Earned Media - Part I

So far, we’ve learned about the powerful role of owned media. Companies now have a multitude of opportunities to use their own assets—their websites, blogs, emails, social media accounts, and more—to market their products and attract new customers.

But the ubiquity of digital platforms has amplified another important marketing method: earned media. Recall that a company can “earn” media when customers voluntarily discuss its products and services with each other, generating valuable publicity in the process. Social media platforms have created more opportunities than ever before for earned media to blossom.

Word of mouth is perhaps the oldest form of marketing. But like every type of media we've discussed so far, digital marketing has greatly accelerated and expanded its scope and impact.

When people share a company's content or discuss its brand organically, we call it earned media. Unlike paid and owned media, earned media originates organically outside the company. In other words, this is media that is neither paid for by a company nor owned by it. Instead, it is media that a company has earned from its consumers.

Earned media is powerful because consumers tend to view third-party reviews as more authentic than messages coming directly from companies. Most of you probably check customer reviews of restaurants, books, hotels, movies, and various other products before making decisions.

So if earned media is based on consumers sharing information among themselves, does a company have any control? And should it include earned media in its marketing plans? The answer is yes. Earned media is an important resource that marketers should consider to acquire and engage customers. It amplifies their message without spending any money.

Understanding earned media as publicity that a company earns from consumers talking about its brand means that a company's involvement with earned media could conceivably be quite passive. But it doesn't have to be. We'll cover what a company can do and how it can capitalize on these conversations and increase its effectiveness.

Here is Gayitri Budhraja on how the earned media conversation around e.l.f. products created measurable results.

I'll just share this one example. We saw this on TikTok. This was about a year ago. There was this mom, Brit O. And this was completely an organic post. e.l.f. had nothing to do with this. She was standing at a Walmart, and she picked up our $5 e.l.f. camo concealer. And she talked about how, as a mom, she would rather splurge on Prosecco, not on concealer. And this ended up going viral.

And I share this because what Brit is responding to is the DNA that we have built within e.l.f., and it is this idea of ensuring that everyone can own their own beauty without compromises. You don't have to compromise on your wallet. You don't have to compromise on your quality standards. You don't have to compromise on your ethics because we're cruelty-free. And so that element has universal appeal, and we've seen that.

As Gayitri's example reveals, earned media can be powerful for driving awareness. When it went viral, Brit's post no doubt crossed the paths of many individuals who were not previously familiar with e.l.f. and its mission. Of course, the post may have also positively engaged those already familiar with e.l.f. and pushed them further toward conversion as well.

As Darren Brown will now share with us, OOFOS has decided to become more intentional about leveraging earned media as a tool for its customer acquisition strategy. He will also mention some of the challenges OOFOS has encountered while doing so.

Earned media has been something that we've been focused on more intentionally over probably the past three years. We realized that as we look to grow awareness, earned media is going to play a huge role in that.

It's great to grow our own social media following. It's great to grow our email base. I think those fall more into a consideration, even more so a conversion level of the business, whereas earned media truly helps you build awareness around the brand. And at the end of the day, people can't buy something they're not aware of.

And so I think the difficulty in earned media is the direct attribution to revenue and conversion at the end of the day because of where it takes place in the market and also a little bit of the wild, wild west of control that you might have over where a given article or press coverage gets linked, right.

It's one of the biggest challenges we have with earned media is that we can't always control whether a big hit in Men's Health, Women's Health, Runner's World, GQ, Forbes, whatever it might be, is actually going to go back to OOFOS.com where we can measure what the impact of that business was.

As Darren pointed out, one big challenge of working with earned media is lack of control. Because this form of publicity is generated by external parties, brands ultimately have a less direct role in planning, shaping, and distributing earned media. But this limitation doesn’t mean that marketing teams can’t do anything to steer the conversations about their brands.

So how do these brands intervene in this space? Companies can successfully engage with earned media in five ways: monitor, participate, leverage, manage, and measure.

Monitoring and Participating

Unlike paid and owned media, a company does not have direct control over earned media. This makes it more difficult to influence and manage.

We will cover methods you can use to benefit from earned media. A simple framework that breaks down this process into actionable steps requires you to monitor, participate, leverage, manage, and measure earned media.

Monitoring earned media is the practice of observing and understanding consumers' attitudes and behaviors about your product and your company. Social media provides a tool that consumers can use to share their honest views about your product or service. And this is a valuable source of customer insight for a company.

