What Is Owned Media?

Owned media refers to digital marketing channels—such as a blog or social media accounts—that a company owns outright. They typically form a significant part of any marketing strategy because, unlike other channels where a company will have to pay to advertise in order to attract customers, the efforts across owned media can often have a wider reach at a much lower cost.

In this article, learn more about what owned media means, why it's important, and some common types of owned media. Afterward, if you're interested in exploring a career in marketing, consider enrolling in the Google Digital Marketing and E-commerce Professional Certificate, where you'll learn how to engage customers through channels like search and email.

What is owned media?

Marketing is an important part of any company because it helps attract new customers and retain existing ones. Owned media are the digital marketing channels a company owns and controls. Examples include: the company website, blog, mobile app, email newsletter, or social media posts. The primary advantage of owned media lies in the absolute control it affords a marketing team over the message they wish to communicate to their audience. Compared to ad spend, they may also yield lower customer acquisition costs (CAC).

However, with owned media, the main challenge is the full responsibility a marketing team bears for content creation, management, upkeep, and any associated expenses.

Owned media, paid media, and earned media 

Within marketing, owned media, paid media, and earned media are all part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Depending on your target market, you'll likely want a multichannel approach to find them and message to them accordingly.

• Owned media: As we've mentioned, owned media are marketing channels a company owns outright.

• Paid media: Unlike owned, paid media is advertising you have to pay for, such as pay-per-click ads, social media advertising, paid promotions, and television commercials.

• Earned media: And earned media happens when public relations specialists successfully pitch media outlets to cover your company, or when others share messages about your company because of an emotional connection they experienced. They could share a news story, leave a review, or mention your company on social media. Along with owned media, you can use these categories to form a media strategy. 

Why is owned media important?

Owned media is useful for a number of reasons. Let's review some of the major ones:

• Reach: Digital marketing channels have the potential to reach a large audience, meaning your marketing campaigns may be seen by more potential customers.

• Targeting: Like paid media, you can often use marketing analytics tools to better target your audience and make sure the best message appears in front of the right people.

• Control: Companies control the content they produce and publish across digital marketing channels. Since you have complete control of the message you convey through owned media, you can establish your brand voice, mission, values, and presentation.

• Long-lasting: The internet means that blog posts and social media posts will stay visible long past the timeline for other marketing efforts.

4 types of owned media

Owned media gives you the opportunity to lay the foundation for your company as you seek to connect with your target audience. Take a look at these three types of owned media you could add to your marketing strategy.

1. Company website

Having an online presence is crucial in the digital age. Besides serving as an online space to sell your product or service, a website can have a powerful visual impact while allowing you to track key marketing metrics, which you can, in turn, use to build more targeted marketing campaigns.

Having a company website can benefit your company by:

• Promote brand visibility

• Establishing brand credibility

• Collect valuable data about visitors

• Provide customer service (if available)

2. Company blog

As a companion to your website, your company blog is an ideal space to offer content such as articles, infographics, news items, white papers, and more to educate and assist your target audience. For instance, if you invest in content marketing, a potential customer searching for information about a product you happen to sell could come across your blog article on the topic. With careful placement of links to your wares, you might gain a new customer. At the very least, you will facilitate brand awareness and begin to establish your company as a trusted source of information.  

Having a company blog can benefit your company by:

• Driving traffic to your website

• Increasing brand credibility and trust

• Engaging customers and potential customers

• Generating leads

2. Social media

Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube are examples of social media platforms where your company can create a brand account. While companies must adhere to the rules and limitations set by the platforms, you still own the content creation process on social media. Short social media posts, videos, and images attract potential customers to your products or services. This type of owned media allows you to interact with your target audience through comments, which helps establish brand loyalty.

You can use all the major social media platforms at no cost to your company, making this type of owned media advantageous to businesses of all sizes. Social media also allows you to reach a global audience, and many platforms provide analytics tools that help you target the users most interested in what you're offering.

Establishing a presence on social media can help your company by:

• Increasing brand awareness

• Humanizing your brand

• Engaging in social listening to stay on-trend and competitive

• Providing customer service and support

3. E-mail

Since billions of people worldwide have an e-mail address, e-mail marketing can be an efficient and effective way to nurture leads, generate repeat sales, and strengthen customer loyalty. E-mail marketing campaigns are typically low-cost and have a high return on investment. You can utilize them to send welcome messages, newsletters, confirmation emails, discounts, promotions, surveys, links to your blog, and many other purposes tailored to the needs of your company and your customers.

The advantages of e-mail marketing include:

• Sending customers to your product pages, downloads, and other target areas

• Conducting A/B testing to optimize your messaging

• Personalizing your messages to increase engagement

• Accelerating the sales funnel process

Learn more about digital marketing on Coursera

Learn more about owned, paid, and earned media by earning your Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate on Coursera. This beginner-level series can help you learn skills in search engine optimization, display advertising, email marketing, and more.