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Learn how to drive traffic and sales using Klout
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Earned or Paid Media? Why You Need Both to Drive Sales
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Contents
1 Intro
2 Earned media still inspires the most trust
3 Best practices that empower your earned media game plan
5 Paid media is still the most powerful way to reach a target audience
8 Best practices that empower your paid media game plan
10 Earned media plus paid media drives maximum impact
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Intro
Companies that focus heavily on either paid media or earned
media are losing out on the potential to fully leverage their
marketing efforts. Why? Because despite the popularity and
significant power of earned media, it presents challenges that
only paid media can solve. The simple truth? You need both to
reach the audiences you want, create brand trust, and drive
sales. Here’s why.
Organic content tends to have a low reach on Facebook (~6%
of followers) and Twitter (30% of followers). Getting people
to share your content helps you reach more people, but only
a small percentage of posts get shared widely by a small
percentage of people (According to Klout, only 5% of people
create 50% of the content on social). And since organic
content can’t be well targeted, most organic content is very
broad in nature. It is difficult to create a brand-to-customer
relationship this way, even though people are more apt to
trust earned media. In fact, statistics show that 92% of people
trust earned media more than any other type of advertising
while 49% say they trust paid media, reports Nielsen1.
Getting content in the right place is also increasingly difficult
as social networks evolve and grow. Brands struggle to develop
strategies that work across a constantly evolving social eco-
system. Measurement and reporting of earned media is also
challenging as data is typically aggregated to provide topline
metrics, i.e. impressions and engagements. It’s difficult to
extract actionable insights from that and even more difficult to
implement learnings from one campaign to the next.
Brands that have tipped the scale too heavily toward earned
media or paid media struggle to see the results they want –
and risk potentially missing out on segments of consumers
they could be reaching. By developing a holistic approach to
marketing that leverages both earned and paid media, you
can improve brand trust and drive sales.
49% of people say
they trust paid media
92% of people trust earned media more than any other type of advertising
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Earned media still inspires the most trust
Earned media has long been heralded as one of the most
powerful mediums that propel consumers to act. It is
relevant, drives impact and sales, and cannot be owned
or bought. Which makes it even more valuable, and for
marketers, sometimes elusive to control. Traditionally, earned
media has taken the form of word-of-mouth or mentions in
the media. “To get people talking” has been the point of action
for marketers. However, with customers going online to
research products before they choose a brand, marketers are
focusing on how to reach the right people to share a powerful
message in the right places so it will drive brand awareness
and increase buying consideration.
Earned media creates trusted, authentic content. In light of this, custom, user-generated content is one of
the highest currencies in brand marketing. Why? Because
when consumers create the content themselves (blog posts,
reviews on Amazon and Yelp, Tweets and Facebook posts,
comments in forums) and share it, they inspire trust within
their circle of influence. People trust friends, family and those
they consider to be experts in an area more than they trust
brand messaging. So user-generated content that is shared
within trusted circles is powerful in influencing people’s
brand considerations. In fact, user-generated content has
been shown to generate a four-fold increase in brand lift,
according to Neilson’s Brand Effect Study2.
Earned media ripples out naturally.
Lastly, when people create content they share it on the
networks that make sense to them, which leads to content
showing up where it’s natural for it to be. As people share
it with their trusted circle, it ripples out to wider rings
of audience. There is no throttling of content based on
algorithms. This natural flow of content means that it feels
more authentic to audiences as it comes from people they
trust and not from the brands themselves.
In light of these factors, today’s marketers are looking at how
earned media can become an integrated part of their larger
marketing strategy. And this is where it gets a bit tricky. User
generated content has to be, well, created by users, but it is
being repurposed by brands and used across channels. The
question is what types of earned media work best for cross-
channel marketing and how can you drive that?
Visual is the name of the sharing game. Consumers latch on to content that is easily shared. As you
consider what type of user-generated content to repurpose,
think of what will grab their attention? What will get them
sharing? Visuals – videos, Vines, photos, infographics – these are
bite-size and shareable. As you look at the consumer-generated
content available to you, consider how you can repurpose it
across your other larger cross-channel marketing campaigns.
