What do Pampers, Apple TV+, and CSSA Insurance have in common? 

They were each honored by the 2023 Webby Awards and experienced the benefits of a powerful earned media strategy. As you may already know, earned media exposure can boost credibility, build brand awareness, and drive audience and customer engagement.

But did you know there’s also a dollar value associated with your earned media that could help you defend (or grow) your budgets and show an explicit connection between your strategies and ROI?

Understanding EMV and how it can help your boost front office ROI is key to boosting your brand and marketing, PR, or social strategy performance. In this article, we’ll discuss how to optimize your budget by measuring earned media value (EMV).

Optimize Marketing Affiliate, PR, SEO, And Social Media Budgets With EMV

Optimizing the value of every dollar spent is key to navigating marketplace uncertainty.

When you incorporate earned media into your existing growth strategy, and measure earned media trends effectively, you gain deeper insights into overall strategy performance.

Earned media gives you more for your investment, even if you haven’t bought a single ad. When you invest in paid media, the insights gained from earned media analytics can help you make smart decisions about where to direct your marketing or PR budget.

Why Understanding Earned Media Value Is Important For Marketing ROI

Even if you don’t have an earned media strategy currently and don’t feel inclined to launch one, your brand likely already has an earn media presence. Read on to see how measuring your earned media value can help boost your ROI.

The value of earned media lies in its ability to:

• Boost credibility: Earned media is often seen as more trustworthy and reliable than paid media, as it represents genuine endorsements from customers, influencers or journalists.

• Improve brand awareness: When your brand is mentioned in earned media, it can reach new audiences who may not have been exposed to your brand through paid marketing efforts.

• Enhance SEO performance: Positive mentions and backlinks from high-authority websites can improve your search engine rankings, leading to increased organic traffic.

• Amplify marketing efforts: Earned media can support and amplify your paid and owned media efforts, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI) for your marketing budget.

5 Ways Measuring EMV Can Enhance Existing Media Measurement

While you understand the value of measurement and the importance of data, your paid and owned media data does not provide a complete picture of your brand strategy performance. You can correct that with access to a solution that measures earned media value as a monetary sum, providing context and perspective to your first-party and third-party data. 

Here are some examples:

• Gain perspective on reach
  EMV data on your brand's performance across multiple channels allows you to enrich existing paid and owned media measurement findings. EMV data can add new context to media insights that help you produce a more performant strategy. 

• Find context on engagement
  EMV measurement data can help you contextualize engagement data. As you track the interactions between your audience and your earned media content, EMV data can indicate where nurture campaigns should focus on stoking positive trends.

• Unlock new insights on sentiment
  EMV insights help you to deduce which channels to monitor for sentiment analysis as you develop an engagement strategy and direct spend. EMV data will reveal activity around your brand that merits review while identifying new opportunities to build positive engagement.

• Put conversions in context
  EMV measurement can support and identify the impact of earned media on your conversion goals, such as newsletter sign-ups, leads, or sales. That means you can provide greater visibility over your strategy performance, even when your existing media data has gaps. 

• Understand ROI trajectory
  EMV data gives you insights that can help you calculate the return on investment on all of your media buys. With data provided by an EMV analytics suite (like Social Index) you’ll have access to the numbers you need to make informed decisions about your media investments.

When you know where your ad spend will produce the most value, you can eliminate waste and optimize your budget more easily.

Enter The Social Index: A Comprehensive EMV Measurement Solution

Social Index provides marketers with industry-leading benchmarks to measure the earned media value of influencer, content marketing, PR, organic, and paid social media campaigns. ​It offers marketers, agencies, platforms, and analysts additional diagnostics and a multi-KPI approach to validate the true ROI of a social marketing investment.​ In fact, over 3000 top companies have leveraged Social Index’s benchmarks and API.

Join us for a personalized, 1:1 demo to understand the impact of your brand’s earned media and how to leverage that data to drive ROI.