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Types of Media and How to Use Them

With a growing plethora of digital media platforms to choose from, each with its own unique features, it can be tricky to identify and utilise the best-fit platform effectively. One of the first steps in choosing a type of media is establishing the goal that you want to achieve. Lead generation is often a prime objective as it is most likely to lead to actual sales. Once you have determined the goal, choose the media platform that will best help you achieve this goal. As part of our vision to make digital marketing simple, the Black Snow Group has created an overview of the various digital media types (Owned, Paid and Earned) as well as how to use them for lead generation.

Owned Media

Owned media includes any digital media of which your brand has direct ownership. Your brand has the sole right and discretion to publish on these platforms and this includes your website and social media pages. Social media pages are initially used to build brand awareness when these platforms are first established, especially Facebook and Instagram. After this, specific target audiences are determined and brand recall and affinity from brand awareness is leveraged. This allows the brand to target lookalike audiences (individuals with similar interests and income levels), to individuals that are already fans and followers of your brand. This creates a higher likelihood that the targeted audience will be interested in, or looking for, your products or services. The type of content that you would use on these platforms would be heavily focused on the offering. The main aim being to get the audience to click through to your website (and preferably to the brands e-commerce store, booking form or contact page). Twitter is used slightly differently, as it is mostly used to cover newsworthy events and leverage influencers that use your brand to build brand trust. Although Twitter qualifies as owned media as it belongs directly to you, its function of building brand trust ties in closely with the use of earned media for lead generation.

Paid Media

Any digital media that you pay to use is considered paid media. This includes Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising and Facebook Post Boosting.

With PPC advertising (Google Search), you would pay a fee each time an advert is clicked. Google Search is arguably the biggest driver of leads as consumers are already searching for a product or service and are either in the information gathering stage or 75% of the way through their purchasing journey. This type of digital marketing includes search engine advertising, which allows advertisers to pay a fee for ad placement in a search engines’ sponsored links when individuals search for a keyword related to the business offering. Once keywords have been generated for your brand, an Ad group is created for different types of keywords. Ad groups contain elements such as branded keywords and generic keyword groups. It is also possible to target audiences with certain demographics, interests, affinities, locations and specific URL destinations. Advertisers that have a good Google Search strategy and content that reflects the business offering have a higher quality score and get featured more prominently and higher up on the list of search results. Your quality score is based on the click through rate to your website, relevance of your offering to the keywords as well as the landing page that you direct the traffic to.

Part of PPC advertising includes display marketing which comes in the form of banner adverts in the digital space. Display marketing is especially effective when your brand is visually appealing, and its offering can be clearly discerned within a single image. Banner advertising also uses demographics, interests, affinities and locations as a means of targeting particular audiences. Placement of banner advertising is usually very effective and display marketing makes use of a bidding strategy to obtain the best placement at the lowest cost. Display marketing is very effective for remarketing and lead generation. Remarketing is when individuals have seen your brand but haven’t as yet generated any leads and an advertisement (such as a banner), reminds them of your brand with an enticing offer to visit your website and become a lead.

Facebook Boosting allows a post to be seen by a wider audience than just those that have liked your business page on Facebook by “boosting it”. It allows you to set a targeted audience for the post with particular demographics, interests and locations within a particular area to a set budget. Boosted posts for lead generation are generally focused on specific offerings that would entice individuals to click through to your website.

Earned Media

Earned media includes user generated social media mentions, PR, and content being displayed or picked up by a third party. The additional mentions by third parties also increases your brands SEO ranking which assists with organic search results for the brand. Earned media can only be acquired through good strategic and public relation practices on social media and cannot be bought or published directly by you. The brand trust and affinity that earned media creates can be leveraged for lead generation.

One of the greatest benefits of the evolution of marketing in the digital space is the development of metrics that allow accurate evaluation of the effectiveness of your online marketing. For both owned and paid media, there are a wide array of detailed analytics that will allow you to determine if you are meeting your goals as well as the reach of your advertising and interest that your content is generating. It is important to make use of these tools to determine what content is meeting your goals and what is not. The budget or the timing of the posts may also need to change to improve efficiency.

Understanding what content to put forward onto which platform at what time and how much budget to put into it can be challenging. That is why Black Snow Digital boasts a full team of digital media experts with years of experience and knowledge. We can assist in creating a comprehensive plan for digital content across all media types with the know-how to use them all to best effect. We are focused on accurate and measurable results without the guesswork. Contact us for lead generation that’s as simple as black and white.