Your four types of media are what drive your business’s marketing initiatives. Understanding each type of media and their benefits can help you to make the most of your marketing efforts. The right narrative in the right medium will grab your audience's attention and give your key messages a greater reach. To help you understand the different ways to market your brand, we broke down each type of media and how to use it effectively.

Paid

Your paid media is any marketing that you’ve put money behind to promote. Social media advertising, sponsored content, and email marketing. Typically, this type of media will have the greatest amount to each because you’re paying for people to see it. This means this is the content that should be the most polished and that you should spend the most time on.

Earned

Earned media is marketing reach gained through unpaid publicity such when your company is mentioned in the news. With few journalists taking on more work than ever, this type of media is one of the hardest to create. However, announcing company news and updates through newswires and in journalist pitches will increase your chances of acquiring earned media. Additionally, framing your company as an expert in trending topics may give your business the opportunity to be used as an export source for news media.

Shared

Your shared media is any content you post to your social media channels. Shared media has grown with the rise of social media and has a lot of influence in building brand loyalty and trust with your consumer audience. With the rise of social media as a marking tool, it has become a competitive landscape when trying to grab the attention of your audience. Make sure you’re considering the tools and elements of each social channel to make sure you’re getting the most out of your content.

Owned

Owned media is anything you create in-house or content you contract to be made for company use. This is media your business owns and uses to tell a narrative. Things like your blog and your website contain owned content that frames you as an expert in your industry, and also typically authenticates you as a trustworthy brand.

How to use the four types of media in a marketing campaign

When you are developing a marketing campaign to promote your brand, consider how you can leverage each type of media to increase your reach and engagement with your target audience. Are you launching a new product or service? Writing a blog post about the benefits of this service (owned media) that you then link to on social media (shared media) is one way to combine two types of media to attract visitors to your website to learn more about your brand. Likewise, you pitch a product launch to journalists (earned media) and include a free sample of the product in your media kit. Finally, launched your product with a giveaway with sponsored posts about how to enter to win will reach your audience and even get them to share it with their friends to increase their chances of winning.

Once you have a foundation for each type of media and how to use them, you can easily leverage each one to form a successful marketing campaign. Looking for help with developing high-quality content that will drive web traffic and sales? Our content creation team combines research and experience to develop engaging content that communicates and resonates with your target audience.