How Owned Media & Audiences Help You Establish Control

Before we dive into the heart of the discussion about how you can gain control, it’s important to establish a baseline understanding of channels and audiences.

So let’s get right into it.

Paid vs. Earned vs. Owned Media

While this is likely a refresher for many, it’s important to distinguish between these channels.

Paid Media

As the name suggests, this is any content that involves a paid placement. This includes Performance Marketing tactics such as Google Adwords, retargeting campaigns or boosting social media content through advertising.

This also includes paid content opportunities such as sponsored content on a publisher's website, a paid speaking engagement at an event or branded content.

Earned Media

Earned media is essentially getting your company featured on a third-party platform without paying for it. This is the basis for many PR campaigns, i.e. getting your company mentioned in trade publications and other media outlets.

Other examples include being asked to speak at events, writing guest articles or being invited to do an interview or podcast.

As you grow your brand, you’ll organically unlock more of these sorts of opportunities. This is why it’s so important to publish your own content 😉 

Owned Media

These are platforms you own such as your website, media platform, newsletter podcast and social media channels.

The biggest benefit of owned media is that you are in complete control of the content and how you are positioned as opposed to, for example, relying on the opinions of an industry analyst or trade reporter.

On the flip side, you’re responsible for distribution and cannot piggyback off an established audience outside of your own channels.

However, even within owned media, not all channels are equal. This is why we must also consider audiences.

Borrowed vs. Owned Audiences

For the sake of our discussion, there are two primary audiences, we’ll be looking at — borrowed and owned.

Borrowed Audience

Social media provides the best example of borrowed audiences. You own the channel (i.e. your company page on LinkedIn) but not the audience (i.e. your followers).

These platforms are lending you a portion of their audience.

Borrowed audiences are fickle because you are at the mercy of an algorithm on someone else’s platform, which decides whether or not your content is seen by its users.

While you have the possibility of network effects that allow you to quickly reach a large audience, more often than not, most of your followers won’t even see your content.

One day you could be riding high on a social media platform, and the next, a change to the algorithm, can send you crashing down.

Or even worse, a policy change or dispute gets your account suspended.

Owned Audience

This is why owned audiences are so important! It’s the most direct way to communicate and build relationships without an intermediary.

Primarily, whoever owns the email address owns the audience.

That’s why we’ve experienced a resurgence in newsletters with platforms such as Substack and Beehiiv popping up.

And that’s why lead generation remains an important pillar of marketing.

You own your email list, thus owning the audience.

It’s much harder to build an owned audience than it is a borrowed audience, but an owned audience is also more valuable.

This is because users are actively electing to engage with your brand through a value exchange — some of their information for access to your content.

This is a much larger barrier compared to simply clicking a button to follow or unfollow someone or something on social media.

When you send an email (aside from technical glitches) every person in your audience receives that piece of content. The same cannot be said for social media posts.

Well, email is the focal point for many organizations building owned audiences. I’d be remiss not to mention another trending owned-audience building-tactic — communities!

This will be a standalone topic in a future newsletter, but for now, understand that building a community gives you a direct line of communication and the ability to foster relationships with your prospects, customers and partners.

A great example in the B2B space is Dave Gerhardt’s Exit Five.

To maximize your reach both borrowed and owned audiences are important distribution channels to leverage.

A good strategy is to focus on borrowed audiences early (because they are easier to build and come with the benefit of network effects) and then as soon as possible, convert as much of the audience as possible to an owned audience.

Owned Media & Audiences Puts You in Control

As I previously discussed, the days of relying solely on paid and earned media are no more.

The gatekeepers of information are losing their grip and mass-marketed companies are giving way to microtargeted brands.

While paid and earned media can be effective channels (when leveraged at appropriate moments), owned media which builds an owned audience must be the center of every marketing communications strategy.

It’s all about control.

You control the narrative.

You control distribution.

You control the data.

You control your niche.

You control mindshare.

You can directly say whatever you want to the entirety of your audience whenever you want to. This is both a powerful right and a big responsibility!

You also gain access to valuable customer data you won’t get on social media platforms, which can provide signals during the customer journey or inform product development decisions, for example.

Building an engaged owned audience through owned media gives you a competitive advantage by capturing attention — the number one currency today!