Paid Media vs Earned Media in Web3 Marketing (Differences Explained)

Ty Smith0:00

What's up, everyone? Happy bull market. Today, we're going to go through one of the questions that are probably one of the most commonly asked or points of confusion for crypto marketers, especially ones that are just getting into the space. And the question is, what is the difference between earned media and paid media? So, we're going to address that today. We'll go through the pros and cons of each, paid media and earned media. We'll go through how the cost structure typically looks for each of them, and then by the end of the episode, the goal is to have you fully aware of which strategy is probably a better fit for you in the current moment.

Ty Smith0:20

All right, let's dive right into it. So first, earned media, paid media, what are they? So paid media is media that you're paying to place. So that might be something like a press release or a banner ad or an influencer post that you're paying to make the content that they're going to make. It's media that you're paying for. So you're paying a certain amount, you know what you're getting, and it's relatively simple. That's paid media. The opposite of that is earned media. So earned media could look quite similar. It ultimately results in you getting media about your company, project, service, whatever it is, but it's organic in that you are not paying directly the person to publish it. So organic media might look something like a news story about your company, which is organic, which you're not paying for. The journalist is just writing without any kind of payment. Or let's say like an influencer or KOL, key opinion leader, joining like a Twitter Spaces or something like that. Again, without you paying them, just because of a relationship that you have with them or they're just naturally and organically excited by what you're building or doing. All of that would be like organic, earned media. And it's called both organic and earned media, but we're talking about the same thing.

Ty Smith1:24

Pros and cons of each. So let's start with paid media. The pros of paid media are the speed and the simplicity. So what do I mean by that? The speed is paid media is much faster than earned media. It's the kind of thing where you can contact a media source, whether it's an influencer or media company, say, 'Hey, what are your options?' They'll give you, oftentimes, even like a list or a media kit which will say, $600 gets you X, $1,000 gets you Y, and so on and so on. You know exactly what you're getting and you know what you're paying. So it's simple. And again, it's fast because typically these companies want to get you in so they can get as many customers as possible for these paid options. Oftentimes, lead time is not more than a month, oftentimes even shorter if you're in the Web3 industry, for example.

Ty Smith2:18

So fast, simple, those are two of the major pros. Better analytics is also a part of the pros. When companies offer paid media, they have to justify their expenses, their costs to a client or an advertiser. Because of that, they are very much incentivized and typically set up to capture as much data about how that campaign is performing, just like a Google Analytics platform might or Twitter Ads or something like that. So you can typically get a lot better understanding from a data perspective of how your budget is being spent and how effective it is and you can benchmark against it. So better analytics is definitely a huge pro for paid media. Another pro is control over the message. When you pay a place to advertise for you, typically you're providing the message. If it's like a banner ad, for example, you're typically creating the graphic, you're putting the copy together, you are providing the press release. So you can control the message very, very specifically with paid media, whereas it's not always the case in earned media. We'll discuss that soon.

Ty Smith3:15

And then the last point as far as a pro for paid media is the ability to manage a budget better. Again, because you can see what you're getting and the pricing for everything before the start of a campaign, it's very easy to plug that into a spreadsheet and say, 'All right, we've got $30,000 allocated to this campaign. We're going to put it to this, this, this, and this.' And there's no surprises there. That's what it's going to cost and that's what you're going to get. So if you're someone that has an issue with open-ended budgets or is in a marketing manager position rather than a founder position and you have to fit everything into a specific budget, there could be a little bit of less friction for a paid media type campaign.

Ty Smith4:02

All right, those are pros for paid media. Now let's discuss some of the cons and drawbacks. Number one is it's visibly sponsored. If you're going to pay for something, almost every single time it's going to say 'sponsored by' or 'in partnership by' and then your company name. Not typically a big deal. Most people nowadays are pretty familiar with seeing ads and it doesn't really affect them in a negative way. But if you're trying to build trust or build momentum that looks organic, it's not going to do that. People know it's an ad and because of that, sometimes they might be a little bit less motivated to act rather than if they see something organic. Another con is the expense. So there's a tradeoff between the budget and the actual total cost. For paid media, typically you're paying a little bit more than if you're going to go the earned media route for the same level of coverage. So that's part of it. You'll get a little bit less for your money sometimes, not always, but sometimes. And that's a pretty major con for paid media.

Ty Smith5:00

All right, that's paid media. Let's go to earned media. Earned media, again, organic stuff, you're not paying directly. You could pay an agency, like a PR agency or something like that, or an internal marketer. So there is a cost to it, but let's go to some pros and cons. Pros are it's much more helpful in the way of trust building. Organic content looks fully organic because it is. It's so much better for long-term brand building. It will get your community to trust you a lot more because they see you've been organically covered in these places, which is, in the eyes of most people, some kind of level of approval or acknowledgment by, hopefully, a large media player, which can go a really long way. So that's a huge pro. That's honestly one of the biggest pros that everyone focuses on when they decide they want to go after earned media. Another pro is, like I mentioned on the paid media side, sometimes on the earned media side, it can be a lot more cost-effective. So if you're going to allocate, let's say, 100K to paid media, 100K to earned media, at budgets of that size, typically you'll see better reach, better coverage, and better results with earned media. But again, there's that tradeoff you make with the guarantees, which takes us to the cons, which is