Leading up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Coca-Cola encouraged fans to submit soccer selfies, which were included in a massive Photomosaic flag.
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Best practices that empower your earned media game plan
Best practices that empower your earned media game plan. There are numerous ways to engage consumers to create
earned media and also to combine it with paid media to
empower it even more. The ultimate purpose is to inspire
influencers among consumers to further engage and drive
organic sharing. Here are some best practices to help you
generate earned media.
Know your audience. You have to know who your audience
is, which networks they engage on the most and the topics
that interest them. What are the demographics, geographic
details, what motivates them to engage? There are a variety of
tools out there to helps brands gain insight into their audience.
For example, Klout helps brands identify and connect with
trusted content creators based on Klout Score, Klout Topics,
demographics, as well as geographic data. This allows you to
create highly segmented and customized campaigns.
Tell a story. People love stories. We live out stories everyday.
Build a unique story that has emotional resonance with your
audience and you will kick-start engagement around your
campaign. Use what you’ve learned about your audience to
generate a story that will capture their attention and make
them want to share with their network. People engage on
emotions – both positive or negative (“you’ll love this” or “be
careful” sentiment in sharing) and you can drive that sharing
by crafting a story that is real, genuine and speaks to their
emotional needs.
GoPro’s campaign began as a way for the company to highlight the performance of their product. Today GoPro is one of YouTube’s top brands and it’s customers do most of the marketing for them.
Enlist partners. Consumers love multiple brands and
partnering with those brands can help you to increase
engagement and drive greater awareness. If you’re planning to
launch an event to drive awareness, incorporate various partners
and align the campaign with a hashtag so that all partners and
participants are able to join the conversation and engage with
each other. This partnership builds goodwill among brands and
consumers and helps generate trust in your brand.
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Colgate partnered with MTV to launch their R u fresh enuf contest targeted at engaging youth across India. Contestants submitted videos of themselves singing via a Facebook app and the winner got the chance to participate in a workshop with music director Amit Trivedi.
Listen to your audience. Once you reach
out, listen to how they are responding to your message
and continue to engage them based on those responses.
Find ways to continue evolving the story to build on-going
engagement with your audience. This is one of the hardest
things for brands to do, as it’s so easy to push out messages
and assume that consumers are receiving the same story. Be
careful that the stories you tell align with overall customer
experience, or your message will not resonate – or even
worse, will backfire, as consumers find that you are out of
touch with their perceived brand experience.
Implementing best practices in earned media will ensure
that you are having the most impact with organic content as
possible. But, as we said earlier, it is still going to leave gaps.
This is where paid media is indispensable.
Domino’s Pizza created an integrated and engaging campaign called: The Pizza Turnaround to gather new pizza ideas. They asked consumers to share their ideas and criticism of the brand on social. Domino’s then took those ideas and created new pizza recipes that appealed to their audience.
Key Questions to Ask
Audience Who am I trying
to engage?
Story What will they want to share?
Partner Who can help
me tell a compelling story?
Listen What are
my customers thinking?
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Paid media is still the most powerful way to reach a target audience
Recently, paid media has been a growing focal point for
brands, as evidenced by the tremendous growth in US
social media ad spend, which is expected to surpass $11
billion in 2017.3 Brands are paying more attention to paid
media because just as earned media enhances a brand’s
authenticity as part of a larger marketing strategy, paid
enables brands to scale these organic efforts to reach a more
meaningful and robust audience. Brands should view paid
media as a powerful and necessary strategic initiative that
balances their owned and earned strategies.
It’s true that paid media has had a rocky experience in
social over the past few years. Concerns about efficacy and
user experience gave many brands pause about devoting
budgets towards Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.
