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It's easy for marketers to get caught up in the contours of their different channels. After all, each channel has a distinct personality, its own objectives, governance considerations and content requirements. And part of marketing professionals' specialization is the ability to understand what will play well on social platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, compared to search, display and CTV among others as well as their own digital assets.
But placing too much attention on the channels themselves often distracts marketers from their true focus: the customer. When marketers' orientation is rooted in customer knowledge and understanding, they are better equipped to reach those customers across all touchpoints and multiply their efforts across channels.
While there are a plethora of channels a brand can use to deploy their marketing, when it come to media, there are three primary buckets: paid, owned and earned.
Balancing those types ensures a brand is using a balanced media strategy.
Paid media is marketing that requires payment to display content. This can happen across many channels, including social, search engines, websites, connected TV and more. Brands typically use paid media to reach consumers who are actively searching their products and/or services or those who show signals of being interested in a product and/or service.
Owned media is content a brand's company makes. This includes a brand website, blog, social media channels, newsletters, emails, SMS/texting or in-app messaging from a brand's owned and operated smartphone app. This type of content is primarily focused on organic traffic from search, social or direct messaging (like email or SMS). Unliked paid media, owned media is largely dependent on consumers who already know and/or interact with a brand.
Earned media is content that results from public exposure, be it through publicity, social virality, customer reviews or simply word of mouth. This is another organic channel, though the brand cannot always control or amplify the content itself. Even still, earned media can be an incredibly effective channel for marketers. According to Nielsen, 88% of respondents in a global consumer survey said that they trust product and service recommendations from people they know more than any other channel.
Many brands run these mediums as separate entities—having teams organized separately from paid media activation, to the website as another team, to the loyalty program strategy owned by another team. That's because many often don't recognize that synchronizing all of these channels together has enormous benefit.
Owned media is entirely controllable in creation, whereas paid media is entirely controllable in targeting. Earned media often feels like the luck of the draw. Understanding how these three things amplify and compliment one another can be a game changer for true omnichannel marketing.
Paid, owned and earned channel integration is a worthy goal because of how it highlights a unified customer view. A customer-centric perspective is also the key to pulling it off. Integrated campaigns become more straightforward to execute when placing the customer at the center of a unified effort.
Many marketing teams are designed to focus on channels rather than customers, with each team having different and sometimes conflicting goals. There is an omnichannel strategy talent gap where most teams have knowledge around either paid or owned channels, not both.
To do this, there needs to be a significant process change, sometimes across multiple stakeholder groups and across agencies.
Customer data for addressable versus direct targeting often doesn’t live in the same place and therefore may have conflicting sources of truth.
Brands need a comprehensive, thoughtful data strategy that goes beyond merely collecting data. A complete data strategy, powered by the right technology, uses first-party data, enhanced by zero-, second- and third-party data to drive better customer experiences and higher performing campaigns
It also establishes a centralized data source for all teams to work from, which is critical for a unified approach.
The surest way to wreck an integration initiative is to have marketing teams row in different directions. This can happen due to poor communication, but within many organizations, there's an even bigger problem: team success is measured according to channel-specific performance benchmarks.
At best, these differ across teams, and at worst, they result in outright conflicts that will undermine your integration efforts and impede collaboration across teams. For instance, if a campaign has a strong CPA (a paid KPI), but brings in poor quality customers that lead to lower activation rates (owned KPI), the paid team is seen as successful, the owned team as unsuccessful and the KPIs conflict.
Getting past this obstacle requires a wholesale reevaluation of the primary business success metrics across marketing teams and adopting organization-wide metrics that promote collaboration and emphasize system-wide success.
One such metric is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which measures the total revenue expected from an average customer relationship over the full lifetime of that relationship. It can break out by different customer segments. Other cross-channel measurement possibilities include Average Order Value and Net Promoter Score.
This strategy doesn't necessarily mean the end of traditional paid-media measuring sticks such as impressions, reach, click-throughs and conversion rate, or owned-media engagement metrics. Those stats still have value, just as there's still value in measuring channel-specific performance. These metrics are enablers of CLV and are vital to understanding how certain campaigns are performing, but not necessarily the primary business KPI with a customer-first approach. In an integrated context, these metrics become diagnostic KPIs rather than top-level targets.
Redefining business success metrics means different marketing teams will share the same goals, but it doesn't ensure they'll choose complementary strategies to get there. Meaningful strategic alignment also requires frequent communication in the form of consolidated briefings and shared data. That way, different teams are in sync regarding overall direction and can operate based on the same updated insights and contextual notes.
Yes, this adds an extra administrative layer. But done right, the result will be a substantial increase in coordination, cohesion, and overall effectiveness.
Another key consideration applies here: this higher-level collaboration likely won't take hold unless it's someone's job to ensure it does. Consider tasking one senior marketer with ownership of omnichannel coordination efforts and assigning a member of each channel-specific marketing team to work with that person to ensure that their team works in concert with others across the marketing function.
Once you have a more cohesive strategy to bring your teams together (and working toward the same goals), you need to also bring together your tech stack, too.
Having a single source of truth for customer insights that informs and scales across all channels and business goals such as acquisition and engagement is critical. A unified data-first strategy also enables the basis of marketing innovation with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The most important aspects to note are shared understanding of customer insights across all groups and that all stakeholders are represented in what insights are used based on what is most relevant for the program.
READ MORE: Read our guide to help start your data strategy process.
An organization's first integrated campaign isn't likely to launch flawlessly, no matter how well or long its leaders and teams prepare. Instead of aiming for perfection, pick a date that's far enough out to allow for a thoughtful, careful pilot effort but soon enough to force some urgency.
Commit to that first campaign while embracing the fact it will likely lead to some learning opportunities. Agile methodology and scrum like processes will also be able to facilitate the transition to integrated owned and paid strategies. Once that initial effort is finished, take time for a careful recap that documents the wins, losses, and opportunities for improvement—and then try again!
It's not easy to shift from a channel-focused marketing organization to one that takes a holistic, customer-focused approach, which is why Epsilon's strategic consulting services are here to help with industry experts that specialize in everything from digital customer experience to organization governance and acceleration of brand growth.
In the end, the effort is worthwhile and will pay off in the form of coordinated, coherent, and effective campaigns across both owned and paid channels that lead to stronger business results, a more empowered marketing team and delighted customers.
