Chapter 16: Publicity: Promotion Using Earned Media, Owned Media, and Social Media
Publicity
Any UNPAID form on nonpersonal presentation of ideas, goods, or services. Types of Publicity: 1. Paid Media 2. Earned Media 3. Owned Media
"The King of Social Media" Online social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, and send messages to connected friends. Facebook is visited more regularly than any other social media site; appeals to older generations more than younger. On Facebook anyone can set up pages to promote a business or nonprofit. Business pages might feature photos, videos, links to a company's home page, reviews, and other information.
Laws for Bloggers
When a blogger (or someone posting on social media) offers an endorsement or testimonial for a product, this must be disclosed.
Owned Media
A type of Publicity that refers to promotional messages generated by a brand (or company or nonprofit organization) communicated through a message channel the brand directly controls. Owned media include the brochures and catalogs a company mails to target customers. A brand's product website, blog, and social media pages—YouTube channel, Facebook page, or Instagram—are also examples of owned media. As with paid media, the selling company is the source of the message.
Earned Media
A type of Publicity that refers to promotional messages not directly generated by the company or brand, but rather by third parties such as journalists or customers. The company or brand is assumed to earn the attention of journalists or customers because there is an interesting story to tell or because others would value this information. Earned media can be positive or negative. Poor customer service might earn a restaurant a bad review on Yelp.
Owned Media can Educate and start a Conversation
A website, salesperson, or book that helps a customer solve a problem also earns that customer's trust. Customers who find content useful will pass along the site to others. Those types of connections also help a firm with its search engine optimization—creating a virtual circle.
A free online photo and video sharing service geared to mobile phones. Photos and videos can be taken with the Instagram app and shared on other social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Most popular among younger age groups. More than half of all users check in daily. Instagram can work well for many small businesses, where an owner or part-time marketing manager may find it less time-consuming to take pictures as compared to writing stories or posts. Businesses in the restaurant, clothing, fashion, travel, and entertainment fields often post images on Instagram to maintain or stoke customer interest in their goods and services.
A social networking microblogging service that allows registered users to send short (140 characters or less) messages called "tweets." Much smaller than Facebook, but still has 319 Million users globally. Appeals to younger generations more than the older ones. Among active users, tweets tend to be more frequent and less personal as compared to Facebook.
Brand Community
A type of Owned Media that connect customers. A group of customers joined around a particular brand or common set of shared interests. A brand community should be designed to serve the interests of its members—and the brand often enjoys increased customer loyalty, larger purchases, or simply being viewed as a trusted partner.
Branded Apps
A type of Owned Media that helps solve customer problems. Sponsored software applications that benefit customers by providing entertainment, solving a problem, and/or saving time. A branded app can be a positive reminder for the brand, especially when its function ties closely to the core product.
White Paper
A type of Owned Media: An authoritative report or guide that addresses important issues in an industry and offers solutions. For a company to establish itself as such a leader, it might publish white Page papers. E-books and white papers are most successful when, in addition to describing a problem, they help the customer solve it without promoting a particular company's products. Loved by Business customers
Infographics
A type of Owned Media: get attention and pass along. A visual image such as a chart or diagram used to represent information or data. The visual images, often combined with minimal text, grab attention, simplify complex information, and highlight trends or patterns. A well-designed infographic quickly conveys useful information and gets passed along more readily than a text-heavy website.
Advertising VS Publicity
Adverstising and Publicity are both types of Mass Selling. Advertising is Paid. Publicity is not.
Paid Media
Advertisements that use messages generated by a brand (or company or nonprofit organization) and communicates them through a message channel the brand pays to access. The source of the message is the organization doing the advertising.
Benefits and Challenges of Earned Media
Benefits: 1. Most trusted information source 2. Customers most likely to act on this information Challenges: 1. Very little message control 2. Can be negative toward brand 3. Difficult to measure 4. Difficult to create 5. Difficult to target Customers act on earned media, but it has risks: Positive articles are the most powerful messages a target customer can receive—customers trust and act on this information. But, earned media can be risky because marketing managers have no control over the purblicity.
