Digital marketing, like web presence marketing, leverages all opportunities online. Facing all of those mounting options is daunting—to say the least—making it essential to create a digital marketing strategy to assist with the onslaught and sift through the confusion.
In short, media convergence is a culmination of all marketing mediums into one cosmic communication across every platform and medium: TV, radio, print, the whole shebang. The Digital Marketing Convergence is the culmination of all marketing mediums available to you on the Internet.
At Post Launch, we strive to propel our client’s owned media, earned media, and paid media into one cosmic digital marketing trifecta. Learn what any and all of those terms mean and why it’s important to your digital marketing strategy.
The Digital Marketing Convergence Unnecessarily Exhaustive Lowdown
What is Owned Media?
Owned media is your house, your property online. That real estate you purchase from GoDaddy every year, that website you labored and wept over to create, those social media profiles you’re not quite sure what do with yet…anything your business claims online that has your business’s branding on it is considered owned. All your web properties, blog sites, social profiles, and directories are considered owned media.
Examples of your owned media:
- Web properties
- Website
- Subdomains
- Social media channels
- Syndication profiles
- Business Directories
Owned media is what you own online.
Why Owned Media matters to digital marketing strategy
You know what owned media means? Then own it. The importance of a digital marketing strategy is not how many owned medias you can communicate through but how consistent your brand’s voice and message is.
Making the most of your owned media means:
- Creating and optimizing your SEO and customer-friendly website
- Creating and optimizing your social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…)
- Creating and optimizing—
You get the idea. And remember: Branding requires consistency.
Owned Media: Start with your story and build from there.
What is Earned Media?
This one’s pretty self-explanatory as well. Earned media is the building, managing, and expanding of your brand across the Internet. You don’t gain visibility just by showing up. You have to earn it.
Examples of earned media:
- Content marketing (blog writing, web content, press releases, etc.)
- Social media marketing (social posting, management, engagement, amplification, etc.)
- Email marketing (marketing automation, drip campaigns, etc.)
Buying the house is often the easiest part. The difficult part is the upkeep, the mortgage, the renovations. Owned and earned media partnership’s longevity hinges on earned media’s efforts to bring new audiences, maintain the upkeep of search engine’s best practices with current keyword strategies, and foster fresh presence across the galactic web. These two are the bedrock to a digital marketing strategy.
Earned media is what you do to earn your spot on the Internet.
Why Earned Media matters to digital marketing strategy
Many make the mistake of creating their website, wiping their hands clean, and walking away from their owned profiles. They leave with the mentality that if you build it, they will come. When in reality, they build it and only the dust visits.
Earned Media: Share your story and they will come.
What is Paid Media?
We hope you’re getting the hang of this lingo and have probably already predicted the definition of this next media. Paid media is any advertising you spend to bring people to your owned profiles. If we continue with the house analogy, paid media in this scenario would be hiring the interior designer or contractor to spruce up the place. Paid media is the fast food of the web presence marketing arena: Fast results but no lasting health benefits.
Examples of paid media:
- PPC
- Adwords
- Display Ads
- YouTube Preroll
- Retargeting
- Paid influencers
- Facebook advertising
Don’t get us wrong; paid media can benefit a lot of businesses online, but it’s not a long-term solution to your online presence. If you want to live to the ripe old age of 97, you need a healthy, sustaining diet of earned media.
Paid media is what you pay to gain new visibility.
Why Paid Media matters to digital marketing strategy
After you’ve built the house and you worked hard to decorate it yourself and maintain the backyard, you want to throw a party, but you don’t have any friends. Or, you have some friends, but they’re just too busy with their 2.5 kids. What do you do? You hire a party planner.
Paid media matters to getting new visits to your owned media and also provides valuable data on how much it costs for you to acquire that customer (or friend).
Paid Media: Pay to play, not to win.
Digital Marketing Convergence: A Strategy Framework
Now you’ve got the holy digital trinity: Owned, Earned, and Paid. It converges into one impressive, lasting online presence. Leveraging all three is the ultimate Internet marketing strategy.
