Paid, Owned, Earned Media - Part 1 of 3 | Ep. 138

Owned media — the communication channels you control and the platforms you build your followings on — are your No. 1 number one asset.

However, it’s not your only asset for driving discovery.

That’s the inspiration behind a three-part series we’re kicking off today on how to get your content discovered using owned, earned, and paid media.

Part I: Owned media

A lot of you are out there making content, and you’re wondering, “How can I get people to find what I create?” Because if no one finds what you’re making, that’s obviously a huge waste of time.

When you’re putting all this work into your content, you want people to listen to it. Otherwise, it’s like building a billboard in the middle of the desert. If no one’s driving by it, they’re not going to see it, no matter how pretty it is.

It’s your job to figure out how to help people find the content you’ve created, and to do that, you need to understand how media channels can help create content discovery.

Let’s break this down into three basic parts:

What owned media channels are.
How they can help you be discovered.
Tactics you can use within your own media to encourage discovery.

Your content discovery plan really should be built on the foundation of owned media, so that’s why I wanted to start with this.

What is owned media?

Owned media is the content you create and publish on your own channels.

Think about that: the content you create and publish on your own channels. That can be your website. That can be a blog within your website. It can be videos or webinars or things you create that you place on other sites, like a YouTube channel, social media site, podcast, etc.

All of these areas are places where you put a stake in the ground and say, “This is where my content will live.”

The most ownable medium is your website because you actually pay for the hosting of that. You build it, you control it, and it features the content you create.

The distribution from that site to social media channels is also pretty much under your control. You decide when to push it out and where to put it. At that point, those sites decide how many people to show it to. But as you develop followings in those places, you pretty much own the content creation and distribution part of that.

Expert content

So, as you’re creating content and publishing to your own channels, first think about what you create that could be expert content. These are things that help tell your story: why you are doing what you’re doing in your business and how you’re positioning yourself against other content that’s out. What could that look like?

Stories from your customers.
Reviews or testimonials.
You exploring your field and your industry in a journalism-type format.
Webinars in which you’re teaching something relevant to your field.
Videos, blogs, podcasts, etc.
Social media and shared posts.

All of that is you creating a body of work that you own. It comes directly from you, and you own it.

Why is that owned media important? Because it tells your story. It shares your message and positions you as the authority or as a prominent player in your industry.

Without that, there’s no way for a consumer to understand what you’re all about and what you want to be known for.

You’ve got to start with that owned media for a couple of reasons:

Social proof

First, you need owned media channels to create some kind of social proof of what you’re all about. People need to understand when they look you up what your story is and what you stand for.

Your owned media also play a role in creating thought leadership. You don’t just want to be another person in your industry. You want to be known for something, and you do that through creating thoughtful, engaging, and helpful content that is useful to your specific audience.

Communication

Within content marketing, the role of owned channels also is to become a place where you can create direct communication with your customers. It’s great to create things, but what you want is a place where you can take what you’ve created and connect it to the people who are going to listen to it.

If you don’t put your content anywhere, there’s nowhere for it to be found. So the first step is establishing where your content is going to live. Once it’s there, you can establish direct communication. That could mean someone follows you on your social media, podcast, or blog.

Maybe that leads them to subscribe. And now because of that, they are starting to receive a regular stream of information from you. If they subscribe to your email list, you can directly send them communication every week or every day as you see fit.

You design it and decide when to send it out. That direct line of communication is the most important piece of any person’s business.

You can continue to grow that list, that subscriber base, and that communication you’ve established helps you nurture your customers over time. It helps you introduce yourself to them and build that “know, like, and trust” factor.

Not everyone, when they first meet us, is ready to buy from us. Owned communication starts that process and helps you build your brand identity. Through your owned media, you’re the one in charge of your image and deciding what you want to tell people so they understand what you’re all about and why they should listen to you and work with you.

Customer experience

Another role of your owned media channels to develop some kind of customer experience. When people engage with your content, they are experiencing you however you want to come across, whether that is as the teacher, the guide, or someone giving them tools. Whatever it is, you’re designing that customer experience, and those channels you own help you do that.

And owned channels aren’t necessarily just web-based entities. Other media channels could be things like an actual event, an in-person event, a live experience, a workshop, a digital course, etc. Those are all owned channels you can create to design a customer experience.

The more of them you create, the more you have a place for your customers to show up and connect with you as a business or as a brand.

How owned media lead to discovery

So there are obvious roles and benefits of owned channels. But the most important piece I want to talk about today is discovery tactics.

After all, this is the part of the season where I want to help you guys figure out how to get people to find the content you’re putting on your owned channels. I think this is the part that gets neglected the most, and that’s really what I’m excited to talk about.

A lot of us understand that we can create content and we can put it in places where it can be found, like on a website or on a social media channel.

However, just simply putting content somewhere isn’t enough to get it found.

You can place a social media post on a website or on a social channel, but if you have zero followers, that means zero people are going to see it. To be honest, if you have 100 followers, maybe three people will see it because that’s the average number that social media platforms show content to. If you produce a podcast, you might have zero people listening to it.

You actually have to get out there and help people find the content that you’re creating. You have to figure out how you’re gonna get people to discover it.

So obviously, the first step is to establish your channel presence. Pick places that are easy to find and ownable.

Part of that is the name of your website, your handles, and your profiles. How will you describe what your show or your business is all about? You want that look and message to be consistent across all channels.

