Top Trends in Paid and Earned Media

It should be no surprise to anyone with their eye on social media, public relations, and marketing that if you aren’t digital, you’re nowhere. Current estimates are now that more than 50% of the people access the internet using their mobile phone and about 43% do so using laptop or desktop devices.

So the top trend, that’s already been going on for a while … make your efforts digital and mobile friendly. If it’s not, you’re losing ground fast! The great news that accompanies that is that digital makes tracking your progress and measuring it a lot easier to do. But if you are just using analytics to look at what happened in the past, you will soon be drowning and no rescue in sight.

Start using your analytics to look forward! That means you need to use analytics to improve your message, decide if what you’ve been using to get the message across to this point has become dated and tired. Whenever you get information about what is happening with your website, marketing ventures, content or sales, find out what you can use that information for in making things better, your approach more effective, and your ideas current or forward thinking in relation to your market … especially if it applies to mobile approaches.

Use the tools offered by platforms to reach new customers. Build your list of customers using Facebook and then let it create a much broader group to test market to. You generally need about 100 people on your initial list that are also on Facebook, but from that list, you can often generate a new list of thousands. These don’t always work, but it’s free, and at no charge, it would be silly not to try it, especially when you are testing to see how effective your efforts are.

Have you heard about geofencing? That’s another tool offered by Facebook, as well as Google. Geofencing connects physical sale information to your digital ads allowing you to have a better picture of what works best. If you have a large budget going to television ads, but your sales are dropping, then geofencing offers the chance to turn off those ads (and the high budget attached) for a time to see if you are getting enough for those dollars, or if you can get just as much headway using social media ads at a much lower cost.

Both paid and earned media should start focusing more on keeping customers and allowing satisfied customers to get you new customers on their word-of-mouth endorsements. It has been known for a long time that it costs a lot more to gain a new customer than it does to keep one already on your side. And equally known is that if you lose a customer, you may very likely lose several more with them, as a dissatisfied customer often is vocal about what they didn’t like and caused them to leave.

When it comes to current trends, they don’t change direction from one year to another as much as they refine the processes already in place. That’s not to say that over time there aren’t occasional drastic changes. But keeping one step ahead of the pack by always looking for a better and more efficient way to do what’s already being done, is always a good choice to make.

Among the many firms doing paid work well includes 5WPR, Finn Partners and DKC PR.