Owned Media - Part I

With this article, we are starting a series about Owned and Earned media, learning outcomes:

• Understand owned media and how firms use it to acquire customers.
• Identify situations for which owned media is best suited.
• Identify earned media’s unique benefits and its synergy with paid and owned media.
• Understand how a company can incorporate earned media into its marketing plan and strategically deploy it towards customer acquisition goals.
• Understand the process of working with influencers and how to manage and measure their impact.
• Understand the synergy between paid, owned, and earned media.

As we learned, one of the challenges of paid media is its high cost. As more and more companies shift their marketing budgets to digital media, the cost of customer acquisition through these channels keeps increasing.

OOFOS, as we know, has set aggressive revenue goals for 2022. It wants to increase revenue three to four times, while holding ROAS constant. It is also trying to increase its focus on the Workout Warrior segment and ensure that it is effectively communicating its value proposition. Finally, it is trying to do all of this as a relatively small organization that lacks the resources of large competitors like Nike.

So this raises the question, are there ways that OOFOS or any company can acquire customers without spending large amounts of money? The good news is that it can. This is where other types of media—owned and earned—come in.

As you learned, owned and earned media form the other essential aspects of the marketing and customer acquisition toolkit. You also learn now that in the digital space, the communication between firms and consumers is not simply a one-way street. Digital technology allows consumers to actively engage with firms and with each other. This has made owned and earned media key aspects of digital marketing.

We'll take a deeper dive into owned and earned media. We'll start by delving into owned media. Recall that owned media refers to the media assets that a company owns. These can include company websites, blogs, apps, as well as a company's presence on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Offline owned media includes media such as brochures and newsletters. As a marketer, your goal is to use these assets in a way that facilitates the process of consumers discovering, learning about, and engaging with your brand.

After examining owned media, we will then explore earned media in greater depth. Earned media refers to the publicity that firms earn through interactions that consumers have with each other, such as when a consumer posts a glowing or glaring review of a new product on their Instagram account. We'll discuss the ways that marketers can monitor and intervene in these conversations to acquire customers. And we will explore how earned media overlaps with other marketing programs such as influencer marketing.

Next, let’s continue with OOFOS’s story to learn more about the unique advantages that owned media presents to marketers.

Advantages of Owned Media

When we first met with OOFOS, the team was gearing up to give greater attention to its owned media efforts. Several months later, Kate Laliberte, Head of Ecommerce, is telling us more about the results of those efforts.

When we look at our paid media channels, where we have paid social, paid search, we have linear TV, we see that they drive a lot of visits to the site. We have a huge media investment there. They drive a lot of visits. They drive a lot of new users to the site as well, to the tune of probably about 75% of our visits. And new users are from that channel.

For us, owned media, we're really focusing on our organic search, our organic social, and our email. But you can extend it as well—our website, the blog postings that we have on our website. Some of the direct mail pieces that we're just getting into, that's our owned media as well.

So we really have control of that media. We have control of placement, who we're targeting, and what the story we're telling them is. We have the means through owned media to really control the message and who we're speaking to and how we're speaking to them.

Even though, from a traffic perspective, about 25% of our traffic comes from there, it represents about 30% of our revenue. So it's a more efficient channel for us. So fewer people generating more revenue.

Kate Laliberte says that for OOFOS, owned media has been useful for engaging existing customers through channels such as email. However, owned media can be useful at all stages of the marketing funnel—awareness, consideration, and conversion.

In general, owned media provides the company greater control over the content that its consumers encounter and over how they interact with the brand. Higher control allows companies to create content according to their resources and schedule. It also allows brands to establish their unique tone, look, and feel, therefore, making it an important tactic for brand-building.

When it comes to the funnel stage, owned media can work at all stages of the funnel. As a top-of-the-funnel tactic, it can help brand discovery through organic search. At the mid to lower stages of a funnel, it can improve conversion by providing consumers with relevant, persuasive, and informative content.

These aspects of owned media make it well-suited for a creative and storytelling approach to marketing. For example, REI Co-Op, a U.S.-based outdoor gear and clothing retailer, frequently releases short films and documentaries on its YouTube page. One of its documentaries, Pedal Through, is about a group of three women going on a week-long mountain biking trip through the Oregon backcountry, two of whom were completely new to mountain biking.