Optimize your owned media for discovery

So, step one is to build those channels and set them up so that when people do find them, they are seeing and hearing your story.

Next, you’ve got to work to optimize for discovery. That’s going to be different for each platform, so one by one, you have to figure out, how does this particular owned channel reach people? How do people find these types of channels?

Think about a website, which is usually the hub of all of this. How do people discover websites? Either they’re told about them, they find a link to them somewhere, or the site is indexed in a catalog that we call Google.

So, if you want your website to be found by Google, you have to go through the process of understanding how that works. You have to optimize your website to be discovered, and there’s a whole process for that.

It’s not just the starting point, which is making sure you have the right keywords and are putting a lot of content on your site. There is also a strategy to how Google decides that out of all the sites out there, yours is important for a particular type of content.

Website discovery 101

You need to do your research on search engine discovery. I’m not going to delve into all of it today, but I’ll tell you one piece that matters is focusing on and featuring what you are all about. If you want to be the leader on “Star Wars” costumes, you’ve gotta make sure you are creating content that talks about “Star Wars” costumes and that those words are used in the headings and the titles of the content you create.

Beyond that, there’s a system for creating lots of content that all relates to your main topic and leads people down a path. Maybe they learned about one type of costume, which led them to this other article about another type of costume or makeup or whatever it is that leads them down the path.

It keeps people on your site, and that tells the search engines you are the site for this type of content. You have to give the search engines signals that readers are going to the right place. People aren’t just visiting your website and then immediately leaving because it was the wrong site for that type of content.

That takes planning and strategy and some design element to that. And that’s the work you need to design to craft your customer journey.

Discovery tactics in owned media

So, you’re guiding your customers along on a journey. But after they’ve found you, what are they supposed to do next? What do they want to do next? Are they buying that costume or emailing their friends? Are they looking at tutorials and creating little costume mashups?

Equally important, what is the road you want to send them down?

All of us can apply this to our business. For me, as a content creator and somebody who talks about content marketing, I’ve got to decide, when someone comes to my website, what are they learning? And then, what do I send them to next?

How do I help them in their journey? Is it some kind of freebie, or course, or webinar? What are they going to want and use along the way?

Designing the customer journey

The power of owned media is that I am now taking you on a journey and helping you along the way, and that’s all designed beforehand.

When you think about that and you’re designing your own media, I want you to think about not just how much you create and stuff onto your website and social channels, but also when someone’s there, how do you take them through and make sure they are going all the way through the journey to the end? And the end might be your product or service, or just getting onto your email list, which makes you now in charge of that communication with them.

How do you take them from discovering you, to consuming your content all the way through, to now being a subscriber or your email list so you can communicate with them on a regular basis. That’s the part of discovery that matters: You are finding a way to be findable, and once people find you, they are staying in your world and becoming a part of your communication channel.

That’s the part of discovery people miss. They think, “I’ll create this website or this social channel and I’ll just keep posting, and then people will eventually find it.”

Well, no.

Beyond that, there are tactics in social media, including hashtags, to make your content become more discoverable or viral. As you design your website, you have to get out there and tell people about it. You actually have to do the hand-to-hand combat to get your own channels discovered.

Direct outreach

Direct outreach is another thing people miss: Once you create this beautiful thing and this index of content and these 100 shows of your podcast or your YouTube channel, you actually have to go out there and introduce people to it. It’s an old-school tactic, but if you’re just starting out, it’s how it has to work.

You have to generate word of mouth, which means you might have to go out there, shake some hands, network, go to the events where people in your industry are, and take the correct steps to connect with people directly.

The direct outreach part of this is how you grow your owned media channel. That’s why we’re focusing on that today. The main way to grow an owned channel, other than doing the structural part and making it findable, is to actually get out there, meet people, and direct them to it.

You’re probably going to be doing that already, but if you have a plan in place, you’re better prepared. Think, what’s the one thing customers usually want to ask. Then, make sure you have a piece of content that would answer that question, and direct them to it. You can say, “Actually, I wrote an article about that. You can go find it on my website or on my podcast.”

Then, when they look you up or they look up that answer you gave them, they’ll find you because you’ve created that owned asset.

Follow up with owned media

Maybe they’ll just Google you after they meet you. Again, they’ll find your owned channels because they’re looking for you directly, and you’ve optimized your owned channel to be found. That’s the power of owned media: After all the work you’re doing to network and to introduce yourself to people, you now have this powerful owned media presence behind you that supports you and tells your story more than you could have in a five-minute conversation.

And owned media channels grow over time. Everything you create starts to compound, and you build this massive index of content that builds on what you’re all about. And the audience coming into your world starts to accumulate.

Coming up: Earned and paid media

I hope you’re beginning to understand the value of owned media channels. Coming up, we’ll also get into earned media channels, which involves getting people to talk about you and using their audiences and PR to generate discovery. Then we’ll get into the paid part of it, which entails paying for discovery through various tools out there.

But even then, it all starts with owned media. Why? Because if you don’t have an owned channel, then you don’t have anywhere to really drive people down the funnel.

You’ve got to start with a strong foundation so that when people start to figure out what they’re looking for, you’re findable in that space.

If you’ve already established those channels, go back and look at them. Ask, “Do I have all these pieces figured out? Is it findable? Is there more I can do to optimize that findability? Could give people more when they meet me in person?”

Be strategic about what you put on those channels, how you use them, how you optimize them, and how you make them findable.

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