Ty Smith6:06

earned media is not guaranteed in that you don't know where you're going to be placed necessarily, you don't know when you're going to get placed, and then you also don't know what exactly the coverage is going to say because you don't control it. You're not paying and as such, you're not necessarily the customer in the eyes of the media. You're just someone that's being covered. So that can be difficult for some people to deal with, especially people that are on a really bootstrap type budget. They need to know, 'All right, if I'm paying this amount to an agency, I need to know that I'm getting this, this, and this coverage.' Oftentimes, an agency that tells you, 'This is earned media and you're getting this, this, and this,' there's something going on behind the scenes where it's not fully organic or the coverage is limited or something like that. So be wary of that. But that is something that people get tripped up on.

Ty Smith6:31

Another con of earned media is that it's slower to scale. So oftentimes you're working with a PR agency. PR agencies, you know, you can't just fire up a PR agency and then in week one you're getting tons of coverage. There is a little bit of typically like message involvement that has to be developed, reaching out to the contacts, coordinating that coverage, getting them the message they need, working with you to understand what makes you kind of interesting and why the media should care. So it's slower to scale up. And as such, again, it's just a little bit slower in general. What else? Ongoing maintenance. So paid media is the type of thing where you can say, 'You know what? We've got this amount of a budget. We're going to spend it in the next two months.' And it's pretty clear cut, right? You're paying, you know what you're getting, you're knowing when it's going out, you're knowing what it says. Earned PR, earned media is an ongoing process where you're building relationships. Sometimes, working with an agency helps because they have those relationships already, and that's on them. But either way, it's an ongoing process that you're going to have to kind of keep going for a set number of months at a minimum.

Ty Smith7:30

So that's a con there. But now let's go through the cost models of the two because they're quite different. Like I said with paid media, it's very straightforward. You know, you're paying X, you're getting Y. You're paying, let's say, 'I want to pay $2,000,' and an influencer is going to include you in a YouTube video, or they're going to do an interview with you, or you pay $1,000 and you're going to have a press release on this website. Super straightforward. Sometimes you'll get it in like package form where you'll get, you know, like 10 paid media options and like a total price, but it's X for Y, X media coverage for Y dollars. Earned media, different. There's two main ways that earned media, I guess there's really three. There's three main ways that earned media can kind of take shape. One is through an agency, so working with a PR agency or an agency that focuses on earned media. That's probably the most common one. Rates, I've done another video on different agency rates, but the main structures are like you're paying them by the hour. Number two would be like paying them by performance, which is typically for like smaller agencies that aren't yet established. You might pay like $1,000 per hit that you get or something like that. But again, those are smaller, less established agencies that are offering that.

Ty Smith9:00

And then number three is just like a monthly set, like either retainer or amount that you're paying for them for ongoing work in that department. So that's the agency piece. Number two is the internal marketer. So you're hiring someone that's experienced in it. This is typically more common at bigger companies that have ongoing, larger scale needs for earned media, and it's as simple as you hire an employee that has experience with earned media, paid media, hopefully in your industry, and you pay them a salary. Or you have a contractor, like a one-time freelancer, and you pay them like a base rate per month.

Ty Smith9:24

The third option is doing it yourself, which is like if you're a small company, a lot of people will try it on their own. To each their own. It's not the kind of thing that most founders, in my opinion, should be focusing on because it is a full-time job, earned media, for most. But it is something you could save a lot of money in that aspect. All right, now which one is right for you? So I have obviously covered a ton of pros, a ton of cons, the cost structure, all of those are huge in deciding which one's right for you, and those needs change also based on how you grow and how the market changes. But let's simplify a little bit. Paid media is right for you if you need it fast. Let's say you have like a TGE in four weeks, or you have a big marketing launch or some kind of launch in four weeks and you need to know, 'We're going to have excitement done, it's going to be in this time frame,' and paid media is right for you if that's the case.

Ty Smith10:19

Similarly, if you need guaranteed placements. So for whatever reason, you're like a marketing manager and you need to show to your higher-ups something in a set period of time, you can be assured that you'll see something in that time because you've paid for it. You know the time that it's going out, you know what it says. It's a sure thing. That's paid media. Speed, simplicity, guarantees. Earned media. Earned media is right for you if you're more playing like the long game, I would say. If you're a little bit more just like long-term minded, you want to maybe focus on more of like a biz dev approach to growth, actually building relationships with people that matter in the industry. You don't necessarily need to know, 'All right, every month we're getting X number of pieces of coverage.' It's a little bit better if you're playing the long game is how I'd simplify it. If you're looking for organic coverage that your community's not going to be like, 'Hey, this is an ad,' earned media is right for you. All right, that's it simplified. Let's wrap it up. If you need help with paid or earned media, both of those things are things that our agency do and have been doing for over half a decade, so reach out to us. And then as always, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button if you found this valuable, and we'll catch you on the next one.