These platforms have taken tremendous steps to ensure a
good experience for users, while simultaneously providing
advertisers tools to help prove a justifiable ROI. As such,
paid social media budgets have increased substantially,
growing more than 40% each year since 2009 and the
interconnectedness between a brand’s owned/earned and
paid media strategy will only become stronger.4
Paid media drives targeted impact. With earned media’s challenges of low, untargeted reach,
paid media steps in to focus content to the audiences that are
most receptive to it. Brand content is becoming the dominant
native ad unit across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, so the
success of organic and paid are inextricably linked. Here are
some of the reasons why paid media creates impact.
Paid has larger reach. Reach often lays the foundation for paid social success,
as getting an ad in front of users’ eyeballs is critical for a
campaign to resonate. Paid media offers a way for brands
to expand reach among a wider audience far beyond just
followers and provides additional frequency controls, both of
which will have a greater impact as organic reach continues
to decline.4, 5 There is circular logic here too, as increased
reach through paid media will feed back into an opportunity
to grow organic reach. As more users share content, more
impressions are generated at no additional cost which
helps tell the earned media story. Selecting the content to
put money behind, however, requires the right partners and
tools to help identify what will be most effective. SHIFT, for
example, enables brands to identify its strongest performing
organic content through a proven algorithm. Advertisers
can then choose to immediately scale that content into paid
media across key platforms and channels.
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SHIFT’s tool is an example of one of the benefits of working with the right partner. These tools can help track and identify top performing organic content that should be boosted into paid media.
Paid drives measurable engagement. Engagements are a powerful indicator of user interest, as
they provide brands with a metric to measure the number
of people that both saw a brand’s content and took an
action (e.g. like, retweet, share, comment, view a product,
click to a website, etc.). Paid media provides brands with an
opportunity to engage with more users over organic alone
due to expanded reach, while also allowing brands to improve
the precision of their reach through better alignment between
content and audience. Targeting options that include broad
demographic data, interests, keyword usage and more help
brands achieve that alignment. In addition most social
channels provide advanced targeting options that connect to
website data, first-party data (CRM data), offline behavior and
specific user IDs. Brands that leverage these targeting options
will better be able to pair the content they distribute with the
users that it will resonate with best, ultimately increasing the
likelihood of an engagement or conversion event. Driving these
high quality engagements through more precise targeting only
improves a brand’s voice in the marketplace and helps you
build stronger customer relationships.
Paid allows you to refine your strategy. Insights gained from paid media efforts can be used to inform
your brand’s paid and organic content strategy. One of the most
powerful methods of doing this is through A/B testing. Paid
media allows you to choose specific audiences, as discussed
above, and serve content to only those groups. Brands can then
identify what content or targeting is most effective and allocate
additional spend to those. Brands can also test organic content
to measure general sentiment among a small audience (i.e.
test group) before publicly posting to all followers. Test results
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will generate insights into how different audience segments
interact differently with posts. Brands can then leverage these
insights to better plan for future campaigns, both paid and
organic, by tailoring content that will resonate and result in
high quality engagements.
Paid generates actionable reporting. Brands have access to granular level data about content, user
engagements, impressions, conversions, specific actions,
etc. through paid media. This data provides unique insights
that can inform your initiatives, including more effective reach
through both real-time optimizations as well as long-term
guidance. Organic strategy can also be improved through better
understanding of the types of content that resonates. Brands
can gain a holistic view into overall performance by working with
the right partner. SHIFT, for example, provides reports based
on cross-channel data as opposed to reporting that focuses on
individual channels. Brands can use this information to plan
larger initiatives that span multiple touch points.
Quickly inform and optimize strategies by being able to analyze cross-channel performance across various metrics
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Best practices that empower your paid media game plan
With a better understanding of how paid media can enhance
organic content and drive a more holistic approach, the
following are ways to ensure you get the most out of your
paid social media:
Set clear objectives. Objectives should be the underlying
guide for all paid and organic content decisions, as they
will form the strategy behind what channels are used, the
audiences reached, and the method of contact. Objectives can
be general broad goals such as brand awareness or website
engagements, but can also be more specific KPIs such as
reaching 10M highly targeted users or generating 1,000
product purchases. Setting clear objectives upfront will serve
as a barometer for all brand stakeholders to understand
what success looks like. They will also provide a baseline for
ongoing performance measurement as initiatives are tracked
and optimized.
