What An Owned Media Audience Is And Why Your Campaign Needs One

The PESO model of marketing breaks audiences and mediums into four types: paid, earned, shared, and owned. It’s an especially helpful framework for digital campaigners to understand their strategy and identify their objectives.

The four categories are distinguished by control. Control of content, data, and distribution. In this article, we break down the differences and how they work together for campaigners.

Paid Media

Paid media is the most straightforward. With advertising, your content is constrained to the format, like a pre-roll video, banner ad, or sponsored post. You only own the data you collect from the campaign and distribution is tied to payment. The moment you stop paying, it all goes away.

Earned Media

Earned media – like blogs, news, or podcasts – give you no control over the content, no data, and no control over the distribution.

But the tradeoff, of course, is that it’s less expensive (but not free!) than paid media and you’re reaching a broader audience.

Shared Media

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are shared media. You control the content, but the company owns the audience data and can limit distribution. Again, your tradeoff is reaching more of your target audience.

The biggest mistake, however, is mistaking your social media audience for one that you own. Social platforms cand – and have – pulled the rug out from marketers by making significant changes.

Owned Media

A fully owned media audience means you control the content, the data, and the distribution. For most campaigns, this means email, web, and texting are the primary owned audiences.

Building owned audiences should always be your goal – especially for social media marketing. To build an owned audience from social media, you need to make a dedicated effort to drive sign ups via petitions, surveys, newsletters, reports, lead magnets, and donations.

Conclusion

An effective campaign incorporates all of these audiences into its strategy with a clear expectation of measurable results from each medium.