Instead of passively monitoring consumers' social media posts, companies can actively participate in these conversations by being present and active in earned media spaces.

Next, leveraging is how you amplify the positive messages around your brand and create brand advocates. Armed with the knowledge gained from monitoring and participating, companies can leverage earned media to amplify messages towards their marketing goals.

The next step is managing. Earned media can be a double-edged sword. It can enhance your brand through brand advocates, or it can damage your reputation. If a few vocal consumers with large followings berate your company, it is important to be prepared to manage both positive and negative messaging that gains traction in your earned media channels.

The final step is measuring. Though earned media can be challenging to measure, there are ways to quantify its impact. We'll cover managing and measuring earned media later.

Let's continue with further discussion on the importance of monitoring. Monitoring your earned media channels and paying attention to your customers can provide many benefits.

In contrast to surveys and focus groups to gain customer insights, social media provides a free and unfiltered forum for companies to become aware of and understand their consumers' attitudes and behaviors. Here are a few examples of how companies benefited from listening to their customers:

• McDonald's noticed a customer-led campaign in the U.K. criticizing the company for using millions of plastic straws daily, contributing to ocean pollution. Garnering more than half a million signatures, McDonald's recognized the strong sentiment and decided to replace plastic straws with paper ones in all its U.K. restaurants.
• Adidas responded to customer concerns about ocean plastic pollution by launching a new shoe made from recycled plastic, even though Adidas was not directly blamed. This product became a hit, selling over a million pairs within a year.
• Porsche, known for its expensive sports cars, faced diverging reactions on social media when announcing plans to launch an SUV at a lower price. While some die-hard fans strongly opposed the idea, many prospective customers welcomed it as an opportunity to own a family Porsche. Social media monitoring provided Porsche with early insights into these reactions, allowing it to manage customer expectations ahead of launching the Cayenne SUV.
• Hawaiian Airlines, investing heavily in improving seat quality, monitored Tripadvisor reviews to gauge customer perceptions. The most common words and phrases used by consumers to describe the airline were "seats" and "comfort," confirming that their investment was appreciated.

These examples show that monitoring consumers on social media can provide companies with a real-time gauge of how customers perceive their products or services. This enables companies to take corrective actions, improve offerings, and even gather ideas for launching new products.

Instead of passively listening to and monitoring consumer conversations, companies can actively participate in them to shape these discussions.

Active participation in your owned media channels allows you to react quickly to current events, turning a newsworthy event into a powerful marketing opportunity. For example:

• After a power outage halted the Super Bowl in 2013, Oreo posted on Twitter, "Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark." Over the next five hours, Oreo's follower count jumped from 5,000 to 34,000, an almost 700% increase.

Companies can also moderate their earned media channels by asking questions that provide valuable insight. For instance:

• Burberry asked three questions of its Pinterest followers to create customized boards for them. This initiative led to over one million Burberry makeup pins and 5,000 redeemed samples.

In addition, companies can use earned media channels to generate marketing material for other campaigns:

• Apple's Shot on iPhone campaign and National Geographic's Your Shot campaign encouraged customers to share their photos. These campaigns built community, gained social media attention, and produced content for paid media campaigns.

Social media can also complement traditional approaches, such as focus groups:

• C Space, a Boston-based consumer research agency, manages online communities by recruiting consumers who fit its client companies' target audience segments. By facilitating conversations among these consumers, C Space has gained insights that led to innovations like Nabisco's 100-calorie snacks.

Monitoring and participating in earned media channels are crucial for understanding your consumer base and identifying opportunities. Next, we'll explore how companies can leverage the insights gained from earned media to amplify their messages.

Leveraging - Amplification and Virality

Amplification is key for earned media. It therefore helps to understand a little bit about the psychology behind amplification: What motivates consumers to share content? We will turn to this concept next.

In addition to monitoring and participating, companies can leverage earned media channels to benefit their brands. We'll discuss how companies can amplify messages from earned media. Remember, in earned media, this amplification is indirect. It comes from consumers organically sharing messages among themselves.

In order to influence which messages are amplified, we need to understand why consumers share content and what content they like to share. Consumers can be driven to share content by intrinsic or extrinsic motivations.

Intrinsic motivations are centered around intangible incentives like identification with a brand, enjoyment of a product, or social status. For example, the story that Gayitri Budhraja at e.l.f. shared about the TikTok user Britt O resonated with many other people who identified with her perspective, creating an intrinsic motivation for them to share this content.