Know your target audiences and speak directly to them. Paid media’s ability to target users at a much more granular
level is a clear benefit over organic distribution. Brands
should identify specific audience segments they want to reach
using the precision targeting that only paid social media
provides. Creating segments with various sub-characteristics
enables brands to tailor content that will be delivered only
to those specific audiences. You will be able to develop a
stronger brand-customer relationship, elicit more desirable
actions, and ensure ad dollars are being spent efficiently by
using messaging that speaks to those groups of users and
resonates uniquely with them.
Age, Gender, Location, Interests, Device (OS specific), Followers, Lookalikes, Offline Behavior, Site Visitors, User IDs, Email Addresses, Keywords Usage, Television Conversations, Real-Time Trends, and more.
Precision Targeting Examples
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Test and optimize. Strong performance delivery is difficult to
achieve at the onset of every initiative, despite a brand’s best
efforts. Brands should calibrate initiatives, through testing
and optimizing, to maximize performance and efficiency of
ad spend. Publishing variations of ad creative and targeting
using unpublished posts – those that are shown to only the
specific audience selected - is one effective way of pre-
testing campaigns. High and low performers will quickly
surface providing immediate feedback that brands can use
before launching a campaign with a larger budget and wider
audience. Risk exposure is limited by minimizing initial ad
spend and removing ads that are either ineffective or costly.
Identify additional optimization opportunities through ongoing
tests for the duration of campaigns.
Analyze and learn. Analysis of performance over time can
provide greater insights that add to an audience’s characteristic
profile or inform everyday organic content strategy. You can
extract small, yet very powerful data points that can be leveraged
to effectively plan for future campaigns by conducting a deep
analysis of performance metrics. Brands can also establish a
benchmark of success that can be used to measure similar
campaigns. Benchmarks ensure that performance can be held
against the objectives that were defined as well as providing a
comparison of performance delivery.
Key Questions to Ask
Objectives What am I trying
to achieve?
Targeting Who am I trying
to reach?
Content Does my content speak uniquely to those audiences?
Test Where can
I make improvements?
Analyze What can I take away from this
initiative and apply in the future?
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Overall, paid media can significantly enhance your earned
media and together, drive a robust, powerful marketing
strategy that reaches consumers in multi-dimensional ways.
By applying best practices and leveraging the full effect of each,
you can balance out your marketing strategy and create more
measurable, ROI-driven campaigns.
SHIFT is the leading marketing software company for social advertisers. SHIFT’s Open Marketing Cloud provides solutions for
planning, optimizing and analyzing social advertising campaigns for global brands, including 10 of the top 20 largest advertisers in the world. SHIFT’s proprietary marketing cloud technology enables brands to automate their social advertising campaigns to meet their business objectives across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. SHIFT is a Facebook Strategic PMD, Twitter Ads API Partner and LinkedIn Sponsored Updates Partner. SHIFT is based in Los Angeles, with additional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and London. For more information, visit www.SHIFT.com.
Earned media plus paid media drives maximum impact
Resources
1. http://www.nielsen.com/content/corporate/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsen-global-consumers-trust-in-earned-advertising-grows.html
2. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en.html
3. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/231564/social-ad-spend-to-pass-11-billion-by-2017
4. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/databook-q1-2014-social-media-advertising-spend-in-the-us-2014-07-17
5. http://digiday.com/platforms/decoding-facebooks-blog-post-decreased-organic-reach/
6. http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/twitter-tells-brands-they-can-reach-30-their-followers-free-158886
To learn more about how Klout Perks can help you generate scalable earned media or to launch a Perk campaign, visit lithium.com/klout.
Klout Perks help marketers generate earned media, at scale, through authentic sources Over 300 of the world’s top brands including half of the AdAge 100 rely on Klout to find the most relevant people for their campaigns and increase brand awareness. Learn more at business.klout.com.
To learn more about how SHIFT can help you plan and optimize your social advertising campaigns, visit shift.com.