You’ve heard of owned media, of course. It’s your website, your email marketing, your social media presence. It’s all of the media where you control the content entirely — your say, with no other influence. It’s a great way to ensure that your brand reaches your audience exactly as you want it to.
But how do you leverage this amazing marketing resource to get the most bang for your buck?
There are many strategies to achieving optimal owned media ROI, and this article looks at a few of the best ways to do it. From website optimization tips to best practices for content marketing optimization and campaign performance analysis, we’ll explore everything you need to know about owned media to maximize your ROI and win audience eyeballs in the process.
An integrated marketing strategy must include owned media optimization
For companies looking to get the most out of their marketing efforts, an integrated marketing strategy is essential. Traditionally, a comprehensive digital marketing approach includes three key types of media — paid, earned and owned media. While organizations often prioritize these channels in that respective order, a strategy that fails to invest ample energy and resources in owned media is as good as doomed.
While paid media — such as digital advertising in the form of search or display ads — can deliver reliable results, it can also be expensive and limited in building customer trust. Similarly, earned media — news coverage, reviews, and other non-sponsored content — can strengthen credibility and enhance exposure, but it can be unreliable in both volume and messaging.
Owned media, on the other hand, is completely within your organization’s control. This includes your company’s website and blog, email lists and newsletters, and organic social media. On these channels, you have the first and last say as to how your brand is positioned, how your value proposition is articulated, and how your target audience gets to know you.
Any well-orchestrated digital marketing strategy relies on all three components — paid, earned and owned media — working together, harmoniously, each with a vital role to play. Understanding how to maximize owned media ROI begins with identifying its core elements, and then developing a strategy to deploy them effectively.
The keys to owned media optimization
Before delving into the strategic facets of a well-oiled approach to generating owned media ROI, it’s important that we outline a few of the primary channels on which your owned media lives. A keen understanding of the role your website, email and social media play in your marketing ecosystem will help you leverage them to maximum effect as you pursue content marketing optimization throughout your owned media ecosystem.
Websites
A company’s website is a crucial component of its owned media, often serving as the first point of contact for potential customers. An attractive, intuitive, and fast-loading website gives your audience key information about your products or services, facilitates purchases, and makes reviews and contact details readily available.
Your website also serves to host your blog or newsroom, where you’ll publish content to entice, inform and even directly promote your offerings. By implementing tried and true website optimization tips — like keyword ranking research — you can unlock your full web potential.
Email marketing is an effective tool for promoting products, services, and other marketing content directly to current or potential customers. Automated mailing systems can send promotional offers, sales announcements, and newsletters to those who opt-in — leading to a direct relationship with your audience.
In addition to product promotions and discounts, email content often includes links to other owned media channels, such as websites or blogs, enhancing the overall marketing strategy and driving traffic to various touchpoints.
Social Media
Businesses of all shapes and sizes use social media accounts to complement their websites, distributing engaging content and growing their brand. Companies use social media to promote products, share educational or entertaining content, and drive traffic to other owned media channels.
With a wide range of social media platforms, and new ones popping up all the time — each with specific niches and catering to slightly different demographics — there is a huge opportunity for brands to reach the right audience through the right social media platform.
The benefits and challenges of owned media
As with paid and earned media, owned media offers some unique and valuable strengths and it poses some specific challenges. To make the most informed and strategic marketing decisions, you must understand both the potential for owned media ROI as well as what’s required to realize those that potential.
Benefits of Owned Media
Owned media offers several key advantages that make it an essential component of any good marketing strategy.
- Establishes brand reputation — Optimizing owned media channels, like websites and social media profiles, enhances user experience and portrays the company as credible and trustworthy.
- Builds brand awareness — Including logos, slogans, and branding materials on owned media can help build brand recognition. These platforms can also be used to sell products or services, further promoting the brand.
- Cost-effective promotion — Distributing marketing content through owned media channels is nearly free (aside from content production, of course), making it a cost-effective alternative to paid advertising.
Challenges of Owned Media
Despite its benefits, owned media also presents several challenges that need to be addressed to maximize its potential.
- Content production — Producing engaging, high-quality content consistently requires significant energy and resources.
- Breaking through — Standing out among vast amounts of online content requires expertise in SEO, social media algorithms, and email deliverability.
- Talent and resourcing — Implementing a successful strategy necessitates investment in skilled personnel and careful planning between owned, paid, and earned media.
Developing your owned media optimization strategy
Now that we have an understanding of the main elements that comprise your owned media, along with why it’s worth pursuing and what it will cost to pursue, let’s discuss strategy. When developing an owned media strategy to market your business, there are a few things you cannot overlook…
Set Your Goals
First and foremost, you want to ensure that all of your efforts toward planning, generating, publishing and broadcasting your owned media content are laddering up to a clear and measurable goal. This will often fall in the realm of brand awareness, but it should also correspond to some KPI that you can rely on to determine whether or not your efforts were successful. This could be page traffic to your website, open- or click-through-rate on email, or engagements on social posts.
Target Your Audience
Next, you need a deep knowledge of your target audience. Understanding who you’re speaking to will be essential when crafting the message that will best resonate and lead to the desired outcome (be that clicking a link, downloading a guide, liking a post, or simply investing interest and time in your brand).
Create Your Content
The development of rich, valuable content is at the core of your owned media strategy. From a dynamic homepage and insightful blog content to timely, intriguing emails and thumb-stopping social media posts, your owned media is made up of an enormous amount of content. Carefully planning out your messaging, production and distribution will all contribute to content that hits the mark with your audience.
Optimize and Promote
To achieve the harmony with earned and paid media that we mentioned previously, you’ll need to ensure that your content is optimized for search engines and promoted when it performs well above average. By following SEO best practices, you’ll generate earned traffic through search — above and beyond what your owned content would drive on its own. And by putting paid budget behind those organic social posts that outperform your benchmarks, you can get even more eyeballs on your content — further boosting your brand’s reputation and impact.
Analyze Your Results
Finally, by conducting a careful analysis of your owned media content — across web traffic, email opens, and social engagement — you can best determine how close you’ve come to achieving your marketing goals and how effective you’ve been in driving owned media ROI. To truly succeed in owned media optimization, you’ll need clear visibility of the performance of your content — what’s worked and what hasn’t — so you can adapt, pivot, and improve on future campaigns.
Unlock a single source view of your owned performance
Unfortunately, this critical step is often where organizations lose their way. Diving into the data behind owned media can be overwhelming, frustrating, or even forgotten completely — but it doesn’t have to be. Digivizer’s newest Owned Media feature makes managing the performance of your organic social media presence a breeze.
Now, all in one place, you can simply and effectively:
- Track performance for specific campaigns across all organic social media channels and accounts
- Add filters to view total organic campaign performance using campaign names, keywords, hashtags or product names
- Access all your organic LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube performance metrics in a single page, and discover what content is performing best
- Track total engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, video views, clicks, engagements, engagement rate) across all organic posts to see what resonates with audiences
- Measure the performance of your brand and executive accounts from a single dashboard to optimize marketing strategies and maximize ROI
Owned Media is available on all Digivizer paid plans, making this powerful tool accessible to businesses of all sizes. All paid plans provide a 30-day free trial, making this new feature available to all triallers immediately.
Learn more about Owned Media and how it can transform organic social media marketing.
