A Beginner’s Guide To The 3 Types Of Digital Media

What Are The Three Types Of Digital Media?

To run a successful business today you need a strategic digital marketing plan to make sure your branding and marketing will reach as many existing and potential customers as possible.

There are 3 types of digital media:

• Owned Media: Any online asset that you control like your website or social media channels
• Paid Media: Promoting your online content to improve traffic to your owned media assets
• Earned Media: Customers recommending you by word of mouth or through social media

These 3 types of digital media marketing will boost your audience reach. Of course, it will vary the way your target audience encounters your brand. If you want to boost brand awareness and increase sales, you want a combination of all 3 to blend them into new marketing strategies.

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The 3 Types Of Digital Media

1. Owned Media

Owned media is any online asset that you control and direct, and which is unique to your brand. These types of digital media platforms include your website, blogs, social media channels, mobile site, infographics and eBooks.

If you optimize any of your owned media for search engine marketing, your brand will be present when and where prospective customers search for topics relevant to what you’re offering.

The more owned media you create, the more visible your brand will be. This will make your brand authoritative, increasing your ranking on search engine results pages. And, if your content appears on the first page of search engines, this means your owned media sites will attract higher engagement and shares. This also means you’re gaining earned media (more on that below).

Owned media offers you the opportunity to control the conversation surrounding your business. This enables your brand to maintain an ongoing and appealing conversation. However, your digital content strategy needs to focus on being informative, relevant and valuable. If you publish content that has no value or is insincere, your customers can change the channel and stop listening.

To make the most out of owned media, you must be committed to delivering valuable content consistently to maintain the trust and build a loyal customer base.

2. Paid Media

Paid media involves promoting your online content to improve traffic to owned media assets, which drives earned media. It includes display ads, paid search ads, Facebook ads, and commercials.

Although paid media is an expense for your growing brand, it exposes your content to a wider audience. If you use paid media strategically, you’ll drive the right customers to your owned media assets. Paid media gives you explicit control over who sees your business’s advertising.

Having said that, using paid media can be daunting. The platform is already cluttered, which means consumers can easily overlook your advertisements. Also, with new technology, it’s easy for consumers to block your ads, which lowers their response rate.

Paid media has less impact on organic search results compared to owned and earned media. However, digital media advertising can offer significant and measurable results within your search campaigns, supporting your overall digital marketing strategy.

If you play your cards right with brand advertising, you can also successfully expand your business to new markets. It’s also your chance to stand out if your business is new and needs more exposure.

3. Earned Media

Earned media is free advertising generated by your customers. It’s when customers become the channel of your marketing by word of mouth or through social media, personal blogs, reviews, testimonials, shares, or reposts recommending your products or services.

This form of recommendation or review is the best endorsement your brand can have. In fact, more than 90% of consumers worldwide say they trust word of mouth or recommendations from family and friends more than any other form of advertising. Also, positive remarks from customers are more trusted than your advertisements because customers have nothing to gain from praising your brand.

What your customers say about your products or services is as important as who says it. For instance, if you attract the attention of top influencers in the industry, this will improve your authority in the market and your search engine rankings will improve.

Earned media is an effective way to grow your brand while cutting down your customer acquisition costs. However, you have to track it regularly because you don’t have complete control over what’s being shared and said about your brand.

To get the most out of earned media, you must have a response plan to handle negative feedback. Sometimes, negative earned media can offer you the chance to display excellent customer service skills, turning a crisis into an asset.

Strong organic rankings on search engines and high-quality content are the forces that drive earned media. This means the content you publish should be informative and valuable to generate earned media.

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You have to diversify your digital marketing media to achieve success. Once you are able to master these 3 types of digital media, your company and brand will have a powerful digital marketing strategy. But without a clearly defined plan and set of goals, your business will drift aimlessly along with no clear roadmap for where you’re heading.

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