What Is Earned Media?

It is always a good idea to combine your earned media strategies with industry best practices to gain optimum exposure and visibility from your efforts. Whether it is live chat, email or social media, ensure that you have designated timelines to respond to customer queries, questions, concerns and complaints. This earned media definition cannot happen overnight but establishing a working relationship with media professionals, journalists, bloggers and vloggers pays its dues in the long run.

The Spotify Wrapped campaign even got a Webby Award nomination in the "Best Use of Earned Media" category (in 2023). When Wrapped was released, you could see Spotify literally everywhere. The popular music streaming app picks the most interesting facts about each listener's preferences, like genres, songs, and artists, and compares them with its general audience. Let's get back to Earth with the yearly evaluation of our genuine music tastes — Spotify Wrapped. Even if you're not in this club (like most of us), there are still a lot of people willing to share your story.

• The reviews that you see above created a compounding effect that led many users to download and start using the desktop app after the launch.
• For example, you can start a contest on your page encouraging your audience who want to attend your next marketing conference to share a video explaining why they want to attend.
• Earned media shows up across many media channels and earned media channels, not just traditional press coverage.
• Wondering how to seamlessly integrate your earned, owned, and paid media efforts?
• LSI stands for latent semantic index, a computer program designed to learn synonyms based on context.

Examples of earned media include press coverage, word-of-mouth, reviews, and social media shares. It is the result of a brand’s efforts to create content that is interesting and engaging enough to be shared by the public. It is a cost-effective way to reach a larger audience and create positive sentiment around a brand.

Channels like social media and blogs are extensions of your website, and all three are extensions of your brand as a whole. Rankings on the first page of the search engines place your owned media sites and content links in a position to receive higher engagement and shares, which is why a good SEO strategy is crucial. Earned media is essentially online word of mouth, usually seen in the form of ‘viral’ tendencies, mentions, shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations, or content picked up by 3rd party sites. Think of earned media, owned media and paid media like a tripod. Track backlinks if you’re optimizing for SEO, outlet authority if you’re building credibility, and referral traffic if you want direct business impact. Common metrics include media mentions, share of voice (how often you’re mentioned compared to competitors), referral traffic from coverage, and backlinks generated.

Discover the Difference Between Earned Media, Owned Media & Paid Media in Marketing

As a marketer for startups I see it as by far the most important type of media. While press coverage is one traditional form, earned media now also takes the form of individual social media posts, likes, blogger coverage, links, rants — you name it. It’s rave reviews from brand advocates, and Twitter tirades by unhappy customers. Generally speaking, this happens when others find your content to be valuable enough that they want to share it with their audience, either by writing about it, talking about it, or sharing it.

About Smart Insights

Start by identifying the publications, podcasts, blogs, and writers who already cover your space. How can you stand out from the crowd and spread the word about your own online appointment scheduling service? As you can imagine, appointment scheduling is another cluttered category with many players competing for their piece of share in the market. From the outside, that would seem like the result of the work of a highly paid public relations agency. However, back in 2019, Blindlee managed to get press coverage through various prominent publications such as TechCrunch…

Credibility is the lowest of the three because audiences know it’s an ad. The paid-owned-earned (POE) framework is the most common way marketers slice the media universe. Owned media gives you full control, but you’re always speaking from your own platform. Paid media gets results the moment you spend money, and stops the moment you don’t. Earned media sits alongside paid media (advertising) and owned media (a brand’s own website, blog, and social accounts) in the standard marketing framework.

For marketers who care about SEO, editorial backlinks from earned press coverage also strengthen domain authority and feed long-term organic rankings. Every company has different goals—whether you’re selling physical products or business subscriptions. Depending on your goals, sometimes a trade publication with a niche audience is worth more than an outlet with millions of impressions. While there are many ways to cut the data, let’s start with the top of the article.

In simple terms, earned media is the result of your brand doing something remarkable enough that others voluntarily promote or discuss it. It’s the digital version of word-of-mouth, when people talk about your brand because they want to, not because they’re paid to. Sometimes simpler methods, such as the number of followers on a journalist's social media page, have been used. In a 2019 study by the Institute for Public Relations, participants shown an earned news story, an advertisement, a blog post, and a company blog post found the earned media story the most credible.

When audiences see consistent social proof and positive experiences, it strengthens trust. Researching media outlets and understanding their target audience improves pitch success and feeds into a broader media outreach strategy focused on the right journalists. Journalists look for trends, insight, or news that matters, so understanding what makes a story newsworthy in the first place is essential. Writing a good press release that clearly communicates real news supports stories, but journalists cover relevance, not announcements alone. While there’s no paid placement, it still requires time, planning, and relationship building.

Data-Led Storytelling

If an advertisement or other paid marketing effort goes viral, so that other people and media outlets publish about it without payment, then the additional exposure (but not the original paid media) is earned media. Generating earned media may require hiring staff, creating content, promoting the brand through paid media, or creating programs (e.g., a contest) that will result earned media. It’s tough to scale without resulting in the automation of different roles and in doing so, you will come across less human and impersonal. The benefits of shared media come down to the enormous potential social media has to reach massive audiences. Shared media can be thought of as directly resulting from your social media and content marketing efforts. In other words, it is the credibility of earned media that sets it apart from owned and paid media.

Never delete or ignore negative coverage, transparency is trust in times of trouble. With earned media, value is based on creativity over budget, which levels the playing field. Prioritize consistency over the quick win, earned media accelerates with time.

Nowadays, savvy marketers are increasingly turning their focus to earned media opportunities. You’ll see your brand naturally popping up in videos, images, and other popular examples, proving how much people appreciate what you offer. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals. Journalists or media outlets feature a company or its offerings in news articles, interviews, or editorials.