Earned media is one of the best ways to promote your business, both online and offline.

What is earned media?

Earned media is any type of content that other websites, journalists or individuals have organically written about your brand without you paying them for it. While earned media was elusive in the pre-digital age, businesses of all sizes can now earn from it. Whether it’s a tweet on social media, a post on a hobby blog, a review on Google, or an article on a news site, you can attract earned media to build your brand and online presence.

Why does earned media useful?

While earned media can sometimes arise naturally when your company does something newsworthy, more often it’s the result of research and public relations. This means that it requires a lot more work than simply publishing it on your own website. Ultimately, the biggest benefit of earned media is that consumers know that all companies post positive content about themselves. You know that the articles and posts on your own site aim to make your products and services sound great, and you will see everything as at least slightly biased. On the other hand, at Earned Media, readers see that objective editors and website owners believe your content is worth publishing or your business is worth discussing. You know that the opinions on your own site are more unbiased than anything else and that the writers have no reason to post false things about your brand.

Get started on your company’s earned media strategy with these five steps:

Example #1: Word-of-mouth recommendations of a brand

We’ll start with the most common and effective way your brand can get mentions – word of mouth.
You should never underestimate the power of word of mouth as it can be up to 5x more effective than paid advertising.
Word of mouth usually happens in chats, forums and social networking groups when people recommend products to their peers.

Example #2: Online review from a customer

Another common and valuable source of earned media is the organic reviews of your products that your customers leave online.
Positive reviews (like those found on review sites like Flipkart, iPhone, and Amazon) are also critical to the success of your products, as they influence more than 90% of customers’ purchasing decisions.

Example #3: Unpaid media coverage

Sometimes brands work with traditional media and pay them to promote their products with press coverage and mentions.
This isn’t always the case, however, as the media can also talk about you organically without having to pay them advertising fees if you have a story big and interesting enough.

Example #4: User generated content on social media

We live in the social media age, with 4.6 billion people using at least one type of social media website by 2022.
one of the massive amount of content these users create on social media (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) we also find many brand mentions and shoutouts.

Example #5: Unpaid product reviews

Aside from sharing their opinions and thoughts about products on social media, some people take it a step further to create full product reviews and testimonials in the form of videos or blog posts. Product reviews (including summaries) are a fairly common form of content for social media influencers, and our example is about one of them.