For Public Relations professionals, Presscast combines the advantages of owned, earned and paid media. This article examines the benefits and drawbacks of each classical media category, and explains how Presscast can be leveraged to disrupt Media Relations.
Owned Media
Owned media relates to all web property that you control. Whether it’s a website or even a social media channel, the value of owned media is that you have full discretion over content and messaging. And with this discretion, you can ensure that your message or product is portrayed to your audience exactly as intended. Additionally, you have the ability to insert a “call to action” to better shepard consumers down your funnel
Challenge of Owned Media: The difficulty with owned media is that it requires time and resource investment. Whether done by a team or an individual, developing content is a manual process and depending on the format of your content, it can take days or even weeks to produce. Owned media is the ideal format from a messaging standpoint, but it comes at the cost of long production times, slow return on investment and the need to cultivate an engaged audience.
Earned Media
“Earned media” is PR equivalent word-of-mouth. You pitch your message to a publisher (often a journalist) in hopes of positive coverage. The organic nature of earned media is where it derives its value, but also involves risks ranging from an absence of result to the presence of negative coverage. As its name implies, publication in earned media signals you have earned the endorsement through merit alone.
Challenge of Earned Media: while earned media is promising in principle, it is problematic in practice. First, the process of acquiring earned media-coverage is manual and involves reaching out to publishers to pitch your story. There is no guarantee your message will be published, and even if it does, you have no control over its fidelity — i.e.: how true to your message the final product will be.
Secondly, even in the unlikely event that your message gets published unaltered, you’re not driving sales directly because earned media will never publish anything resembling a call to action. Remember: earned media is never an ad.
Paid Media
Paid media’s main advantage is scalability of distribution. The only practical limit how wide an audience you can reach is is budget, The paid media approach allows you to pay a publisher to distribute the full length content you have produced on their platform providing you with a pre established audience and cutting out the costs associated with hosting your own publishing platform.
Challenge of Paid Media: while using paid media to circumvent the process of building a platform and audience, you still need to produce content, which is a decidedly non-scalable process. But you also have a cost aspect to consider. If you are expecting to receive plenty of value from being being published,you can expect to pay a hefty price — easily in the triple-digits.
Presscast
Presscast allows you to natively embed your message within a publisher’s article. Not only does this give you control over messaging and targeting, but the price-point is significantly cheaper than classical paid media. Additionally, the process is streamlined to the point where there are virtually no limits to how far you can scale Presscast campaigns There’s nothing preventing your message from appearing in hundreds of thousands of highly-relevant articles.
To recap, Presscast provides the best bits of all three types of media:
- You keep control over your message and choose how it is embedded into a publisher’s content.
- You can ensure a call to action aimed at a targeted audience so that click throughs (and eventually sales) can be prioritised.
- You can scale yours campaigns to the extent of our marketing budget.
Click here to take advantage of the Presscast approach to media.
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