then it’s time for a strategic regroup. It is no wonder that so many content creators are consulting astrology and other spiritual means to help them create and plan content; the digital verse is no joke (fingers crossed).
Examples of earned media include:
Press coverage: when your brand is mentioned in another website online or on the news. Because there’s nothing better than an ad you don’t pay for! Earned media can generate millions in advertising value equivalency (AVE). It is THE most powerful tool in the strategic integrated communications toolbox you can have. The power of public relations and social influence is that, now more than ever, brands are less reliant on paid media and more reliant on owned and earned media to build and engage their audiences and make a real impact.
Social media mentions/shares/tags: garnering tags by someone else for free, such as voluntary influencer endorsements, leads to audience growth and engagement, along with an increase in brand trust. Don’t forget that people really just trust and connect with people, not brands; we connect with everything that a brand represents, and literally nothing is more powerful than an endorsement or referral from a trusted friend, family member, or influential person/celebrity
First-person user-generated reviews and testimonials, especially on third-party user-generated content sites like Facebook, Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, and AirBnB. Because people don’t trust brands or companies: they trust real people. A review or an endorsement from a trusted celebrity, friend, or influencer can drive real action at scale.
A Nielsen study found that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. According to HubSpot, 7 out of 10 consumers trust influencers' opinions as much as their face-to-face friends, and 66% say that influencers have more impact on their buying choices than the people they see in person. Hubspot also found that nearly 70% of their surveyed B2B clients trusted influencer content more than content that came from vendors.
The Bottom Line
Before you launch an integrated campaign, make sure you’ve covered all the bases across paid, owned, and earned media. You may have assets that could be repurposed across channels or leveraged as part of a campaign to meet marketing and PR goals. Always conduct a brand asset audit and a landscape review before launching any marketing or PR campaign, and always be sure you are clear on your goals, audience, and purpose in order to achieve the most impact while leveraging your owned assets. We’ve come a long way since the news was only delivered by hand, so you might as well take advantage of it. Just don’t forget to build in some downtime!