The media landscape has changed a lot over the years, and phrases like ‘earned media’ or ‘paid Media’ often get thrown around a lot. These terms tend to refer to the type of media coverage that your brand is getting, and also how it is being achieved.
While it is possible to improve your SEO through paid media, Earned Media tends to be much more organic and authoritative.
Affiliates need to stay on top of SEO trends in order to be the best, and grab market share of traffic in search. Here, we are going to look at the importance of earned media to improve your SEO.
What is earned media?
If you are creating your own content or paying others to do so, then this is known as ‘paid media’. Earned media is content that someone else has written about your brand without your input. For example – earned media could be something like the Affiliate Spotlight Features that we run across www.affiliateinsider.com
The key point is, earned media can be anything from a tweet that a customer has written about you, to a newspaper article or even a TV segment. Social media can also be considered to be earned media – depending on who is using it and how it is written.
How can you use it?
Earned media helps provide organic traffic and essentially this gets you more commercial deals. If you know how to use it in the right way it can make a big difference to your content strategy and marketing tactics for your affiliate site. Organic traffic improves your SEO and if you can find a way to have others write about your brand or service online, then you can achieve better results. You cannot pay for Earned Media so you have to think of ways to engage your audience with content that they will be happy to share, comment on or write about – thus qualifying as earned.
How to earn it
So you know what earned media is, but do you really know how to get it?
There are a few ways that you can do this organically, but you need to ensure that you are approaching each situation in exactly the right way.
Arguably, the most effective way to earn this kind of publicity is to create content that is worth sharing. Your customers aren’t going to promote your brand if there is no direct benefit to them. If you create something that they are interested in and that they think their own followers will be interested in – you have nailed it. Think about education, think about unique content and think about commentary you can’t get anywhere else to give you some direction.
Social media interaction is also key to getting your hands on some earned media and improving your SEO. Reply to comments, ask questions and be as engaging as possible. If you just ignore your customers on your social channels you are not going to make the right impact.
Finally, earned media also comes directly as a result of providing good customer service and impressive products. If you can show your customers that you care, they will be more likely to spread the word to their contacts.
According to Oberlo, 54 per cent of people research products on social media. This means that before they buy, they are looking for earned content about your brand. This isn’t a review, these are real life testimonials. You need to go above and beyond to earn this kind of referral, which then improves your SEO.
Improving your SEO is an ongoing and daily task so you need to consider using earned media to boost your conversions and secure those deals alongside the page content you load up on your website too.
If you want to learn more about Earned Media, and the latest digital marketing trends for iGaming business – REGISTER for a ticket to attend the Digital Marketing Forum which we are running alongside the SBC Trade shows – Betting on Sports and CasinoBeats Summit on the 18th September this year.