- The marketer’s new digital toolkit – INFOGRAPHIC
- 20 dimensions of paid, owned & earned marketing
- How to easily navigate online advertising – INFOGRAPHIC
- Earned marketing made simple – INFOGRAPHIC
I earlier outlined a model encompassing paid, owned and earned marketing. My subsequent post focused specifically on the paid marketing aspect. This post is specifically about the owned component. Owned marketing is new fancy word for most marketing tactics that are not advertising.
There are 6 dimensions in owned marketing – the marketer’s new digital toolkit. You’ve likely heard of owned media, but really, this is not media, it is marketing. In the past, owned marketing has been called “below the line marketing”. That is, all marketing activities that specifically are not media.
But what is owned media?
Owned marketing is all the marketing opportunities the brand could possibly do itself in-house if it wished to.
Often-times many such tasks are handled through an agency or an expert of some kind. Yes, the brand ends up having to pay for these, but these are all owned marketing. These include their own website, store location, layout and logo, newsletter & email marketing, social media accounts and eCommerce among many others.
There are at least 6 distinct dimensions for owned marketing.
6 dimensions of owned marketing
There are 6 dimensions in the marketer’s toolkit. Each has a direct impact on the five others. None are optional. Having a strategy and plan in place for each allows the brand to properly align its tactics with its objectives while measuring their impact.
Here are the 6 dimensions of owned marketing in further detail.
Main objective
What do you want to achieve as an endgame with your marketing effort? Do you want to generate more sales or lead more people to your brick & mortar stores? Are you looking for more social media fans? It’s important that this objective be clearly spelled out and quantifiable.
Marketing KPI
How will you know what you’ve done worked? This is the quantifiable part of your objective. You need to use a readily available Key Performance Indicator to gage whether or not you’ve met your objective. Readily available means it exists in your web analytics suite or ecommerce platform. You further should question what this data could mean, what else could it be interpreted as? Does it really mean what you want it to mean?
Is your chosen KPI dependent on multiple systems? Do these systems talk to each other?
Website
Everything you do in digital needs to ultimately lead consumers here. This is your home base online. Whether your final sales happen here, or the shopping happens here to make purchases in-store doesn’t matter.
Your website needs to have optimized UX (user experience). It needs a fully planned content marketing strategy to answer potential client questions and inspire them. It needs to be well coded and structured for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes.
You cannot consider your website without having linked it to your social accounts or your newsletter. Further, your website absolutely needs to be mobile friendly.
Your website should be connected to a web analytics suite like Google Analytics so you can track its ongoing performance.
Mobile
Your website is useless if it is not mobile friendly. Being mobile friendly means you’ve considered all your consumers, no matter their preferred device.
Having a mobile friendly site is of paramount importance from a social media and newsletter point of view as the majority of their usage is through mobile devices. If people are interested in what you’ve sent or shared with them, the destination needs to be optimized for them.
Mobile include whether or not your brand needs an App separately from your mobile site. Mobile sites are great for discovery and quick information. Mobile apps generate more profound brand experiences.
Social
Is your brand present and active where your consumers are? The big two (by very far) are Facebook and YouTube. However, depending on your market and target audience, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, Vine and many others could be important to use.
Your consumers spend a lot of time on many social channels and it is important for your brand to adapt its content marketing for these social channels so you can engage your audiences there in the right way.
Ultimately, your social accounts shouldn’t only make friends. They should be leading consumers to your site or store to ultimately buy your brand.
Another important communication method is email marketing which includes brand newsletters. Does your brand have a clearly spelled out email marketing strategy? Do you only communicate with clients when they have questions, or post-purchase? Do you invite them to sign up to a newsletter? What content or deals to your subscribers expect to get from you and are you delivering on this expectation?
Conclusion
For the last 4 dimensions, you further need to determine how you will measure success to optimize your efforts in each. You will need to consider your SEO efforts for each tactic across points 3 to 6.
Does this model present things in a clear way to help you not forget anything? What would you add to this model?
