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As social media takes up more and more of the communications landscape, earned media is ready for its closeup in a big way, according to a new white paper from Edelman and WARC Advisory.
“Beyond the Buzz: Examining the Effectiveness of Earned Media” says that the cultural shift brought about by the rapid growth of social media has led to major changes in earned media’s place in the overall marketing mix, as well as to the strategies that comms pros should use when implementing earned media strategies.
“Social media is fundamentally about many-to-many engagement rather than a one-way broadcast message,” says WARC insight director Aditya Kishore. “To benefit from it, brands need to explore opportunities to truly engage rather than simply replicate print or TV buying approaches.”
A key component to successfully engaging in this new environment is cultural salience—giving the role that culture and identity play a prominent place in the communications aimed at a particular audience. The study finds that culturally salient creative work “clearly out-performs non-culturally salient work in terms of profit, sales and market share.”
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For example, in a TWSC study cited in the white paper, 40 percent of the brands and companies surveyed who said their earned media work was culturally salient reported experiencing “very large business effects” when it came to profit gain, opposed to only 19 percent for those whose earned media efforts were not culturally salient.
Earned media is particularly suited to taking advantage of cultural salience. According to Edelman chief innovation and strategy officer Brent Nelsen, “earned’s unique ability to take action in culture—participating in, creating and changing culture—enables brands to drive greater levels of brand trust.”
The report also stresses the continuing importance of paid media. Adding paid to an earned marketing strategy reaps such benefits as amplified and extended reach, credibility enhancement, increased channels and ROI, enhanced engagement and a creative boost.
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