Earned media is all the posts and buzz about your brand on social media created by people outside of your company. If you do any type of marketing for a brand, you’ve probably been asked to calculate the earned media value (or EMV) of your efforts. While EMV is important for brands, it has a bad reputation for a reason. Here, we’ll cover why calculating EMV is convoluted at best, and what numbers you can report back to your higher-ups instead.
Let’s be honest here, calculating earned media value is outdated. For starters, there isn’t one single formula for calculating it that all marketers follow. This means that there isn’t a reliable benchmark to base numbers on. Across the internet, you’ll find various formulas and methodologies telling you to multiply and divide impressions, reach, engagement, sales and other metrics to come to a final number. With every method being so different, what are you really calculating? EMV has a bad reputation because it’s not a real measure of your marketing efforts and your brand’s presence online.
Don’t get us wrong, earned media is still incredibly important, so don’t mix it up with paid and owned media when you’re doing your reporting.
Earned media encompasses the activity around your brand that you haven’t paid for, since it’s posts made by people outside of your company. Your brand should be monitoring the conversations around your brand online and reporting on metrics like shares, press mentions, retweets, views, mentions and more.
Paid media is, you guessed it, the buzz around your brand that you’ve paid for. This includes everything from Instagram ads to paid sponsorships. If you dipped into your marketing budget for it, put it in this category.
Owned media is all the content posted by your brand. All of your brand’s tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram photos all make up your owned media.
Calculating EMV with influencers is so complicated because it’s not taking into account the unique value of earned media they provide. Influencers have a special way of motivating their audience to join conversations and take action. Check out our blog on how to calculate EMV here.
To grow your brand’s online community, you have to get in front of people who aren’t already following you. Through their posts and captions, influencers introduce your products to audiences you don’t reach with your own posts. Every time an influencer makes a post about your product, uses your product in a video, tags you in their Instagram Story, etc it is all earned media they’re generating for you.
Through those posts, they’re getting their audiences excited about what your brand has to offer and motivating them to try for themselves. By working with influencers, you’re expanding your brand’s reach past your own social media channels. While it can be hard to directly track how an influencer’s posts translate into sales without the use of things like promo codes, as long as you’re working with influencers who fit with your brand, you’ll definitely be getting reach and brand awareness as forms of ROI.
It can be hard to get people to care about what you’re posting. Users are constantly scrolling through a sea of social media posts on a daily (often hourly, let’s be real) basis, so you face a lot of competition when it comes to grabbing their attentions.
Influencers serve as conversation starters to people who may not be familiar with your brand. They’re already known for getting high engagement on their posts because of how invested their followers are. People love liking and commenting on their favorite influencers’ posts because they feel like they’re part of a community. So when an influencer posts about your brand, those likes and comments don’t just help the influencer, they help you as well.
So we mentioned how loyal people are to their favorite influencers, and this is seen especially with how much they trust those influencers’ opinions. If an influencer swears by a new skincare routine to help clear acne, you can bet a large number of their followers will give it a shot just because they trust that influencer.
Social proofing puts a stamp of approval on your brand that essentially says “Yep, this brand is the real deal. People actually use it, love it and it’s probably not a scam!” Before people buy, they want to make sure the brands they’re purchasing from are legit and have positive reviews. Influencers are an easy way to social proof your brand and put any uneasiness to rest that potential customers might have.
The earned media value of influencers is clearly seen in how much weight their words and posts carry. As a brand, influencer marketing can drastically change the way your brand is seen online and in the eyes of consumers. Ready to take your marketing efforts to the next level and get the right influencers posting about your brand? Contact Statusphere to chat with one of our influencer marketing specialists about your options!