Promotion, especially when marketing on social media, is extremely important in the marketing and advertising world. After all, what good are the great actions and exciting content of your business if others aren’t there to hear about it? A healthy social media promotion approach combines three different types of promotion: paid, owned, and earned. Confused as to what these mean? Let us review.
Owned Promotion
Owned promotions are self-generated items that you distribute through channels that you control, such as your website, blog, social media accounts and email lists. The most important factor to consider when creating an owned promotion is what platform that you are releasing your content on. Your content should be tailored to whichever platform you are using, and the audience you are expecting to reach with said platform. As an example, detailed visuals work great on Pinterest, but if you were to post something on Twitter, you would want to pull a specific detail from the visual to tweet in order to draw people in. Whereas, if you were creating content for your blog, you may want to use the visual and then go into even more detail and add sections.
The key to success when using owned promotion is to produce content unique and relevant to your company that will drive engagement and action from your audience.
Paid Promotion
Paid promotion is just what its name suggests- promotion obtained through paid advertising. This is the ideal strategy for content that you want a large amount of people to see. Paid promotion includes forms of traditional advertising, such as print, radio, television, and outdoor ads, but it also includes some aspects of online marketing, such as promoted Facebook posts, tweets, and pins, as well as SEM and paid search. Online paid promotion is actually a mix between paid and owned promotion, since you are typically promoting things from the previously mentioned channels that you control.
When choosing which posts to boost through online paid promotion, go for posts that you know will really resonate with your audience, whether it be through their emotions, humor, or thought provoking content. These types of posts tend to result in more interaction with your other posts, such as likes, comments, and shares, which takes your paid promotion even further.
Paying to promote content online doesn’t JUST give you the benefit of reaching more people. Because this content IS reaching more people, you will begin to see patterns emerge depending on what content is more engaging. This results in knowing how to create organic content that will inspire more engagement, thus driving more traffic.
Earned Promotion
Earned promotion is positive recognition from efforts other than the ones previously mentioned. Positive word-of-mouth mentions, whether it be in person or on social media websites, is the most common form of earned promotion. This type of promotion means the most to consumers because they see it as trustworthy, but it is also the hardest type of promotion to get.
One way that you can prepare for your content to generate earned promotion is by letting influential and relevant people know that you have created something new and interesting and requesting that they share it. Additionally, you can embed things into your content that will make it more “shareable”, such as interesting and unique visuals, social sharing buttons for easy sharing, and calls to action.
Now that we’ve given a run-down of what owned, paid, and earned promotion are, we want to express how important it is to have all three. In order to effectively implement content marketing into your business, you will need to have a set plan of how to implement these three different approaches to promotion, as they all go hand-in-hand and all aid each other in promoting your content further. Always remember, creating exceptional content is only half the battle. Figuring out how to reach the largest amount of your target audience is what will really take you far. Any additional insights? Feel free to leave them in the comments!
