Implementing an effective paid, owned, earned (POE) media strategy is essential to increasing a brand's share of experience (SOE) and hence growing the brand itself.
Paid media alone may account for only less than a third of all brand experiences, while touchpoints like word of mouth can have 5 to 100+ times the impact of paid experiences.
Marketers need to look beyond the traditional metrics of share and reach and consider measuring such things as impact, relevance and positivity, since the quality of touchpoints can turbo-charge your media strategy.
Accordingly, when implementing a successful POE strategy, they should choose and prioritise those channels with the most positive impact – and these may be ones that had not previously been considered.
Categories like peer observation (seeing someone else using your brand) and retailer advertising (seeing your brand featured in a retailer ad) can significantly impact on brand consideration.
Understanding which touchpoints impact most on key brand outcomes can then inform the combinations and sequencing of different channels and the appropriate levels of investment in each in order to pull people through the path to purchase.
Paid media is often the starting point to generate owned and earned touchpoints, which are increasingly digital. Paid tweets, for example, can be very positively received when well targeted.
They can encourage earned media through retweeting with people adding their own personal touch to the story. So brands need to consider how 'shareable' is the content being broadcast.
Marketers can also explore new ways of exploiting owned touchpoints, by using packaging as a media space for example, or integrating POE touchpoints to create a multiplier effect.
But having a framework to operate within is only the starting point. To create a truly great paid, owned, and earned media strategy, you will need penetrating insight, a compelling brand promise/proposition/purpose, and creative work that sparks people's imaginations.
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