Estimated reading time: 4 mins
To reach your target audience and see maximum returns on your content marketing investments, it’s critical to leverage the power of owned, earned, and paid media channels. This is especially true for companies using content marketing to reach the pharmaceutical industry, who must overcome fierce competition, target highly specialized keywords, and strategically distribute content to reach the right audience.
Businesses that serve pharma companies have the opportunity to use a converged media approach that combines the three types of media channels to amplify content marketing efforts.
I. Overview of Owned, Paid, and Earned Channels
Once you’ve developed content, you need to determine how you will distribute it to your target audience. Understanding the channels for distributing, or amplifying, your content will maximize your reach (and ROI). Channels for distribution can be broken into 3 main categories: Owned, Paid, and Earned.
“Instead of categorizing your marketing efforts by how you acquire the traffic, think instead about who owns that property… Categorizing your efforts into owned, earned, and paid is about identifying how your content achieves a seat at the audience table,” writes Katy Katz, Search Engine Journal.
Owned Media
Owned media includes any channels your company has direct control over, like the company’s website, LinkedIn page, and Twitter account. Since you own the website or account, you determine what to publish and when.
“While owned media content can take on a variety of forms -- blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, etc. -- the primary goal of this content is to continue providing value to leads as they move down the funnel. These assets offer a more controlled -- but not overly promotional -- message about your company,” writes Kelsey Meyer, HubSpot.
Paid Media
Paid media channels can overlap owned media, but by paying for exposure on these sites you can exponentially expand the reach of your content. LinkedIn’s sponsored content and ads, for example, provide multiple options for narrowing down the audience that will see your material. This enables you to launch campaigns highly targeted to your audience.
While paid media is valuable for generating interest, it requires engaging content to be successful. “Paid media, more and more, is all about generating an audience for owned media. Paid’s greatest virtue is that it gets attention and it’s fast. But it works best if it’s getting attention for something specific—if it’s pointing people to a piece of content that can deepen their knowledge, understanding and emotional connection to the advertiser’s brand,” writes Kirk Cheyfitz, Huffington Post. Having “good, genuinely engaging, audience-pleasing” content on your owned channels for paid media to link back to is critical for maximum exposure and ROI.
Earned Media
Earned media is arguably the most important of the 3 options but also the most challenging to obtain because it relies on the efforts of others on behalf of your brand. Any time someone mentions your company in social media, writes a review about your products/services, or links to your website content is earned media.
Earned media is a free way to drive significant traffic to your website and support conversion goals but requires fostering the right relationships and working to get clients, industry influencers, and other outlets to mention your brand positively.
“Earned media is a scalable way to grow while driving down your customer acquisition costs but you have to monitor it because you don’t have complete control over the message that’s being shared,” (SEJ).
II. The Relationship between Owned, Paid, and Earned Media
The Huffington Post nicely summarizes how owned, paid, and earned channels relate to each other, “Paid jumpstarts owned. Owned sustains earned. Earned drives cost down and effectiveness up.”
Using each type of media in conjunction with the other types creates a synergy that boosts overall content success. “[Study] after study shows that these strategies are so much more effective when used concurrently toward an overarching strategic plan…the return on investment will far exceed the sum of the parts alone” (SEJ).
We call this synergistic approach to content distribution converged media. Integrating owned, paid, and earned media into your content marketing strategies yields the maximum reach possible. A converged media strategy enables you to leverage all the tools from the platforms your audience frequents to create, measure, and refine effective distribution campaigns.
Converged media requires “[creating] engaging, customer-oriented, and problem-solving content through owned media, with paid efforts, [getting] that content strategically placed where it can be spotted by your target audience, and finally, [earning] the audience’s trust and support and [turning] them into your brand advocates,” writes Daniel Newman, Forbes.
III. Harnessing the Power of Owned, Paid, and Earned Media to Promote your Business to Pharma Companies
To harness the power of owned, paid, and earned media, it’s important to prioritize your content distribution strategies so that you share the right message with the right audience at the right time but don’t overextend or overspend.
Finding ways to combine distribution channels and leverage their synergies will ultimately deliver the highest ROI. For example, sponsoring content (paid media) you’ve published on LinkedIn (owned media) will give your content extra juice and may even lead to earned media in the form of likes, comments, and shares.
The best converged media strategy meets your company’s promotion needs by reaching and engaging your target audience.
IV. How Pharma Acumen Can Help
For clients that are targeting business with pharmaceutical companies, a content marketing strategy that uses owned, paid, and earned media distribution channels will be most effective. Our team has worked to help clients develop content their target audiences find engaging and increase the reach of content through each media type.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help your company effectively reach pharma companies or visit our content marketing page to explore our strategies and capabilities.