Skip to main content

Owned Media v/s Earned Media: How UGC is Placed

As per the research from Altimeter, 70% of marketers lack definite and consistent content strategy. There can be many reasons to it, however, the most common being the lack of resource or expertise. This is the area where small companies fail to compete with the larger brands in content marketing department. This inability to create integrated content strategy pressurizes the whole content creation approach the business has. Most likely, it impacts content creation, understanding buyer personas and overall marketing strategy.

The report also highlights the inability of the marketers to align their actions with the definite strategy. Although, they are aware of their top needs, lack of resources or expertise hinder them to invest in those areas, specially audience identification and targeting.

In a way, content marketing seems to be one of the major challenges that brands face today. When it comes to creating content, different types of media can be utilized to generate value. One is Owned Media, such as official website, company blog, company-owned social media presence, eBooks, white papers and etc. And the other being the Earned Media, such as reviews, feedback, recommendations, articles or press coverage. Compared to the latter, the brand exercises complete control over the former. In terms of brand building and trust factor, Owned Media lacks behind, whereas Earned Media finishes with style. 

As the name depicts, Earned Media is earned and helps build brand community through different channels. Most importantly, it earns brands the much-needed trust factor through user-generated content. User-generated content (UGC) is a crucial piece of strong brand building. Through product reviews, social content or feedback, users always try to generate content that express their views or opinions, leaving brand with no control on the content. 


As there is no control of the brand over user-generated content (UGC), it holds the great value for other peers. In no way brand can alter or influence UGC, making it unique and real for other users. Hence, it holds the great value for the brands. 

UGC is a great opportunity to the brands who lack integrated content strategy. Rather focusing on in-house inadequacy, they should focus on encouraging UGC for better brand value and trust creation. 

UGC can help brands with:

1) UGC is the great way to know your target audience. This enables brands come up with precise strategies.

2) In terms of customer engagement, UGC encourages brands to come up with new avenues or opportunities

3) The basic rule of content marketing drives from conversation and conversions. Hence, UGC helps driving better customer satisfaction for consistent conversation opportunities.

4) Most importantly, UGC helps in building strong brand loyalty through concentrated and gated community efforts.

5) When users are creating content for the brand, it automatically becomes authentic and trusted. Thus, it helps the brand in improving overall online presence and visibility.

6) Last but not the least, it makes the brand more trust-worthy and authentic.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Four Ways to Create Social Media Engagement

Are you using your social media channels to create stable engagement opportunities for your customers? If no, you are definitely missing something big in your marketing efforts. I have often seen marketers giving more importance to short-term objectives than long-term goals. Ideally, any marketing activity should focus on creating long-term impact. And to create this long-term impact, you need to engage your customers consistently.  Today, I am going to write about five important ways that can be utilized to create stable engagement on social media platforms. 1) Be Creative with your Content: Content packaging and positioning is one of the important aspects of marketing efforts. Today, social media platforms have given ample opportunities for marketers to package their content in an attractive manner. Be it simple text, images or videos, marketers can take content liberty to reach out to their target audience. Your content creativity should not be limited to the p...
1 comment
Read more

Relevance and Influence: Balance is the Key

Relevance and influence are two important aspects of social media marketing. Which one of them is more important is very difficult question to answer. The key is to maintain balance between these two. However, it's not that easy. For me, the best way to attain this balance is to have content consistency. I would consider content as a magical lamp to solve social media challenges.  Marketers need to use content precisely to have a great mix of relevance and influence in their marketing strategy. This can be done by effective content syndication. Content syndication does not necessarily mean content repetition, it can be referred as sending consistent marketing message across all the platforms. The success of these two important elements is largely depend on the effective customer engagement, and again content comes in the picture.  Social media has provided marketers with ample sharing opportunities, however,  they need to be utilized properly. Sharing, for me, i...
3 comments
Read more

Advertising and social media marketing

Advertising has been the biggest source for marketers to influence target audience in any form of media. From print to online, and mobile to social media , the concept of advertising has undergone tremendous transformation. Today, we're going to talk about the role of advertising in social media. Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn has really changed the way people are advertising online. With complete control over advertising, these platforms allow marketers to measure their ad performance in every possible way. Although these platforms vary in their approach and delivery towards advertisements, they provide marketers with an influential tool to recognize the potential of their ad on daily basis. I will put down some key features below to make this more precise and simple. 1) Complete control over expenditure 2) Freedom to modify advertisement based on the performance 3) Effective report generation capability 4) Ability to drive traffic to the website , and ...
Post a Comment
Read more