These pieces of long-form content engage consumers at a much deeper level than short 30-second ads can. This is just one example that demonstrates the importance of content in owned media. While paid media is limited by the amount of money a company can spend on buying ad space, owned media is limited by the time, creativity, and human resources that a company has to create compelling and enticing content.

Here is a summary of the unique benefits of owned media that we’ve discussed so far:

• Allows more control over message
• Enables setting brand tone, look, and feel
• Builds deeper relationships with customers
• Works at all stages of the funnel
• Allows greater creativity for brand building

Search Engine Optimization

Now that we’ve covered some of the unique attributes of owned media, let’s move on by investigating some specific ways that you can make use of owned media.

Remember that owned media, by definition, is not paid to be placed in front of a consumer. Instead, the consumer must encounter it organically. So, the question for marketers is, how can you facilitate that process?

Search engine results consist of both paid and organic links. As you learned, companies spend money on paid search to place their ads in response to a consumer query. Let's begin our exploration of owned media by turning to the other key dimension of search engine results: organic links. These are the results that consumers see during their search that a company does not pay for. Companies want their organic search results to be ranked higher by search engine algorithms.

To introduce this topic, we'll explore the challenges that Duckworth, a small family-owned clothing company, was facing with its marketing approach. Established as a sheep ranch over 100 years ago, Duckworth launched an apparel business in 2013. It specializes in clothing made from Merino wool that is sourced from sheep raised in Montana, the home state of the company. These sheep produce a very durable, high-quality wool due to the environment in which they are raised. The company calls this approach "sheep to shelf" as it tries to own as much of the supply chain as possible.

For a while, Duckworth had been relying on an omnichannel approach by focusing on partnerships with physical retailers, such as outdoors-focused clothing stores, and supplementing that with e-commerce sales. Going through big retailers put it in competition with larger players. Its e-commerce operation was fairly small, generating around $200,000 in a year. In addition, its website did not see a lot of traffic and had some technical problems that caused the site to load slowly.

On top of these issues, Duckworth was dealing with a challenge that you already learned has plagued many companies: the constantly increasing cost of paid media. The leadership of Duckworth knew they had to reassess the brand's marketing strategy. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these needs as brick-and-mortar retailers shut down and online shopping took off.

As a result, the company decided to pivot to a more DTC-like approach and refocus the business on e-commerce growth. But could Duckworth carve out a niche for its unique product? And could it grow online sales and revenue in the face of increasing customer acquisition costs?

Let’s summarize the situation that Duckworth found itself in. Its objective was to drive ecommerce sales without spending significant money because of the high cost of paid media. It hoped to target outdoor enthusiasts and its value proposition was centered around its high quality, environmentally conscious, “sheep to shelf” wool clothing.

Recognizing the rising cost of paid media, Duckworth decided to focus on owned media to boost the ranking of its organic search results. But in order to do this, it needed to understand what consumers were searching for and where its products might be most relevant. The Duckworth team decided to partner with an e-commerce and marketing research agency, Tadpull, to help them with researching the market and crafting an owned media strategy.

One of the first things that the marketing team created with Tadpull was a customer journey map for new customers that it hoped to acquire through owned media. The marketing team believed that consumers were likely to become aware of Duckworth while searching for use cases related to wool clothing. These might include keywords such as "skiing and snowboarding layers merino wool" or "best merino base layer." Organic search results for these and similar keywords might lead to a click that would bring consumers to the Duckworth website, where they would be offered a discount code if they provided their email. A percentage of these visitors would sign up for this email list and enter the consideration phase of the customer journey. Duckworth would then focus on engaging these consumers via email marketing. When a customer finally decides to purchase, they would go to the website, enter a promo code from their email, and checkout.

One of the primary goals of an owned media strategy is to improve the odds that your site shows up at or near the top of the organic links shown by search engines like Google. Being on the first page of results makes it more likely for someone to click on your link. And being at the top of the first page increases the likelihood even more. But how do you ensure the search engines show your website among the top organic links?

