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You might claim that your grandma’s pumpkin pie is the best out there, but other people might not believe you—after all, everyone thinks their grandma’s pie is the best. However, if someone who’s eaten it before claims it’s also their favorite, then other people will be more likely to take a slice.
This situation occurs because you’re biased; of course, you think your grandma’s pie is the best. Your opinion alone isn’t enough to convince others, but when a trusted source backs you up, that pumpkin pie starts looking more like a hot commodity to everyone else. Do you see where we’re going with this?
This scenario illustrates a critical concept in marketing: earned media. Essentially, your opinion about your brand or business is valuable, but it’s the third-party validation that truly cements its credibility among customers.
While publicity is beneficial, smart marketers know that its advantages extend beyond mere exposure. They gain insights from earned media to drive their campaigns' success. This is where earned media value (EMV) comes into play.
What Is Earned Media Value?
To be clear, you can’t calculate the value of earned media without actual earned media. So let’s start there.
Content is classified as earned media any time your company is mentioned online. Of course, you will publish your own content, but it’s crucial to understand that this would be classified as “owned” media. Earned media refers to any mention of your company that you didn’t pay for or create yourself. It includes reviews, social media mentions, press, and even word-of-mouth recommendations about your brand.
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Keep an ear to the ground and monitor customers’ sentiments about your brand or products. Implement social listening tools to be notified whenever you’re being talked about online.
Unlike paid and owned media, earned media provides genuine, organic proof of your business’ credibility. This can be crucial for convincing customers to try your products, considering that 69% of customers are more likely to trust third-party recommendations over direct claims from brands.
So, now that you’ve secured these mentions, what then? You need to quantify the return on investment (ROI) from your efforts. Earned Media Value (EMV) is used to evaluate the effectiveness of your earned media strategy. This metric measures the impact of a specific piece of content by estimating its value, as if it had been obtained through paid means.
Why Keep a Pulse on Earned Media Value?
Tracking earned media value enables you to fine-tune your marketing campaigns with greater precision. It allows you to identify what is and isn’t working, enabling you to shift your approach to achieve your desired results. But that’s not all—when you work toward measuring earned media value, you’ll see several additional benefits such as:
Stability Amid Algorithm Changes
Social media channels are always updating their algorithms, which can affect the effectiveness of your content. To ensure you remain relevant and visible, it’s crucial to diversify your content strategy across paid, owned, and earned media. A well-rounded marketing strategy should feature all three, feeding off of each other for a 360-degree approach that delivers maximum impact.
Trackability for Accurate Measurement of Engagement
Earned media value assigns a dollar amount to the engagement your brand or business receives. It provides you with a specific metric to track, allowing you to gauge your company’s engagement across various platforms effectively. These insights are crucial when you’re making budget decisions or proposing new marketing initiatives, as they offer a glimpse into the value and effectiveness of earned media efforts.
Enhancement of Influencer Marketing Efforts
EMV is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of paid and unpaid influencer marketing campaigns. It provides you with valuable insights into which influencers deliver the highest returns for your business. Beyond identifying the most impactful partnerships, EMV helps pinpoint areas for improvement, enabling you to optimize your strategy for maximum results. With a clear understanding of EMV, you can make more informed, cost-effective decisions about where to invest your resources.
Increased Brand Footprint
People are more likely to engage with a post from a third-party source than with your company directly. Consumers can see straight through a paid-for piece of content, they’re hungry for authenticity and honest feedback.
Benchmarking Against Competitors
EMV can be a powerful benchmark for evaluating your brand’s performance against other key players in your industry. By calculating EMV, you can gain insights into how effectively your earned media—such as social mentions and reviews—is generating value compared to your competitors' initiatives. That way, you can tailor your own efforts and invest in tactics that have proven effective for others.
How to Calculate Earned Media Value
To understand the impact of efforts like employee advocacy, it’s essential to measure the earned media value. That way, you can gauge whether the resources you’re allocating correlate to the outcomes you aim to achieve.
It’s worth noting that, unlike more straightforward metrics such as views or conversions, there is no single earned media value formula. To accurately reflect your earned media value, consider using one of these common formulas.
Option 1: EMV = Impressions x CPM
The most common method for measuring earned media value is multiplying the total number of impressions by the standard cost per thousand impressions (CPM).
If you’re already running paid advertising campaigns (e.g., Facebook Ads), you’re likely familiar with CPM. This reflects how much you typically pay to reach 1,000 people on social media. If you don't have this data, you can calculate CPM using the following formula:
CPM = 1,000 x (Cost/Total Impressions)
For example, if you spent $50 on ads that generated 10,000 impressions, your CPM would be $5 per 1,000 impressions. Note that if you only leverage organic social content (i.e., free content), you will need to estimate a dollar value for your impressions.
Once you have your CPM, it’s time to determine the number of impressions. Impressions represent how many times a specific piece of earned media content is seen or viewed. You can get this data from social media analytics tools.
For instance, if your earned media campaign garnered 3,000 impressions, your final formula would look like this:
EMV = 3,000 x $5 = $15,000
When calculating the value of earned media content—such as influencer recommendations and social media posts from employees—it's crucial to define a clear time frame for what you’re measuring. This could be monthly or quarterly as weekly intervals may be too frequent.
