Earned media

The idea of Earned Media is compelling. Very compelling and comes when you create a compelling customer experience. It saves you a lot of money, gets you strong referrals from your customers and has a direct contribution to your bottom line.

Yet the reality is to get some to talks about you and share your brand with others, you have to earn the right. You cannot buy it.

Focus on earned media not buying media

And the focus of most marketing departments has been on buying rather than earning their communications. They spray the communication strategy as far and as wide as possible and hoping like hell it works. This has been the focus of big budget, big advertising strategies.

This idea really did work at one stage but no longer. Your customers trust and attention has become hard to capture. This is why word-of-mouth marketing is so important. It is what earned media is. Ironically it has only really been the industrial or business to business marketing that has focused so heavily on referral.

Socialisation and engagement

Don’t confuse this idea with technology. It is not about Twitter campaigns or Facebook pages and pushing top down broadcast messages through these tool. Today your media is about creating contextually relevant content that connects and builds a community

It is about gaining your customers trust and inspiring them enough so that they want to pass on your message. It’s about becoming a story teller and helping your customer to tell their own story. It’s about building a Tribe.

Possible the biggest thing for marketers is that you have to give up control, the idea of control and everything it means to you. Hard? No doubt.

So how do you create earned media?

Build it and they will come is a dream. A Hollywood story detached from reality. People don’t wake up in the morning looking to find you. They are not willing to share their earned media by being excited about what you are going say or post via your social media network. They’re worried about their problems and buy what they need rather than what you have to sell.

This makes building a referral marketing machine that results in free earned media a well designed process.

It must create an experience that blows your customers socks off, create customer loyalty and get them to talk about you. It’s about turning your ordinary customers into raving fans.

When you get this right, you build a network that leverages the many different brand connections and allows your customers to tell their story to express themselves and to fulfil a most basic human need:

• The need to connect
• The need to be important
• The need for recognition

What will make people refer you?

When the customer experience is exciting, different, relevant, standouts, authentic, transparent, fun, excitement. The combination of these, any of these.

Your next steps on how to create earned media:

Here are a series of post on customer experience that will help define and show some customer experience how to’s

• Why paid media will only give you a 1.5% return on your investment
• Understanding the media eco-system
• Why focusing on technology is bad for your marketing
• What is Social All about?
• How do my customers socialise?
• Why viral (earned media) campaigns fail
• How to create a viral campaign that works

How to create a referral marketing system

You can subscribe to our email series on how to create a referral marketing system:

Anything else?

If there is anything else you need, please drop us a comment below or contact us