Extrinsic motivations are centered around tangible incentives such as monetary rewards or free products. Brands can also motivate their consumers to share content with tangible rewards like giveaways or member perks.

The next question is, what content consumers share? Research has shown that an emotional connection with viewers (whether joy, shock, or humor) can create intrinsic motivation for viewers to share. But companies should be aware that while content with high entertainment value is more likely to be shared, such content may fail to communicate a brand message along the way.

Understanding why consumers share content and what content they choose to share can inform companies on how to present consumers with messages they're likely to amplify. A deep understanding of your consumer base can amplify the reach of certain messages by two to three times.

But engineering virality where your content reaches millions or billions of people is more difficult. Some experts believe that you can engineer virality. Others point to studies that show that it is much harder and often requires a lot of luck.

Regardless of whether a piece of content goes viral or not, there are certain factors that improve the odds of people sharing it.

Let’s continue with the topic of virality by considering several different perspectives. First, Gayitri Budhraja will tell us about e.l.f.’s viral endeavors. You will recall that e.l.f. faced a tough competitive situation and decided to go through a “brand recharge” by reinvesting in brand building. 

As part of its recharge, e.l.f. attempted to engineer a viral moment—and thus generate earned media—on what was then a new app called TikTok. Here’s Gayitri of e.l.f. telling this story.

We were one of the early brands to launch into TikTok in 2019. There were not that many brands that were in TikTok then. When I think about how we got there, we were following the data. So we knew that we wanted to build our stronghold with Gen Z. We knew that Gen Z played on TikTok.

The other signal that we saw is without e.l.f. doing anything, there were already three million views against the hashtag #EyesLipsFace. And so we were seeing the organic interest in e.l.f. on this channel. At the same time, we were going through a recharge. And so we had just made the declaration that we are for every eye, lip, and face.

I think one of the things that we recognized with TikTok is we had to go into this platform without any preconceived notions. We could not take something that we had done and posted on another channel and figure out how to force-fit that onto TikTok. We needed to approach TikTok in a way that is completely native to the platform.

I ended up going to my high school reunion, my twenty-year high school reunion, in 2019. Because this was in the middle of our recharge, anyone who would listen, I was talking to them about our brand recharge. I happened to sit at this table with a friend of mine, Evan, and I was telling him about the recharge that we were doing with e.l.f.

He was telling me that he and his husband had started this agency around telling brand stories through song and dance. As soon as I heard this, my thought was, you have to come pitch to us. This feels like the superpower that we need to bring inside this organization to figure out how to crack TikTok.

What's incredible about this story is Evan and Movers+Shakers, which is their agency, knew nothing about TikTok before we went into this together. But the approach that we had taken together is, let's do our due diligence. Let's understand this platform. Let's understand the motivation as to why consumers are on TikTok.

We know that TikTok is all about creators. Creators want a platform where they can express in an unbridled fashion, and so we wanted to come up with an idea that would allow them to do just that. Ultimately, what we decided is we're going to create an original music composition. The original music composition is going to be Eyes.Lips.Face.

Here is Gayitri discussing the impact of e.l.f.’s song “Eyes. Lips. Face.” upon release.

We feel like we can come up with a song that has universal appeal, one that is authentic to our brand but is also going to connect to this platform in a way that excites the creators. So let's launch this and see what happens.

We launched this back in October of 2019. It became immediately viral. We hit a hundred million views on day one. We crossed over a billion views within the first six days.

What we quickly saw is that this became more than a campaign on TikTok—it became a movement. Part of the reason why the appeal of this was so high is because we figured out how to play way bigger than who we are. We figured out how to transcend beauty and connect to a community that was even bigger than our core consumer base.

What was unbelievable about TikTok is that we hadn't seen other brands cross into billions of views. While we had seen brands achieve hundreds of millions of views, the metrics on TikTok were just completely staggering, offering a reach we had never experienced anywhere else.

For us, we put it out into the universe that we were going to launch this and reach a billion people. If you look at the campaign to date, we've exceeded over eight billion views.

When companies present their consumers with content that both connects with them on an emotional level and motivates them to share, with some luck, it could go viral.

E.l.f.’s “Eyes. Lips. Face.” song is a success story in which the company set out to create viral content and achieved billions of views. But is pursuing a viral moment the right strategy in every case?

Viral content is ideal for earned media, but achieving it is difficult. Engaging content that appeals to consumers may not always get the brand message across.

