AFHood Group Blog The thoughtless yammerings of marketing junkies..

Analyzing Paid/Owned/Earned Marketing

As more is written about various categories of marketing, we can't help but think analytically about the implications of approaching marketing problems given their categorical differences. Of late, much has been written about 3 specific communication or marketing types:

1. Paid media
2. Owned media
3. Earned media

This breakout is logical, however any marketing breakout must be based on some common public thinking about 'channels'. Thus customers must interact and respond differently to those categories. During some of our most recent analysis, we found that applying some of our traditional segmentation matrices to the response indicators for these categories told a specific story for one client.  Various customer types respond distinctively different and to varying degrees to each type of marketing.

Now this might not be ground breaking on it's appearance, but if an organization could understand it's customer base to the point of actioning it's marketing toward the most profitable segments within each category, therefore maximizing it's return in paid, owned, and earned, great efficiencies could be made. It would be apparent which channels need the most focus and are the most profitable for an organization.

In the case of owned or earned media, organizations could save large portions of marketing dollars from being wasted in the paid category by maximizing 'word of mouth'.

Yet I digress. All this to say, understanding one's customers and the preferred and most profitable interactions of those customers is what creates efficient and effective marketing. Paid, owned and earned is no Earth shattering new marketing breakout, but if this is how marketing thinks about it's channels, it is how analytics should organize to help them understand where their attention should be focused.