Owned vs. Rented Media – A New Era for Online Marketing in 2015

Back in the early days launching a social media campaign was more about innovation than budgeting, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter weren’t financially driven. The newsfeeds typically reached a large percentage of your fans or followers and they were able to see most of the content you shared.

Unfortunately this has passed. Today social media marketing, especially Facebook marketing has required us to change and actively work towards ensuring our information sharing appears in your target fans newsfeed and beyond that, seen by as wide an audience as possible. Advertising is one of the go to options to ensure extension of content reach.

FACT: A recent study from Ogilvy and Mather showed that company posts reached only 12% of their followers in October 2013 and that dropped to 6% in February 2014.

As if things had not changed enough, along came the Facebook’s algorithm changes in 2014. Marketers reflected on new strategies to ensure they maintained and increased the reach of their posts.

So what does this mean?

Is social media marketing moving away from earned content views to paid content views? The value of owned or rented online media channels, is the real question to consider.

These latest changes in Facebook’s algorithm have forced online businesses to question the value of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus as an affordable vehicle for sharing content.

Let’s talk rented media first.

As the owner of an online marketing company, I understand how easy it is to get lost in the whole ‘social-media-is-the-future’ hype. Yes, it is 2015 and Social Media is an extremely important part of any marketing strategy. But any business requires risk mitigation and focusing all your marketing activities on one channel is not advisable. So many times I talk to businesses who only use a Fcebook page for their online actions. Consider this, do you actually own your Facebook page?

Yes or No?

The answer is a resounding NO.

Granted, it is your business page and you love posting updates on it every day and running new ad campaigns but are you the one controlling who does and does not see those updates or those ads?

What happens if a year from now Facebook shuts down? What happens when Mark Zuckerberg decides that you must pay 10 cents for every update you post on Facebook? What happens if Facebook removed your entitlement to access your page? I am by no means providing an insight into what will happen within the Facebook platform but highlighting the fact that you as a Facebook user do not actually control that environment. Any action by Facebook may be beyond your control and sadly could result in you loosing your Facebook page and or access to your Facebook fans.

This combined with the fact that you now have an advertising spend to ensure your content is seen within this social media platform confirms the fact that you do not own this channel. Facebook is who controls the platform and therefore hypothetically has the ownership stake in the ground when it comes to your business page. In a Harvard Business Review blog article published in Oct 2014 Mark Boncheck stated that “if social media were truly owned, brands would have control over the experience, access to their fans, and full use of the data. But the reality is quite different.”

I couldn’t agree more with his statement. It is simple… it is the owner who make the rules, not the tenants.

So how can we regain some control of our online marketing destiny? The answer – owned media!

What is Owned Media?

Owned Media – A term that most of us use when comparing paid, earned and owned content in the online space. Owned media is the content that you have the control of i.e. your blog, website, newsletters, emails and any other form of content that you have the complete ownership of.

It is now the time to return to the heady days of social media marketing when brands owned their content and engaged with their audience via websites, emails or newsletters as well as through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on.

What does this mean?

The reason that we are focusing so much on owning your content is because sharing general content on social media is not going to cut it anymore. Instead of using rented online media space such as Facebook business pages, it is important to be more tactical and establish an integrated marketing strategy.

Use your website, your newsletters, your emails and your blog to engage and build a loyal customer base through helpful and valuable content. Use these online platforms to store your valuable content. Keep using social media to its full potential and for the benefits that it provides to your business but as a rule, place your content on platforms that you have control over.

Your website and your blog should be the life and blood of your Digital marketing strategy Tips.

Now, the question, is how do you stand out from the crowd with owned media?

It may not be as easy as creating a Facebook business page and posting regular updates on it but there are many innovative steps you can take to ensure your owned media platforms are found. Make sure to use mediums such as email marketing and news letters to share your content with your target audience.

In summary, brands need to quit focusing on building just a social media strategy and come up with a more tactical online marketing plan where they can have the best of both worlds, i.e. engagement on the channels that their customers are present on but that engagement needs to lead their audience back to the brand’s owned platforms. These owned platforms are where the brand continues to tell the stories and share the content that have engaged their audience but also control the whole environment including the customer’s actions and the sales funnel.

It is not about focusing on paid, earned or owned media any more but more about rented and owned media and leveraging the best results for your business by using both mediums collaboratively to obtain leads and produce results.

Contact Net Branding to schedule a one-on-one consultation where you can discuss your online marketing goals, your branding challenges and your unique business requirements with us.

Our service offering incorporates the following areas: Internet Marketing, Social Media Coaching, Social Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Domain Name Optimization, Directory Submission, Google Profiling, Online Advertising Campaigns, Website creation, Blogging and UserTraining.