3 Content Marketing Media Options [Chart]
To deliver your original, branded content to an audience aggregated around a topic of interest, in a variety of formats, on a regular schedule, content marketers have three distinct options. They are social media, owned (or internal) media and third party (or paid) media.
For marketers, here’s an infographic chart that lays out the differences between the three content marketing media options in terms of marketing goals, audience, benefits and challenges.
To provide context for marketing decisions, here’s a brief summary of each media option to maximize your content distribution platform use.
- Social Media. Provides a variety of platforms and formats to distribute content and engage in conversation with prospects, customers and the general public. Social media provides broader reach to build brand and attract prospects. While social media doesn’t have a media cost in the traditional sense, it requires a constant stream of content, manpower and brand and business monitoring that generate expenses. If special targeting is desired, marketers can use social media advertising that’s less expensive than most third party options. The biggest downside is the lack of brand control that’s balanced by the potential for earned media from social sharing and related product endorsement.
- Owned Media (aka Internal Media). These are media properties that a company and/or its brands control including the website, email list and blog as well as offline communications and media such as catalogs and retail outlets. They establish a firm’s online footprint that helps support search, answer customer questions and convert sales regardless of where they’re initiated. Further, they’re available 24/7 in the event of an issue.
- Third Party Media (aka Paid Media). This is traditionally what’s considered media. It’s content created by professionals. It’s has both online and offline options. It excels at aggregating audiences around a topic that can be either broad or highly focused. From a marketing perspective, they’re great for building brand and expanding reach due to audience size. Further they can add brand association. The downside is that, without press placement, they are expensive to rent and their results can be difficult to track directly.
Depending on your content marketing initiative, you may use one or more of these media platforms. It’s critical to adapt your content to meet the media environment to be relevant and yield the best results.
What would you add to this list of benefits and challenges for these three media options, social media, owned media and third party media?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Here are some related articles of interest.
- Why content marketing is more cost effective than digital marketing
- How to make the case for content marketing.
Image credit: Heidi Cohen. Use allowed if linked to this column.
