The Key To Your B2B Marketing Strategy: Own It
The fragmentation of media has led to the rise of owned media. Marketing plans once revolved around paid and earned media, but their influence has waned over the years, offering diminishing returns at higher price points. That’s not to say that earned and paid media can no longer be effective, but it does mean that to get the most out of them, you must have a robust owned strategy.
What does that mean? In short, for B2B companies, nothing is more important than your website, email, videos, webinars, proprietary research reports, expert commentary and other assets that your marketing department fully controls. You can count social media platforms on that list provided that you understand that to have an effective social media campaign there needs to be a supporting paid strategy. Third-party validation remains instrumental in establishing credibility in the marketplace and among prospects, but earned media reaches its potential when owned media is utilized to provide the context necessary to make an impact with your constituency.
It used to be that earned media was wholly effective on its own. If a national publication that reaches your core prospects wrote a feature on your company, for example, it meant that your prospects were likely reading the story. But with the advent of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, individual stories were less likely to single-handedly drive prospects to your business. Today, stories are archived quickly, which means your prospect either needs to be searching for your business specifically, or they need to be on the website in that small window of time during which your story remains “above the fold.”