Option 2: EMV = Impressions x CPM x Adjustment Variable
The first formula for calculating the EMV may not always capture the full impact of your earned media efforts. This is particularly true if you’d like to factor in specific campaign goals or engagement metrics—increased click-throughs, shares, comments, and so on. In that case, you can include an adjustment variable in your earned media value formula.
Because the adjustment factor allows you to tailor the formula to reflect specific objectives, it will vary depending on the project. One adjustment factor might be the number of people who engaged with a particular post. If that were 500, then you’d multiply by 500 as well.
Your new earned media value formula would then be:
EMV = Impressions x CPM x Adjustment Factor
Applying this new formula to our earned media example:
EMV = 3,000 x $5 x 500 = $7,500,000
This is a popular method to measure EMV, but it’s not the only way. If this doesn’t work for your company, consider the third option.
Option 3: Measuring the EMV Based on Sales
The following earned media value formula will vary depending on your products and strategy, but it can be a helpful tool for looking at EMV through a different lens.
If your company decides to measure success based on sales, you can fine-tune the earned media value formula to better fit your needs. Instead of using CPM, compare the number of impressions from third-party social mentions with your sales figures. From there, you can cross-reference how much a certain product (or group of products) sold during a specific period. With this data on hand, you can draw calculated assumptions about the effectiveness of your earned media efforts.
If you’re trying to determine what to include in your marketing mix, this will give you a better understanding of how earned media content affects conversion. That way, you can decide if it’s a priority channel or not. However, do note that it can be difficult to get this 100% accurate, as other factors might also contribute to increased conversions during the same period.
Tip: As with any marketing initiative, your goals dictate your performance metrics. This makes it beneficial to calculate EMV using multiple formulas. That way, you can gain a clearer understanding of how EMV affected your reach or overall brand awareness across a certain period. Once this is complete, you can cross-reference these insights with sales data, and draw correlations between earned media events. This could give you a more holistic picture of the impact of earned media.
How to Interpret Earned Media Value
As a general rule of thumb, the higher your earned media value, the more valuable your earned media is. The EMV is an estimated number of how much you’ve gained from your earned media efforts. While this is great to see, it can be hard to know what to do with this information. What actions should you take after you see your results?
Trying to understand any metric on your own is complex. It helps to use software tools that define actionable changes you can make based on your earned media value results. Utilize a metrics dashboard where you can personalize results according to your third-party channels. This will help you understand what worked so you can repeat the success going forward.
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How to Improve the Value of Earned Media
If you're not satisfied with the results, focus on enhancing your earned media value. Consider these strategies:
Create More Content
Without sufficient earned media, you’ll have little to work with—so start creating quality content! Use owned media to gain earned media. Develop a strong social media strategy that engages your audience, sparks conversations, and increases brand awareness. Leverage AI-powered content creation tools to streamline the process, ensuring you produce relevant content that drives positive interactions.
Recruit Employees as Brand Ambassadors
Build your earned media content through the biggest tool in your company’s toolbox: your employees. Transform your workforce into brand ambassadors who can humanize your business and amplify your message within their own networks.
Harness the Influential Power of Your Office
Mobilize your employees to amplify your brand’s voice. Clearview Social’s comprehensive suite of features makes it easy for your team to share company content, leading to increased visibility.
Encourage Reviews and User-Generated Content
Happy clients have the potential to become your best brand advocates. Encourage customers to leave positive reviews of your products or services. These can significantly expand your brand’s reach, not to mention contribute toward your earned media value.
More importantly, ask them to share content about your brand—user-generated content (UGC) serves as strong social proof, with 50% of millennials finding UGC more trustworthy than other forms of media.
What’s the Risk of Relying Too Much on Earned Media Value?
While earned media value is a helpful tool, it can also be a vanity metric. That means that sometimes, your engagement won’t correctly correlate with the cost of your advertising. Yes, your impressions and engagement might be through the roof, but your conversions are rock bottom. That means people might like the content, but they’re not buying your product.
Ultimately, calculating earned media value can give you an incorrect view of the success of your content. That’s why you need to use it together with other business intelligence tools to gain a fully-rounded understanding of what’s working in your marketing strategy. It needs to service the full sales funnel, so take your time to review all the relevant metrics at each level. You don’t want to over-deliver on reach but drop the ball on intent.
Tip: Familiarize yourself with the social media sales funnel and have this in mind when you’re analyzing your earned media value. It makes sense to allocate metrics to different tiers. That way, you can understand their value in the big picture.
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If you’re looking to gain more clarity on your earned media value, utilize the employee advocacy and social media tools from the experts at Clearview Social. Our employee advocacy software includes a robust, customizable analytics dashboard about your posts and third-party posts, so you can gain actionable insights into what’s working with your marketing strategy and what needs to change.
Harness the ⚡Power⚡ of Earned Media
Clearview Social gives you the insights you need to understand where you stand and tailor your earned media strategy for maximum impact. Experience growth through data-driven decisions.