How to Unlock Your Small Business PR Potential with Owned Content

Wendy Marx — October 30, 2016 Follow @wendymarx

Owned content is an exciting prospect for any B2B small business. With the right small business PR program, it’s like clay in your hands — you can mold it to take virtually any form you desire to reach your specific goals.

Want to show the evolving side of your small business? Build authority? Generate leads? Whatever your goals are, owned media gives you control over how people view and interact with your company.

What Is Owned Content, and What Makes It Different?

Hubspot defines owned content as “content you’re in full control of. Content for your company website, your ad tech blog, and your social media accounts.”

Owned media or content includes:

• Blog posts
  
• Infographics
  
• Videos
  
• eBooks
  
• White papers
  
• Case studies

This is in contrast to paid and earned media, which are not always in your control. Here’s a little rundown on each:

• Paid media is media exposure that you pay for. And in this digital age, it encompasses social media campaigns, native advertising, and Google Adwords, to name a few.
  
• Earned media, as the name suggests, is media that you earn through media outreach. It’s what has traditionally been thought of as PR, including press mentions, reviews, and articles written about you or by you on other sites. Unlike paid media, you usually have less control. However, it carries with it added credibility since a third party is indirectly endorsing your work.

Owned media, on the other hand, is free and completely in your control. While you will also want to include paid and earned media at some point, owned media is a great place to begin for your small business PR.

Let’s Look at How Ad Tech Content Marketing Can Work For You

1. You Have Complete Control

No need to wait around in anticipation for what people are going to write about you. When you pursue owned media, your content is in your own hands. Create content around topics or themes that are important to your audience.

2. It’s Basically Free

Who doesn’t love economical marketing? Apart from the expense if you decide to hire someone to create owned media for your site, it’s free. There’s not too many times you can say that.

3. You Can Address the Concerns of Your Audience

Owned media puts you in the unique position to address and allay the concerns of your prospective clients. You know what they worry about, what solutions they’re looking for, and what questions they ask. Or if you’re not quite sure, do a quick survey using a tool like SurveyMonkey.

Address these concerns and questions in blog posts, videos, and infographics. The more media forms you create, the more engaging it will be across multiple audiences.

4. 94% More Views

Would you like 94% more views — more eyes on your website? Then it’s critical that you focus on developing your owned visual content — including graphics, video, infographics, and slideshares.

Visual content engages your audience. Put your resources into creating stunning visuals that drive leads.

5. Measure Your Results

Owned media allows you to track performance. Use Google Analytics or another metrics tool that measures activity on your site (including views, click-throughs, and other engagement data) to track results.

An outpouring of traffic won’t happen overnight. It will take time for your owned media to gain traction

Granted, traffic isn’t going to pour in immediately. It will take time for your owned media to gain traction so don’t be too quick to throw in the towel. To ensure maximum visibility, promote it on social media, in newsletters, in email and any other outreach.

6. Create a Brand Personality

Have you ever heard your company described as dull? Now you have the opportunity to change that persona. Let’s face it — no one feels drawn to a robotic, impersonal brand. Your brand needs a human side. The best way to do this is through your owned media.

First impressions are very important, so make sure that your owned content is putting your best foot forward. You can leverage such tools as blog posts, case studies, and white papers to build your brand personality, authority and expertise.

7. Add Value For Your Audience

Distinguish yourself from your competitors, and create undeniable value for your audience. This can be done through engaging language, action words, and visual content.

Many are under the mistaken impression that the internet is on content overload, and it’s useless to add more content to the pile. Let’s be clear. It’s only useless if you add mediocre content.

Don’t create content for content’s sake. Have a purpose with your small business content marketing. Instead of fueling those content engines with useless, repetitive information, create light bulb, or “aha” moments — moments when your audience truly benefits from the information. Moments like these will create positive experiences for your readers.

8. It Never Goes Bad

That’s right — once you create it, it’s yours. It’s like the difference between renting and owning — when you rent, you have limitations, and you need to ask permission before making adjustments. When you own, however, it gives you more freedom. Owned media gives you a similar kind of freedom over earned or paid media.

You can continue to evolve your content at any time. Take your blog post and transform it into an infographic or video. Update your blog post with new content. Reshare it on social media. You can do whatever you want, because it’s all yours. Doesn’t that feel good?

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