The media strategies that businesses use have a significant impact on how well they can advertise their products and services. With the many options available today, businesses can leverage paid media, earned media and owned media. Out of all the media strategies, owned media is the only form in which a company has control over its content and advertising. In this post, we will explore the best owned media strategies for businesses to increase their audience and customer base. The three best owned media strategies include:
1. Website blog
The blog on the website of a company is a primary owned media channel and it’s the foundation for the owned media strategy for most enterprises. It’s very important to note that the blog a business runs should be on their own personal website. Using platforms like Medium, Quora, etc. would disqualify a blog from being owned media because it’s owned by another business. With a blog on the company website, a business can capture organic visitors from Google and promote their products/services or capture their information in an email list.
What makes a blog so valuable for enterprises is that they can target the keywords that their customers are searching for and write helpful content with SEO. By using tools like Ahrefs, Moz, etc., businesses can get an accurate estimate of how many people are searching for a particular keyword, number of backlinks and how difficult it will be for their site to rank competitively. This process can be repeated continuously to rank content that a site can rank for and this can turn into tens of thousands of organic visitors per month to a site.
A website blog is one of the best long-term investments that an enterprise can make in owned media. As a blog gains age and authority, it will rank much quicker and better for the keywords that are being compounded. The content and links on the blog will continue to increase and the organic traffic for the site will compound. This can lead directly to driving key business metrics like number of leads, number of new email signups and sales of products and services. A well written and ranked piece of content can bring hundreds and potentially thousands of monthly visitors to your site for years.
2. Email list
An email list is one of the best forms of owned media for all enterprises. The actual impact of content marketing efforts are often unrealized until an enterprise uses email marketing to capture website traffic and turn those visitors into paying customers. When an enterprise captures signups for their email list, those contacts become the audience and owned media of the business. This list of contacts can be sent informational and promotional emails that help build the brand of the company in addition to getting sales for products and services.
Email lists are loved by enterprises because it’s one of the most cost-effective owned media channels. Besides the marketing tools and software a company uses to run campaigns, there are basically no other costs to sending emails to thousands if not tens of thousands of contacts in an email list. Additionally, the barrier to entry for email outreach is low; if you build a list, you can start marketing towards them immediately. This is why email marketing has one of the highest ROIs amongst all of the marketing channels available today. In fact, email campaigns see an average of a 4300% return across all industries.
Enterprises who are experienced with email marketing can get an even higher return by using tactics like segmentation to personalize emails further. Segmentation is the process of separating email lists based on the interests and preferences of your email contacts. This can be done based on demographics, purchase history, email update preferences and more. Enterprises can use segmentation to send different types of emails to test engagement and conversion rates. Since the email list is owned by the company, there are virtually limitless ways that a company can use their list to reach their business objectives.
3. Apps
One of the newer forms of owned media for enterprises are mobile applications. An app acts as the primary owned media platform for the mobile users of a company. Your app is basically the mobile-friendly version of your website and you can customize it to show any type of media for your users. With mobile apps, you’ll have unprecedented access to your customers and you can utilize a variety of mobile-specific messaging that includes text messages, chatbots, in-app notifications, push notifications and more. By using one of these messaging tactics, you can access your customer basically anytime and use geospatial data to personalize your marketing campaigns.
Enterprises generally either develop their app in-house or outsource to a mobile app development company. When the app is created and launched on iOS and Android, it becomes part of the owned media. The enterprise has full control over what gets published on the app and they can add or remove media without any permissions. As long as the general iOS or Android guidelines are being followed, an enterprise is free to do as they wish with their app and this becomes another layer of owned media for a company.
The different functionalities of apps make it one of the highest ROI forms of owned media. With apps, an enterprise can:
Personalize user experience
Mobile apps enable you to get data on your users like their demographics, location, email, preferences, etc. Enterprises can utilize this to personalize the user experience and help retain their users better. This plays an important part in branding and creating a great in-app experience for users.
Gain visibility
Mobile apps also enable enterprises to gain unprecedented visibility into their users. Since mobile users have their device with them at all times, enterprises can see how users interact with their messaging and campaigns and use that to improve the experience for other users.
Leverage in-app payments
One of the biggest benefits of using apps for enterprises is they get the ability to access in-app payments. This opens up an entire new revenue stream for enterprises. Enterprises can use payment platforms like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, mobile wallets, cryptocurrencies, etc. to process payment for their media and services on apps. Additionally, both iOS and Android support subscription-based payment methods and this can enable enterprises to start offering monthly recurring services.
Create loyalty and reward programs
In addition to using mobile payments, a mobile app can also support loyalty and reward programs. One of the best ways to increase engagement on an app is to create a loyalty and reward program where a user is rewarded for making an in-app purchase. With mobile apps, you can make real time loyalty offers to users based on their in-app activity and purchase history.
Any time that your company spends writing a blog post, creating an app or building an email list is time well spent because these are assets that your enterprise owns forever. It’s important to start with owned media channels and diversify to other strategies like paid media to reach a larger audience. To learn more about paid media, check out our blog here.
Ali Ali is a content marketer and blogger at alisquared.co. When he’s not guest posting, you can find him link building and learning about technical aspects of SEO. He can be reached at ali@alisquared.co.
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