Earned and Paid Media Require Different Strategies and Inspire Distinct Results

Two local tech leaders share their take on earned vs. paid media — and how both can elevate your marketing strategy.
Written by Olivia McClure
April 27, 2021Updated: April 27, 2021

The importance of paid and earned media is evident to savvy marketers — yet not every company invests in each one equally. 

The focus of an organization’s media strategy depends largely on their goals and strengths. For instance, some companies might be more interested in boosting their social advertising, so they decide to put more emphasis on paid media. 

Metric Theory is one such company. According to VP of Marketing Josh McClauss, the firm pays greater attention to paid media efforts simply because they align more closely with their skill sets. 

“Every marketing team needs to lean into their strengths and build plans that are most compatible with them,” McClauss said. 

Yet not all organizations focus their energy on one specific channel. In fact, many companies strive to strike a careful balance between earned and paid media in order to reap the benefits of both. 

Built In Colorado checked in with McClauss and another local tech leader to learn how they use earned and paid media to elevate their marketing strategies. 

 

Stacey Clermont

Blue Moon Digital is a consultancy that supports companies along their digital transformation journey, offering services such as social media influencer marketing and paid search. 

 

In terms of earned vs. paid media, where do you invest more of your time, budget and attention, and what do those campaigns look like?

I focus more on earned media, but sometimes it's best to look at the current landscape to determine where we should focus our attention. For a quick promotion or a short sales cycle, prioritizing paid media makes a lot of sense, especially with a very trendy topic. If we're looking to own a space or have long-lasting visibility, then earned media is the way to go — focusing on a multitiered organic strategy that incorporates social media, content marketing, video and site optimization.

When clients are looking for performance marketing tactics, we will look to paid media channels to help resolve the need to drive immediate revenue or results. We recommend a breakout to support a multichannel strategy between affiliate, display, paid social and paid search.

We see an opportunity for earned and paid media to align, especially in the world of organic and paid search. Our aim would be for those channels to align behind a common keyword strategy. Making sure those terms are in lockstep is key to clients’ long-term success.

 

What tools or data helped you shape this approach and determine where your time and money was best spent?

When it comes to analysis of a channel breakout, the company goes through a lengthy audit process when evaluating prospective clients. We lean on tools such as Moat Pro, The Search Monitor, Google Ads, BrightEdge, Semrush and Majestic. We also have partnerships with companies like Facebook and Google to aid in benchmarking data, competitive intel and any upcoming opportunity available within things like alphas and betas. Our audits also determine where a prospective client falls within the digital transformation scale. We evaluate the complexities of their program and how far along they are in the process of becoming data-driven. We also use proprietary tools like our Universal Campaign Coder and visualizations powered through our partnership with Domo to pull together benchmarking and quick insights on historical performance and opportunity. Additionally, we use predictive modeling to determine how channels will continue to contribute to a bigger piece of the pie in the future.

 

We see an opportunity for earned and paid media to align, especially in the world of organic and paid search.”

 

How do you integrate these different efforts into one cohesive marketing strategy

Through our automated visualizations and benchmarking capabilities, we can quickly evaluate how clients and prospective clients are performing compared to competitors and general industry trends. This allows us to be proactive in our approaches to paid and earned budget breakouts and their ability to make the most of each client program. Earned and paid media have always gone together. Every place that earned media can live has an opportunity for a paid placement, and the real question is how much to dial up each type. For social, it depends on the ability to penetrate. Social platforms have reduced organic messaging so much that you have to have a robust paid campaign to get any visibility. For search marketing, it depends on the keyword difficulty and search volume. Each channel needs to be evaluated individually to determine the opportunities and then adjust focus and budget accordingly.

 

Josh McClauss
Vice President of Marketing • Metric Theory, A Media.Monks Company

Metric Theory is a digital marketing agency that specializes in a wide range of services, from paid social and paid search to programmatic buying and production of video and display ads.

 

In terms of earned vs. paid media, where do you invest more of your time, budget and attention, and what do those campaigns look like?

We're specialists in digital advertising, so obviously our potential customers expect that we would put more emphasis on paid media. We practice what we preach to clients, offering advertising that meets our ideal prospects at different stages of a very long buying process in the right places and with the right offers.

We'll invest in content syndication with publishers that share our key audience to build mindshare. Even if we can't get someone to download our content, it's beneficial to work with the publisher brand to build credibility and relate ours back to relevant needs in the mind of the user. We also do a lot of social advertising on LinkedIn promoting our guides and, of course, search ads to capture intent.

We don't spend as much time on earned media, not because we don't think it's important, but because we don't have specialists in it like we do in paid media. Every marketing team needs to lean into their strengths and build plans that are most compatible with them.

 

What tools or data helped you shape this approach and determine where your time and money was best spent?

Ultimately, sales are what matter most. As much as we're able to, we track initiatives based on metrics that we can compare across programs, such as the cost of qualified leads or meetings booked, all the way to the contract value of new clients, all of which lives in Salesforce. If we don't have data all the way down to sales, or it's too early to know, mid-funnel metrics give us something to make decisions with.

For paid media, one big breakthrough has come from tracking paid search attribution even when it's not the last click before a lead. Our clients' evaluation processes can last for several months and being able to know some important leads interacted with search ads first or at some point has helped us budget more appropriately and drive growth. 

The contribution of earned media can be harder to tie to leads and sales, and when it does, it tends to be smaller for us. Our ideal clients are going to tap into their networks, and we believe that paid media provides a halo effect to that and other ways of searching that increase our odds of being included in a search.

 

For paid media, one big breakthrough has come from tracking paid search attribution even when it's not the last click before a lead.”

 

How do you integrate these different efforts into one cohesive marketing strategy?

We like the organization and amplification that comes with running coordinated campaigns. All campaigns are planned to be multi-channel and interdisciplinary, with a goal of reaching a slice of our total audience and promoting a specific service or building awareness in an area of need. We'll typically try to launch them at the peak time of interest for the intended audience.

For example, we arranged a campaign on the cusp of summer and fall aimed at e-commerce marketers preparing for the holidays. It included paid programs like social ads and event sponsorships in addition to new content such as a webinar series that fueled earned media via social and a customizable holiday planning calendar. We also like to design initiatives with business partners to amplify campaigns further. That campaign led to some limited opportunities then, but we're actually seeing more interest from retailers now, which falls in line with what we've learned about the length and complexity of our customer journey at this stage of our business.

 

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