Benefits and Challenges of Paid Media (Advertising)
Benefits: 1. High message control 2. More precise targeting 3. Potentially large audience Challenges: 1. Not trusted 2. Customers easily avoid 3. More costly, declining effectiveness High message control yet less effective: Most advertising is designed to target a large number of customers at once. Customers are getting better at avoiding advertising messages. Most customers see advertising as an interruption of something they would rather be doing. New technology helps many customers sidestep advertising messages. (DVR's, Paying for ad-free, etc.) Combine these behaviors with customers' lack of trust in advertising and it's easy to understand why advertising effectiveness has been declining.
Benefits and Challenges of Owned Media
Benefits: 1. High message control 2. Relatively low cost 3. Niche audiences 4. Versatile in message content and format Challenges: 1. Need to drive or attract customers to sites and create value to ensure their return 2. Requires resources to manage and maintain High Message control as Lower Cost. Owned media allow a marketing manager to craft the precise message customers receive. Marketing managers can choose what information is displayed in a brochure or on the company website, YouTube channel, Instagram, Pinterest page, or Twitter feed, etc. Owned media also allow a manager a great deal of versatility with the messaging.
Social Media Objectives
Builds relationships; not fans. Promotional efforts utilizing social media are best focused on increasing target customers' purchase likelihood. And because customers generally follow brands they already know and like, social media work best when the target market is already a customer. In most situations, social media as earned and owned media are not aimed at making target customers aware of the brand or encouraging trial. Instead, promotion objectives for social media usually focus on (a) enhancing brand familiarity by growing the number of customers that prefer or insist on a brand or (b) growing customer equity by encouraging customers to increase their purchases.
Earned Media from Customer Advocacy
Customers trust and act on recommendations from friends, family, and colleagues. Even recommendations from strangers often have a stronger influence on buying decisions than advertising does. Customers acquired from word-of-mouth are more loyal and have greater lifetime value. Opinion leaders like to share their views—they also get attention from other customers who respect their views. Marketers value personal recommendations from opinion leaders. Another way to motivate positive word-of-mouth is through a referral program. Ratings and Reviews let customers do the selling.
Snapchat
For firms targeting Millennials and Gen Z, the fast-growing photo/video messaging app Snapchat has been a hit. Snapchat includes a mix of private and public messaging. Some magazine and newspaper publishers, including the Wall Street Journal and National Geographic, post articles, photos, and video on Snapchat. With all those young users, Snapchat continues to experiment with ways to reach them with commercial content.
LinkedIn is a networking website to businesspeople who create personal or company profiles. Recent growth has occurred mostly with younger age groups. Individuals may have hundreds or thousands of connections. Businesspeople used to think of LinkedIn as a place to network for jobs. Now many companies and salespeople use LinkedIn to communicate with customers. Companies posting news, white papers, and reports develop a reputation as trusted industry experts. Salespeople identify and qualify leads and share knowledge with customers.
Pass-along
Occurs when one customer makes a recommendation for (or against) a specific brand to another customer. occurs when one customer passes information on to one or more other customers. Customers pass along videos, articles, coupons, or websites to other customers. They also recommend brands when the seller has earned an endorsement—or advise against a brand that deserves it. Sellers can earn more recommendations by making it easy for customers to share recommendations or content. The ultimate Pass Along is going viral.
Bounce Rate
One measure of a website's success is bounce rate, which indicates the percentage of visitors who only visit a single page in a website. A high bounce rate indicates customers are not interested enough to click on other page links. Marketing managers can change how they attract customers to the site or characteristics of the site to lower the bounce rate.
Pinterest is a website that allows registered users to share ideas and images they find online with fellow users. The ideas and images are organized into "pinboards"—a kind of online bulletin board. Lets users share wish lists. About three-quarters of Pinterest users are female. Although the site is more frequently used by younger people, it maintains appeal to some in older age groups.
