Comparing paid and earned media is no easy feat. The former is essentially advertising and, as the name suggests, usually involves money changing hands. The latter, on the other hand, refers more to editorial and is often the domain of bloggers and PR people. However, as a brand investing in securing coverage from both, it’s necessary to ensure that the message going out is a consistent one and that your campaigns are integrated with one another. These tips outline some practical ways to make sure that’s the case.

Paid media is media that is bought, planned and a certain space is owned for a period of time. Image Credit: heza

1. Plan

As with all things eMarketing, careful planning is the key to successful integration. Slapping two campaigns alongside one another and hoping they will work together successfully is foolhardy and is highly unlikely to work. The message that you are distributing needs to be cohesive, and the timing of your campaigns needs to be aligned to ensure that you derive maximum benefit from them. Bear in mind that earned media can take longer to seed - time it accordingly.

2. Know your KPIs

The old adage of “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is particularly true of both paid and earned media. Successful measurement does, however, have a lot to do with knowing what the metrics you need to measure are. Despite the need to integrate these campaigns, objectives for earned and for paid media can be different – it’s important to have thought through your objectives and then to plan specific key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of the campaigns. Once these have been identified, you can look at an appropriate way to measure these.

3. Track

Quite obviously, laying out KPIs is a fruitless exercise unless you plan to actually track the performance of your campaign. When setting up the tracking for your campaigns, its not only mission critical to understand what you need to measure, but also to ensure that your tracking is correctly set up and that you are actually measuring it. Bear in mind that while it may be tempting to focus your energy on tracking awareness or exposure, it’s what happens after someone is exposed to your media that counts and looking at more in depth metrics will go a lot further towards calculating your return on investment.

4. Be dynamic

Paid media offers a measure of control over the message and its spread. That said, a measure of flexibility can go a long way toward optimising the campaign. Keep an eye on campaign performance and if necessary, change your messages. With earned media, on the other hand, you cannot control the message. While this is a scary prospect for brand owners, it takes only a little bit of dynamism to cope. Some careful planning in advance as well as a preparedness to adapt and respond appropriately to mentions will go a long way toward quelling your fear and giving your campaign a greater chance of success.

5. Keep learning

As with many areas of eMarketing, the true experts in paid and earned media are those who realise that each campaign offers a unique opportunity to learn something and build on that learning in the future. This insight can be gathered from the way in which you rolled out the campaigns, how successfully they were integrated with one another and the impact of continued optimisation. The data and insight that you gather can be used to help you plan your next campaign. A large part of this is ensuring that you are continually improving on your methods of tracking. It’s worth making a habit of reading about industry trends in this area too – you could always learn something valuable from what other people have tried.

Also check out:

• Andre Britz on Earned vs Paid Media
• Online Banner Advertising