Next, we’ll turn to several more perspectives on virality and how it should coexist with your other marketing priorities.

Creating Virality

Let’s turn back to Ben Kirshner, who will explain why he is optimistic about engineering virality under the right conditions.

The question of whether you can create virality—I believe the answer is yes. Do I think some of it is by chance? Absolutely. I think it depends on the product, service, and the time period we're in.

Yes, there are people who can create virality through humor. My favorite example is Dollar Shave Club. They had no marketing budget, and the founder created a viral, funny video about his company. He went around the warehouse, essentially doing a comedy show about razors, and everyone thought it was funny. The next thing you know, he got acquired by Unilever for billions of dollars.

His razor isn't necessarily better than anyone else's; he just created the virality. If you asked this person when they created the video whether they expected it to do what it did, I don’t think he would have said yes. But I believe it can be created.

Unique content with the right timing, messaging, and audience can definitely work. However, I think there are a lot of people who try too hard. They go into the intention of creating virality, and when it doesn’t work, they think, "Oh, it didn’t work." It’s very difficult.

Next, consider Darren Brown’s position on viral marketing. He discusses how OOFOS worked to “strategically create luck.” Darren is careful to note that virality can happen occasionally, but you can’t rely on virality as a strategy. Going viral is not as important as creating the relationships that ultimately build the brand and result in increased sales.

I think what I'd say about having something go viral in the earned media space, I'd look at it similarly to how I look at luck. Luck is not a strategy, but I believe you can strategically create luck. And I think we've done that pretty well as a brand.

I think planting the seeds of luck has led to many of the introductions we've had to some of our brand partners, some of our mOOvers, who are much more visible in their social spheres and networks. These partnerships have allowed us to gain earned media through their channels, giving us more visibility and attracting more people to the brand from potential consumer target groups.

Our job is to harvest that luck and bear the fruits that come out of it. It’s really fun to see. It could start as simple as slinging 300 pairs of product at an athletic trainers convention in Houston. That might lead to an athletic trainer trying the product, believing in it, buying it for a team, and purchasing it year after year. Before you know it, we’ve got a partnership with the Raiders and Derek Carr.

We took steps to create our own luck by introducing ourselves to people in high-profile places who would believe in the product for what it did. You can spend day and night coming up with countless slogans, taglines, and quick-witted videos to try and go viral. You might win for a moment with those efforts, but to truly build trust with a consumer, you’ve got to be transparent with them.

I think that’s how you build relationships with consumers. That’s what drives consumer loyalty and advocacy. From a business perspective, when you talk about margin and contribution margin, you ultimately want to look at the lifetime value of a customer.

I can sell you something once off a viral moment that becomes an overnight trend and disappears the next week, or I can tell you the truth. I can communicate experiences, earn your trust and buy-in, and gain a consumer for life.

We will now introduce a new expert: Maggie Malek, CEO of MMI Agency, a US-based marketing agency with a strong background in working with social media and social influencers. Here, Maggie introduces herself and acknowledges the power of viral moments, but also stresses the importance of not prioritizing them above the rest of your marketing plan.

My name is Maggie Malek. I am the CEO of MMI Agency. I think every brand would love to engineer a viral moment on social. However, if you think about the marketing funnel and marketing fundamentals, a brand-new brand does not need to necessarily focus on creating a viral moment.

What a brand-new brand needs to focus on is awareness. They need to focus on getting ratings and reviews, potentially on Amazon or with their favorite influencers. They need to make sure that when people search their brand on Google, a website actually pops up.

We always talk about if a brand has $1 to spend, you've got to figure out what their goals are first before you start talking about organic social, PR, or paid social. And I think that what brands should be doing, rather than spending all their time trying to create viral moments or create culture, is making sure that they are there for their consumers in the way that their consumers need them to be in specific moments in culture and that they're actually listening.

While some companies (such as e.l.f.) have had success in creating viral marketing campaigns, there is still much debate over the feasibility of engineering viral moments.

When amplifying earned media messages, remember that amplification is only one part of an earned media strategy, which is only one method of employing digital media, which in turn is only one aspect of your larger marketing plan. It is important to keep your marketing plan and your company’s value proposition in mind to maintain perspective.

Monitoring, participating in, and leveraging earned media can produce strong marketing results, but earned media can be a double-edged sword: some consumers could be your brand advocates, but others could be your strong critics. In the next article, we will learn how to manage negative earned media and how to measure your efforts.