klout earned or paid media why you need both to drive sales

Earned or Paid Media? Why You Need Both to Drive Sales

2

share this whitepaper

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

1


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

2


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.

http://www.photomosaic.com/

3


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.

4


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?

5


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.

6


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

7


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

8


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

9


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?

10


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.

http://www.SHIFT.com

http://www.shift.com/

http://www.nielsen.com/content/corporate/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsen-global-consumers-trust-in-earned-advertising-grows.html

http://www.nielsen.com/content/corporate/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsen-global-consumers-trust-in-earned-advertising-grows.html

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en.html

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/231564/social-ad-spend-to-pass-11-billion-by-2017

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/231564/social-ad-spend-to-pass-11-billion-by-2017

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/databook-q1-2014-social-media-advertising-spend-in-the-us-2014-07-17

http://digiday.com/platforms/decoding

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/twitter-tells-brands-they-can-reach-30-their-followers-free-158886

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/twitter-tells-brands-they-can-reach-30-their-followers-free-158886

http://shift.com

http://lithium.com/klout

http://business.klout.com

http://lithium.com/klout

http://shift.com

http://shift.com

klout earned or paid media why you need both to drive sales

Social Media