Planning Your Owned Media Strategy

When a business moves its brick and mortar location they can lose a lot of repeat business. Having a stable location that people get comfortable with builds loyalty and trust in a business. It is the same online. Building community on Facebook and Twitter and forums has value, but if you do not have that consistent store front for people to return to, where are you building your loyalty and trust? Owning your own blog, website, email list is a core part of your overall social media strategy. When defining an owned media strategy, Consider the end result first.  Among important goals count:

• Attracting more visitors to your site organically
• A deeper level of engagement
• Ultimately selling more of your product or service

This consideration set makes it sound easy, but creating an interesting, repeatable experience that moves the needle requires continuous creation of enticing content, paid and earned promotion and patience. For example:

1. Strategy

Content strategists help determine not only the types of content that need to be created, but advise how to deploy messages across platforms. At Allen & Gerritsen, we recommend building and optimizing content across 5 categories:

• Brand: Aligned with the pillars of the brand, but not necessarily always about the brand or its business.
• Product: Conversation about product usage including suggestions.
• Campaign: These are directly related to an attempt to sell something.
• Customer Service: Complaints, feedback and the like
• Human: Conversational elements

2. Content

Content is the most important thing and, so far, it does not create itself. You need to build it out and you need to budget and plan for the types of content you want to create. No one can tell you the magic mix of original branded, curated and user generated video and text you need to create to be successful. You had better be ready to test and test often. Err on the side of more is better.

3. Platform

This is a decision you want to make once and be able to stick with. The platform should have a strong balance of social media propagation, community management and analysis tools. Remember, the idea is to create an experience that people want to return to. Your brand is moving past the brochureware phase. In order for that the happen, the community manager needs to be able to get a read on everything that is happening on the site. This can be a daunting task so make sure they have the tools to do so along with the ability to promote content. Our agency has go-to partners so that we can help our clients decide how to incorporate owned media in their overall experience. There should also be integration with a CRM solution so that you can map touch points from the community with sales, marketing and any other touch points within your relationship. —- Consider the full team:

Creative

Creative and production teams will actually produce the content. Do not skimp on them and keep them busy.

Social Media

Community and Social media managers will actually disseminate and promote the content, manage the conversations and identify and nurture the relationships between your brand, influencers, evangelists, naysayers and everyone in between. They are the voice of the brand.

Analytics

Analysts are really helpful in partnering with the social media team to go deep into the conversations and look for the aha moments. They can also dedicate themselves more easily to the competitive analysis, allowing community managers to focus on what is happening with the brand. The two teams should work very closely together to determine the meaning of the insights and how to proceed in a way that supports goals, capturing share of conversations and selling products.

An Agency Partner

Building an owned media strategy is an important part of the overall communication strategy. An agency can provide you with the means to create the strategy, build the platform and execute the plan.  Agency content strategists, designers, copywriters, analysts, video production teams and technologists can provide much needed advice and support to the community and social media manager positions within the organization on matters ranging from the best way to engage to risk mitigation. —- What are the hurdles you must overcome to implementing your earned media strategy and how can I help you get over them?]]>