Search engines like Google rank the organic search results according to two criteria—relevance and authority. Google determines relevance based on the content on your website and how it matches with the search terms of the consumers. Among all the relevant websites, Google chooses the site that has the highest authority based on how many other sites refer or link to the site for a particular topic. The process of improving your company's relevance and authority to increase its odds of ranking higher in organic search is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

An important part of search engine optimization is to build up your company's website with content that search engine algorithms see as relevant. In other words, the content on your website, such as headings, blog posts, or other information, should incorporate keywords that you hope will draw traffic.

Duckworth decided to focus on keywords such as "skiing and snowboarding layers" as well as keywords that included the words "merino wool." As you already know, these are examples of generic keywords. In particular, these longer, more specific search terms are known as long-tail keywords. While the number of consumers searching these long-tail keywords might be low, these consumers have specific needs and therefore are easier to move through the funnel to conversion if they find the relevant product. Long-tail keywords are especially useful for a small company that would have a difficult time competing with large players for high-volume mainstream keywords.

Duckworth used these keywords as a basis for creating content on its website, with blog posts on topics like layering merino wool clothing or comparisons between wool and cotton. They also created and posted video content about their sheep-raising process, highlighting the uniqueness of their product. The creation of this content allowed them to move higher in organic search results and drive more traffic to the site. But ultimately, Duckworth wanted to see more than just higher traffic to its website. It needed to know whether its pivot to e-commerce and owned media was actually working.

To measure the success of this pivot, Duckworth needed to determine the revenue that has been generated from the traffic that it has brought to its website. There is a simple formula for estimating this figure:

• Revenue from site traffic = site traffic * conversion rate * average order value
• Recall that conversion rate = (conversions / visitors) * 100

Using the formula given above, Duckworth’s revenue from site traffic would be as follows: Revenue from site traffic = site traffic * conversion rate * average order value = 170,000 * 0.02 * $152 = $516,800.

Duckworth found that its pivot to owned media delivered very favorable results. Not only did it see a 54% increase in page views and a 21% increase in website sessions, it also saw a 30% increase in revenue. Duckworth's experience shows that companies can generate significant revenue by improving their websites and creating relevant and authoritative content without spending more on paid media.

However, owned media is not without its challenges. For one, paid media often generates immediate returns that are easily attributable to specific ads. Owned media, by contrast, can have a longer turnaround time before results become apparent. This also means owned media can sometimes be challenging for companies internally, as marketers may need to convince their management that the investment in content creation will be worth it. But as examples such as Duckworth's show, it can be a highly effective option that can ultimately pay off.

When done well, owned media is not only efficient from a budget standpoint, but it can also be incredibly useful for building a deeper relationship with consumers in a way that paid media cannot. This connects back to a theme that you've now encountered many times, the tension that marketing teams must manage between performance marketing and brand building. Performance marketing is a great way to generate revenue in shorter frames, but marketers also need to build brands for the long-term.

With Duckworth's example in mind, let's explore how companies can improve the ranking of their organic search results through SEO.

Within the owned media umbrella, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important tools to increase discovery and engagement with brands without spending more on paid media.

As it turns out, there is quite a broad set of techniques for increasing relevance and authority that can be used in SEO.

We’ll now turn to Rodrigo Stockebrand, SEO expert, who will tell us about the key pillars of SEO.

I'm Rodrigo Stockebrand. I'm the vice president of SEO at Univision, previously the global SEO lead at Amazon, SEO lead on NASA, and global SEO director at Publicis Groupe.

When you're starting on your SEO journey, I often refer to them as the three pillars of SEO. The three main things you'd be thinking about are the technical aspect of the website and the page itself, the content that lives on that page, and then also the links.

Now, technical essentially means every web page that's created today is done so in HTML and uses a variety of other code. Without going too deep into the topic of code, basically, web pages have to be accessible. They can't be blocked to search engines. They have to load quickly. If it takes 30 seconds to load a page or the content, or things are loaded in an unbalanced way, it creates a problem. But not just for search engines. It also creates a user problem.

The content piece is also equally important because a page could be brilliantly fast. It could be incredibly well-structured. But at the same time, it may not have the words that someone typed into Google on the page. And more so, it may have the wrong kind of combinations or syntax of the words. Going back to another example, if someone's searching for the age of a particular celebrity, it's quite simple what their mission is. They're looking for a number—what that age is or what that information that they're seeking specifically is. And that's really the content that the page has to have. It's not really about the amount of words that are on the page; it's how well those words match what the user is trying to accomplish.

