What's the sweet spot in marketing especially when it comes to social? How can you really get the greatest bang for your buck? In this episode of the Social Media Marketing Happy Hour, Dawn and Traci talk about the 3 critical components – owned marketing, earned marketing, and paid marketing – that will help you hit the sweet spot! You'll also hear how all these 3 pieces fit together in your overall marketing scheme to make your business even more successful.
Owned Marketing
What is owned marketing? Can you build your own business without your own content?
Owned content is your original piece of content – the things you create and the things you control. This is where everything starts so it should be the foundation of your content marketing strategy. A lot of times people try to use curated content to build their following, but that's not enough. Whether you are an online business or a brick-and-mortar business, you still have to create content especially when you are using social for marketing. Your owned content is important if you want to be known as a thought leader or an expert in whatever it is that you are selling in your marketplace. Also, you should run traffic to owned content because it will help build that “know like and trust” factor. Another benefit of having owned content is that you allow your stuff to be searched and found in the search engines.
One of the things that fall into the “owned content” category is your blog. If you don't have a blog yet, you probably know that you need one. That is your little piece of the internet where you get to be who you are and show everyone what makes your business special. You can have a blog that provides education and value in whatever it is that you are selling. It's also a great place to send traffic to.
Another type of owned content are your social posts. Here you do microblogging and create either a great post, an image, a tweet, an podcast, a video or even live video that you post on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. These are all considered owned content as well.
Earned Marketing
Do people like your owned content? Is it being shared a hundred, thousand, even a million times?
First of all, when we say viral, people think it's something that gets shared millions of times. But it doesn't have to be that huge. It all depends on how big an how specific your niche is.
Earned media is precisely what it is, it is earned. You take the that crazy amazing content that you own and you put it out there. You earned it organically because you are getting traffic since search engines optimized your blog posts or videos on Facebook, YouTube or something like that. When people are sharing your stuff, it means that they find value in it. A good indicator that you are starting to hit all cylinders in earned content is when there's lots of tags, shares, tweets, retweets, reshares, making it viral.
If you want to take a look at the existing content that you own and see if it's getting shared, you can go on over to www.buzzsumo.com. Put in the url of your website and it will show you which blog posts are being shared in social media the most. It will list them down from the most shared to the least shared. This is a really good indicator of the kind of content you share that people love so that you can make more of that type of content. The more viral
Paid Marketing
Is paid traffic always effective? Will it work for any type of content?
Actually, it doesn't matter how great you are at running traffic or how much traffic you send to something when it is sent to content that's no good. Your content, first and foremost, should be stellar!
For example on Facebook, let's say you have owned content that you shared and it starts to get a lot of traction. What Facebook does is it gives you notifications saying something like, “Your post is performing better than others, you might want to consider boosting it to get even more traction.”
That is essentially taking this 3-pronged approach – taking the owned content, the earned content, and then putting some paid traffic together.. this is when you start hitting your sweet spot! You have to start with the end in mind and making sure that people get a wonderful user experience. To do this, you have to have a rock solid and valuable foundation. It all comes down to having great content that's timely, relevant, interesting, useful, and valuable… and the rest will follow.
If you feel like you've been missing that sweet spot and need some help, apply for a free marketing diagnostic session with Dawn or Traci at https://happyhourhangouts.com/coaching.
