Member Article

What’s The Difference Between Earned, Owned, And Paid Content?

Content is vital to successful online marketing. In fact, it’s vital to every sort of marketing. At the most basic level, marketing is the creation and promotion of content through various channels. To be a successful marketer, it’s necessary to create great content.

Saying “marketing requires great content,” is true, but not especially useful. Content appropriate for one channel isn’t appropriate for other channels; the promotional strategies for each type of content and each channel are different too.

Understanding promotional strategies and channels allows businesses to plan and create effective content strategies. There are many ways we might categorize content to gain a better understanding of how to distribute and promote it, but in this article I’d like to take a look at one high-level way of categorizing content: the division between owned content, paid content, and earned content. Most online business will be well served by focusing on all of these.

Paid content is content the placement of which has been paid for. Paid content includes traditional advertising, but also newer approaches like paid promotion of social media posts. A paradigmatic example of paid content is native advertising, in which an organization pays to have its content published on the platform of a popular publisher.

Owned content is content directly under your control and published on your platforms. Content you create and publish on your blog is owned content, and so are social media posts. It also includes web copy, landing page copy, and lead generation content like ebooks.

Earned content is content voluntarily created, without payment, by third parties. Earned content is the holy grail of content promotion: people creating positive — or at least widely read —content about your brand without your having paid them is a win. Earned content includes articles in news media about your brand, reviews, and social media posts from influencers.

It should be emphasized that “earned content” doesn’t mean “free content”. You really do have to earn it and that often involves a significant investment in promotion. In today’s media landscape, anyone with an shred of influence is constantly bombarded with pitches. Without active strategic outreach, it’s unlikely a brand will receive any significant earned media.

Which is not to say that doesn’t happen. We all know stories of content that has “gone viral”, earning massive coverage with very little upfront investment. But betting on virality is a mistake. It’s inherently unpredictable. A content strategy the sole focus of which is to go viral and reap the benefits of massive earned media has slim chance of success.

For small and medium businesses, the most effective content marketing strategy is one that invests resources in each of the approaches we’ve discussed here. Paid content, particularly promoted posts on social media, can be extremely effective. But owned content is, as the name suggests, an owned resource that generates value over a much longer period than paid content. Finally, outreach for earned media can be a big win for many companies: an article in a prominent national publication can be worth orders of magnitude more than months’ worth of social media posts and blogging.

About Graeme Caldwell – Graeme works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, https://blog.nexcess.net/.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Graeme Caldwell .