Marketing: How to Optimize Your Paid, Owned and Earned Channels

The terms paid, owned and earned have become ubiquitous amongst marketers in recent years and, as you’d except from a tool that is designed to provide insights for brands and agencies, Brandwatch has a lot to offer when it comes to optimizing these.

To aid this optimization, the platform’s features can provide insights on emerging trends, demographics, custom audiences and key influencers, to name but a few.

In this post I’ll provide some examples using data from three distinct brands; divisive but undeniably iconic food spread Marmite, Scandinavian Airline Finnair and industry leaders in navigation tech, TomTom. 

Owned media

The key to developing effective content for your owned channels is more often than not finding the topics and trends that will resonate with your audiences.

Brandwatch provides the means to ‘drill down’ into conversation data, for instance, by understanding when your audiences are most actively discussing the brand and where they are based.

The graphs below demonstrate this – showing both the peaks in conversation relating to Finnair over time and then segmenting by the geographical source.

As the second graph shows, there seems to be a propensity for more conversation relating to Finnair from North America during winter, certainly a useful insight for anyone creating regional content plans for the year.

Perhaps the most useful feature for content creators using Brandwatch however is the Demographics tool, which uses Twitter profile data to identify audience gender, interests and profession.

For example, the graphs below confirm that TomTom’s audience shows a slight bias towards males and that sports is a prominent interest for the group.

However we can drill down even further to provide month by month insight.

In this instance we see sports fans, as well as those interested in health and fitness, are significantly more likely to talk about the brand in June and July – a prime time for the brand to post content likely to resonate with these groups.

Paid media

Anyone familiar with building audiences for social paid media will know the value of a good custom audience.

By building custom categories in a social listening tool which segment data, you can create a custom audience for just about anything. The example shown below is list of Twitter users who have previously stated that they ‘love’ Marmite – who you’d expect to be a prime audience for Twitter ads.

Social listening doesn’t just benefit paid social media however. The topic cloud below shows the most prominent keywords used by audiences who are asking questions about Finnair on Twitter.

These are likely to closely resemble terms audiences are using when asking questions about the brand on Google, so data like this is of real value to anyone managing paid search.

These insights can even help optimize display ads.

Here are the top news sites mentioning Finnair in 2014 in a positive light – each of which would make sense as a destination for display ads.

Earned media

It’s fair to say that earned media is concept that has grown out of the social web, and so it’s natural that a social listening tool like Brandwatch has features that can help inform brands approach to this.

For example, the platforms ‘Top Sites’ tool can be filtered by source – as demonstrated below, where the blog sites who have mentioned TomTom the most in the past year are shown.

Users can also organize these by number of mentions, impact score, Mozrank or even the percentage of male/female visitors.

Influence isn’t always positive however and, as shown below Brandwatch can also be used to identify authors speaking negatively about the brand – in this instance we see globally renowned house DJ DeadMau5 complaining about Finnair removing his battery charger cables in a Tweet that would have seen considerable reach.

Filtering brand mentions by image and video sites also helps identify visual user generated content relating to brands, often making great content for owned channels.

Below is just a selection of images from Instagram that relate to Marmite, found using Brandwatch Analytics.

One final tip for using Brandwatch to optimize across paid, earned and owned is to ensure that insights are shared effectively across your brand’s departments and agencies – after all, if vital knowledge ends up siloed in a single place, the opportunity to use it to optimize is going to be fairly limited.

Brandwatch offers the means to create and share custom dashboards with varying levels of access, and these can be used to distribute insights, ensuring all stakeholders are on the same page and can work together to achieve better results for the brand.