And links are things like, for example, when one page links to another page, that's essentially a link back. And this is really what made Google Google back in the early days, as it was kind of setting itself apart as a search engine. They had the strongest measurement and scoring system called PageRank that really gave a lot more kind of emphasis to the social aspect or the citation aspect of the web. So a web page wasn't just relevant; it was also very popular and highly cited by other similar web pages or websites on that particular topic. And that's really what sets it apart and continues to do so today.

The technical and link optimization pillars of SEO are more relevant to the backend web development.

Technical and link optimizations form two of the three pillars of search engine optimization. The following information serves as a small how-to guide for marketers hoping to understand more about these pillars of SEO.

Technical optimization describes the process of optimizing the technical aspects of a website to ensure accessibility.

In addition to technical optimization, a company needs to optimize its links to ensure that they work effectively and encourage other sites to link to the company’s site to increase its authority. This process is known as link optimization.   

Of particular importance for link optimization are inbound links. Inbound links are like citations that build the authority of a website and improve its odds of getting higher ranking in organic search.

Rodrigo Stockebrand goes into detail about these pillars of SEO.

One of the key things to consider is that technical optimizations vary platform by platform. So if you're on WordPress or if you're on Drupal or another content management system, there's just thousands of technologies available today. This makes the technical SEO piece incredibly complex.

I've had the opportunity to work with some of the largest sites but also some of the smallest sites. What I found is that a framework is incredibly important for technical SEO. The framework that I use is called the CIRCLE framework. Essentially, the CIRCLE is every letter of the word C-I-R-C-L-E. The CIRCLE framework really brings the entire technical SEO spectrum together into one single process.

It's really important for triaging technical issues, finding out exactly where and what and why certain issues exist. It also makes the process much more rigid and much more likely to result in implementation. In enterprise websites, very large websites, it can be very hard to get things done on the technical side because there's such a long list of things in the backlog. You have to make a very strong case to get implementations done. This framework helps package everything up because you not only find the issues, but you also make a solid case for what the resolution is and, more importantly, what the impact is going to be.

The CIRCLE framework:

• Crawling: Search engines must be able to crawl and access a web page to evaluate it.
• Indexing: Once the page is crawled, the search engine catalogs it properly. Think of Google or Bing as a librarian organizing books in a digital library.
• Ranking: The signals on the page must make it the most relevant webpage for a specific search term, ensuring a high ranking.
• Click-Through-Rate: Even if a page ranks highly, it must generate clicks. If it doesn’t, it signals to search engines that the page might not be the best resource, potentially lowering its ranking.
• Landing Page: The page users land on must meet their expectations. If it's outdated or irrelevant, users might bounce, reducing its effectiveness.
• Experience: The page must load quickly, avoid intrusive interstitials, and provide a seamless experience.

For example, The New York Times used the CIRCLE framework to address issues of duplicate content. Local stories that became national news were creating duplicate pages. By identifying the issue at the ranking stage, they implemented a technical tag to guide search engines to the authoritative page, improving user experience and monetization.

Another pillar of SEO is links:

1. Fix broken links: Repair links on your site that no longer work.
2. Recover lost links: Reclaim links that previously pointed to your site but no longer do.
3. Acquire new links: Build relationships and create valuable content that earns inbound links.

At Amazon Music, we used link intersect analysis to identify links competitors were getting, but we weren’t. For example, lyric videos on YouTube were trending, and we created lyric video content with links to the streaming page for the song on our platform. This strategy not only aligned with consumer behavior but also scaled effectively, driving significant value back to the site.

The CIRCLE framework and strategic link-building can help ensure a comprehensive and successful SEO strategy.

As Rodrigo mentioned, there are three pillars of SEO to improve access, relevance, and authority:

• Technical optimization: Ensuring that your site is easily accessible to search engines and loads quickly.
• Content optimization: Ensuring that you have the most relevant content that a consumer may be searching for and that is relevant to your brand and business. The right content enhances your relevance to Google’s algorithm.
• Link optimization: Encouraging other websites to link to your site to gain authority.