The catch? All three require three (incidentally) important things: Quality, Time, and Money.
Do these examples look familiar? They should because they look a lot like this…
There’s an important connection we’re attempting to make here: Unlike the “pick two” scenario, when it comes to digital marketing, you can have all three. Like the “pick two” scenario, you want to start with owning and earning before you start paying.
Start owning and earning before you start paying.
Moon’s Eye View: How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
We’ve addressed what makes up digital marketing, simplifying it to three objective categories. Here’s how to formulate a plain sailing digital marketing strategy:
Phase I: Owned Media
The Owned Media phase is focused on establishing, optimizing, and researching your owned media to ensure the foundation of your campaign before you began the next phase. Review your web presence marketing scorecard for a checklist:
Set-up and research
- Research and prioritize audience and industry-relevant keyword terms and longtail phrases
- Create site architecture
- Create keyword mapping of target search terms
- Evaluate and audit site for identifiable website and SEO fixes
- Update website with necessary user-friendly fixes with prioritization of conversion opportunities
- Make Search Engine Optimization fixes (meta titles, page titles, meta descriptions, etc.)
- Clean up major business profiles with correct business NAP
- Research and identify all SEO opportunities for the brand online
Reporting
- Establish success metrics
- Evaluate all efforts thus far
- Check your analytics (Google Analytics or whatever reporting software)
Before diving into the next phase, research and strategize what content creation to prioritize, content that will coincide with the keywords researched and necessary to build a formidable owned media foundation.
Phase II: Earned Media
Just because you’ve finished one leg of the race doesn’t mean you slow your pace. Continue to optimize your owned media profiles to make sure it’s up to date with search engine best practices. Review your earned media checklist:
Ongoing SEO
- Update current website with relevant search engine friendly content (ongoing)
- Make necessary Search Engine Optimized fixes to the Main Website (ongoing)
Content marketing
- Plan a monthly content strategy (based off your Phase I research)
- Create weekly content pieces (blog articles, onsite pages, video blogs, infographics, etc.)
- Syndicate posted content pieces to drive link building (outreach, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, etc.)
Social media marketing
- Coordinate social posts with posted content
- Post to all relevant social profiles almost daily (and probably a few times a day)
Email marketing
- Create audience buckets and develop a drip campaign
- Create a bi-weekly newsletter to keep potential and current customers engaged
Reporting
- Evaluate all efforts thus far
- Evaluate content success
- Check your analytics (Google or whatever reporting software)
The biggest piece of your digital marketing strategy pie will be content creation, the heavy work going to content creation, optimization, syndication, and investigation.
Phase III: Paid Media
One mistake you don’t want to make is to start paying for website visits when your site and brand isn’t ready. Don’t send invitations to a party you don’t have. That being said, once you’ve got the party in place, then you start sending out invitations. Review your paid media checklist:
Set-up and research
- Research which platform to advertise on to retrieve a new audience
- Establish budget
- Create relevant artwork for display
- Create ad copy for optimal conversions
- Develop user-friendly landing pages for lead generation
Ad campaign
- Monitor CPC (Cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition)
- Manage ads’ ongoing results and budget
Reporting
- Evaluate all efforts thus far
- Evaluate specific ad platforms and measure success metrics
- Check your analytics (Google or whatever reporting software)
Why is digital marketing convergence important?
First, you now have a big picture of all your online opportunities, their individual buckets, and how they can converge into one cavernous space of potential customers. More importantly, you understand the phases and purposes of each media and how to use them to your advantage.
Digital marketing doesn’t have to be rocket science. It starts with understanding your audience (through buyer personas or customer analysis) and building off of what you already own, working to earn more customers, and paying to get some attention you deserve.
Digital marketing strategy: Own through establishing your story, earn through sharing your story, and pay to further that story to infinity and beyond.
Owned, Earned, and Paid Media Services
While this is a generic, unabridged digital marketing strategy, this all takes time, expertise, and yeah, resources (::cough:: money ::cough::). It’s a big a scary galaxy out there. Don’t jump in without a helmet, or a team of nerds with stellar digital strategy spunk.
