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There are a million metrics out there to measure in the land of marketing and a million reasons to measure them. At the very top of the list? Demonstrating your return on investment (ROI) for your marketing efforts.
ROI is notoriously tricky for marketing teams to prove, though. Metrics like brand awareness or customer sentiment quickly fluctuate and don’t always correspond to hard numbers or quarterly goals. So, what’s a progress-minded marketing professional to do?
Take a look at earned media value! Here’s what you need to know about this valuable marketing metric.
Earned media value (EMV)
One of the best analytics tools in your arsenal that should influence marketing decisions is earned media value (EMV). Earned media includes any written material or content about your company that you haven’t paid for or done yourself.
To calculate your EMV, take the total number of impressions you’ve acquired from earned media and multiply that by your standard cost per 1000 impressions (CPM). A CPM is typically acquired in a paid campaign, so this will be an estimated number based on your spending on organic content.
Frequently, EMV is not used as a standalone metric. EMV is best used to understand how much value third-party posts bring in. It helps determine the benefits of tools like employee advocacy, outreach efforts with powerful influencers, and other organic mentions.
There are significant benefits to calculating your EMV.
Benefits of EMV
When you focus on your EMV, it can help you add value to your brand at a lower cost than paid social. Check out some of these major benefits of EMV.
1. Expand your brand
When you use paid channels, social media users may write you off or scroll right past those ads, annoyed that they’re clogging up their social media feed. But if a person that the user admires or is friends with talks about a brand, they’re much more likely to engage with the content.
Earned media like news articles, customer reviews, and other third-party sources help people trust your brand more than a paid ad.
2. Creative content secures trust
When you create content that’s helpful or entertaining for your potential customers, people notice. Genuine sources of authentic and honest information stand out in a sea of spammy clickbait and heavy-handed marketing.
When your content is shared from a third-party, whether on Facebook or product reviews, it can make your brand more trustworthy and credible.
3. Variety helps you navigate the waters of change
When you only rely on one social media platform for all of your marketing, you could be in a world of hurt when the algorithm changes or an update shifts how profiles look.
When you mix in earned media, though, different types of content will help you until you figure out how to market the right way with the changes implemented. How does this impact your EMV? If you have content on multiple platforms, you’ll still have a way to cultivate earned media on one of the platforms if the other makes a significant change.
In short, having diverse streams of content helps you keep your EMV engines running in an ever-changing marketing environment.
4. Gives you a dollar amount on organic social
When you calculate your EMV, you better understand how much the engagement outside of your owned social accounts costs you. When you need your CEOs and decision-makers of your brand to support your social media efforts, you have real numbers to show them the benefits of your content.
Challenges of EMV
One of the biggest challenges with EMV is that it’s a soft number. It can be tricky to calculate if you don’t have the right tools at hand to measure impressions. However, employee advocacy software offers robust metrics that help you calculate your EMV and earn more engagement.
One benefit of implementing employee advocacy as part of your EMV strategy is that it’s easy for you to control. You can use tools within your employee advocacy software, like one-click email sharing, to make it easy for your employees to share pre-approved company content on their social pages. Employees receive an email in their inbox and can click to share all the content. Alternatively, they can select the content that resonates the most with them.
The other tricky factor for EMV is navigating negative reviews.
At least 19% of online reviews are negative, making people turn away from your brand. However, negative reviews can be turned into an opportunity when you respond to the customer. You can proactively address the situation, providing a real-life demonstration of your stellar customer service skills. As a result, customers seeing this exchange may be more likely to trust your brand—they’ll know that if there’s a problem, you’ll do everything in your power to fix it.
Metrics related to EMV
EMV isn’t the only metric used to help measure the worth of organic social. Both share of voice and engagement give insight into your company’s reach.
Share of voice
Share of voice measures your brand’s percentage in your industry’s market versus competitors. EMV adds to your share of voice: when you use employee advocacy, that’s further mentions you’re receiving versus your competitors. To calculate your share of voice, you take your total brand mentions and divide that by total industry mentions.
Engagement
When you measure engagement, you’re looking at the total number of clicks, likes, comments, or shares on any given post. Looking at these granular pieces of engagement gives you a better sense of what makes people respond to your content. And when you measure the shares, you can get a simpler peak into the reach of your EMV.
Boost your EMV with Clearview Social
As a brand, it’s difficult to calculate metrics on your own. Save yourself time and money, and let Clearview Social do the heavy lifting for you. Our robust analytics show you who is clicking on your content, which content receives the most clicks, and what type of content works best for your brand.
And the easiest way to immediately boost your EMV is to implement employee advocacy. Our employee advocacy offers accessible sharing features to maximize your online presence, including:
- One-click email sharing so your employees can share company social content to their personal pages in seconds
- Article queue builders to easily plan out posts online
- PeakTime AI posts for you when the majority of your target audience is online
Master your EMV and boost your social reach by Getting A Free Demo with Clearview Social today.