Use-Generated Content
Refers to any type of communication created by customers for other customers. User-generated content can take many forms. Customers can recommend their hairdresser to a friend or demonstrate their new Samsung Galaxy phone to a coworker. A customer can also send a tweet praising a new book—or post a review at Amazon describing what he likes (and doesn't like) about his new nonstick frying pan. ***All of these types of user-generated content are examples of earned media.***
Social Media
Refers to websites or software applications that allow users to create and share ideas, information, photos and videos, and interact in a social network. Social media can include paid, owned, and earned media. Social media has no placement costs, but funds are still needed to hire staff to manage their social media platforms. Social media is a "many to many" model of communication.
Earned Media in PR and Press
Some companies earn editorial coverage—with their goods and services or good works featured in articles, stories, and reviews in magazines, newspapers, or on television. If a firm has a really new message, a published article may get more attention than advertising can. Trade magazines carry articles featuring the newsworthy products of interest to people in a particular job or industry. This kind of coverage doesn't usually happen by luck or accident. A good public relations effort often lays the groundwork for companies that get positive attention in the press.
Customers trust Publicity over Advertising
The four most highly trusted sources for buying information are forms of publicity, not advertising. Consumers trust information from earned media sources most: 83 percent of respondents trust recommendations from people they know, 66 percent trust online consumer opinions (reviews), and 66 percent trust editorial content such as newspaper articles. Branded websites (a form of owned media) are trusted by 70 percent of respondents. These levels of trust are significantly higher than various types of advertising (paid) media. Among various advertising (paid) media, trust ranged from 36 percent for text ads on mobile phones to 63 percent for television advertising
Blog
Type of Owned Media: A regularly updated website, usually managed by one person or a small group and written in an informal, conversational style. Many companies use blogs as a way to regularly communicate with customers. A blog allows a company or individual to get their ideas out to interested target customers. Some firms use a blog to position a firm or individual as a thought leader on a particular topic or to just demonstrate their helpfulness and concern. Customers like to do business with experts and caring people and companies.
Case Studies
Type of Owned Media: Business customers also like to read case studies—success stories about how a company helped another customer. A type of owned media.
Marketing Automation Software
Tracks individual customers' behavior and triggers actions in response to specific customer actions. For organizations with customers who spend a lot of time online, this software provides a low-cost way to learn more about customers and deliver the right messages at the right time. Software can also be programmed to help firms respond to particular customer actions
Referral Program
Type of Earned Media from Customer Advocacy: Offers a current customer an incentive for recommending a new customer to a business. Usually referral programs require the new customer to make a purchase. To give both the person giving and the person receiving the referral an incentive, both are usually offered some sort of discount.
Landing Page
Type of Owned Media: A customized web page that logically follows from clicking on an organic search result, online advertisement, or other link. Landing pages may be linked from social media, an e-mail campaign, or search engine optimization around specific key terms. The goal of a landing page is to move customers along in the purchase process. Because customers can easily click away from a web page, a landing page that directly addresses a customer's needs minimizes click-away. Often a landing page will make an offer to the customer—perhaps the opportunity to download a white paper—and ask for their contact information in return.
Branded Services
Valued services a brand provides that are not directly connected to a core product offering. Branded services are usually free or low cost and offer target customers benefits that leave a positive impression. This helps customers perceive a company or brand as caring about the customers' welfare. Customers experience these benefits and develop a positive attitude that fosters trust. EX: Samsung putting charging stations in the middle of an airport.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
a systematic process of ensuring that your firm comes up at or near the top of lists of typical search phrases related to your business. To appear high on organic search results, marketing managers often use search engine optimization (SEO), which is the process of designing a website so that it ranks high in a search engine's unpaid results. SEO considers how target customers search, what keywords they use in a search, and how the search engine prioritizes its results.
