Building Your Owned Media Channels: A Guide for Marketing Executives
With this article, I aim to help marketing executives build communities indirectly owned by their brand to engage with their audiences without having to pay for it. Owned media is a long-term solution that can help your business increase sales, collect feedback, raise brand awareness, and even build your sales lead database.
Owned media is a channel where you put lots of effort into producing “people first” content regularly to build a community that belongs to the media channel you built. When I say owned media, I am not talking about literal ownership as in owning a website or social media account. Being in charge of owned media is to have full control over a non-promotional platform or content where your target audience acts and feels like the owners of the community by engaging with the content you create. Unlike paid media, owned media will allow you to continue to have a voice even while you are not paying for it.
The opportunity to have direct relationships with your target audience, clients, and likely-to-be clients is powerful. In this article, I will also share some insights from what I learned from the book Killing Marketing and my experience building the Hacker Combat channel.
Benefits of Owned Media
- Controlling the Content: You decide what the agenda is as long as it aligns with the community. When deciding what content to publish, you can contextually include your messaging and prime your audience about what’s coming.
- Cost Benefits: Producing high-quality content while avoiding promotional spending isn’t cheap. Building and managing an owned media channel is time-consuming and expensive, but once you build it, there will be no cost in the sense of “paid marketing.”
- Direct Conversation: Owned media channels enable you to have non-transactional, genuine conversation mechanisms with your target base. These conversations, when you feed AI with them, can create a solid feedback loop and even help you predict what innovations will get demand.
Identifying Your Audience
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? I have conducted countless market research in the past, but it was never a straightforward process. Initial data will give you some ideas to help you build your foundation, but the most accurate target audience identification happens in the field, which means you must make enough mistakes to be very accurate when identifying what content aligns with the base you want to attract.
Once you have implemented your market research, you can start testing your content by category as such:
- Informational-only
- Questions (multiple choice)
- Provocative predictions
- Funny (if it applies to your niche. Avoid this if it doesn’t)
Setting Clear Objectives
Categorize your objectives because you will need a separate set of skills to tackle each objective. Main objective, daily objectives (content calendar and the tone), conversions (what do you ultimately want your owned media channel to accomplish).
Main Objective
I built Hacker Combat for a cybersecurity brand. From the start, my main objective was clear: building a community to control the nature of the conversation in cybersecurity based on trends. Be cautious when deciding your main objective, as it significantly varies based on your business model (SaaS, e-commerce, etc.).
Daily Objectives
Daily objectives drive your owned media channel towards your main objective. Remember, owned media content must be non-promotional by nature. Non-promotional content doesn’t necessarily mean content that doesn’t serve to improve your brand awareness. My approach of a 90% informative to 10% semi-promotional ratio has helped me build a LinkedIn page with 245k followers and over 150k newsletter subscribers. See your promotional content as your credit and use it wisely, only when you absolutely need it.
Conversion Objectives
This comes way after you have built your foundations and earned the trust of your followers. I’d avoid focusing on conversion objectives until you reach 100k followers. Deliver value first, then ask for something in return. The content for conversion objectives should be layered and semi-promotional. For instance, instead of posting content with a direct ask (buy now, sign up today), offer value such as subscribing for free tools or exclusive content. This approach enables you to own the data as your followers will become warm leads (subscribed to your website).
Owning a community channel is good, but you don’t want to build a community of hundreds of thousands of people and end up having zero contribution to your revenue, sales, or even brand. Identify clear goals before you start building your channel. The questions below may help you identify your goals:
If 200,000 people from my target audience listen to what I say, what would I say so that what I hear back makes my brand known more, my sales increase and my solution be innovated?
Answering these questions beforehand will help you to start off with the right content strategy and scale from there.
Developing a Content Strategy
Assuming that you prioritize your goal of “increasing sales,” you can streamline your tracking and content production strategy to feed your sales funnels. Remember, “salesy” is the opposite of “owned media,” so you want to have a well-crafted strategy if you want to post informational content, get your content engaged by your target audience, and still increase sales. There needs to be a serious content buffer between what you post and where you do the ask (buy, sign up, etc).
There are several techniques you can implement where you hold the hands of your audience and walk them to your sales funnels without any sales friction, but these techniques particularly depend on several factors, such as your solution or product, the demographics of your target audience, and more. All other details, such as the type of content (videos, infographics) and content calendar, come after you identify your content buffer zones. If you need help identifying these, contact me and let’s chat.
Home for Your Owned Media Channel
You will probably want your owned media channel somewhere objective, where your audience will not have an initial bias against your content. These channels might be LinkedIn, Reddit, or even Twitter, depending on your solution. Treat your owned media channel as an organization and have a website to make it your “home.” The website is not only to “move your audience” but it also can help you capture subscriptions when you share content from your website. This is an incredible way of creating a constant loop between your 3rd party channel and your home (website). What you share on your owned media channel can drive traffic to your website, and emails you send to your subscription base can drive traffic to your owned media channel.
Leveraging Social Media
If your owned media channel is on LinkedIn, you can utilize other social channels to create awareness and followers of your LinkedIn group by sharing content on Reddit and Twitter. This creates a snowball effect when done right.
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