Owned Media & Digital Marketing Strategy

Owned media is the content your brand has full ownership of and control over. Examples of owned media include your brand’s website, blog, email newsletters, and social media channels. Owned media is essentially original, created content. Content should be curated with the foundational focus of building more authentic and longer lasting relationships with both existing and potential customers. A secondary goal should be to earn media; in other words, generate enough user engagement through your content to garner a surplus of free, positive PR. Owned media is generally used to fuel paid media and paid search. Without quality content, content marketing initiatives are not as effective. Without a strong website and persuasive landing pages, your pay-per-click campaigns won’t be nearly as effective. Even social media campaigns won’t have nearly as much reach and impact without a growing online community across multiple channels.   A comprehensive digital marketing strategy is one that focuses on owned media as the bridge between paid and earned media. To quote a previous post, Clarifying Omnichannel & Multichannel Marketing Strategies, “omnichannel crosses the bridge by driving in multiple lanes while multichannel drives in the lane of its choosing to cross the bridge.” If owned media is the bridge, an omnichannel approach to optimization means that your content is relevant and easily visible to your audience in the same ways regardless of channel and/or device. From a multichannel perspective, optimization means its channel and device friendly. You’ll use the same copy to communicate the same point, but you’ll make sure it displays appropriately and translates effectively in the right context.   If you have any examples of how you’ve leveraged your owned media to your digital marketing benefit, please contribute by letting us know about what you’ve learned in a comment below.