Before you develop your firm’s marketing strategy, it’s important to consider the different options that are available to you. In general, there are three major types of marketing: paid, earned, and owned. Alone, none of these avenues really have the ability to drive business in a big way. Together? These three types of media combine to create a powerful trifecta of digital marketing magic.
If you're ready to learn the difference between the three types of media (and how to use them to leverage your firm's current marketing efforts), keep on reading:
1. Paid Media
Yep, it’s exactly what it sounds like: media that you pay for. This could come in the form of banner ads, television commercials, paid content promotion, paid influencers, social media advertisements, newspaper advertising, pay-per-click advertising, and more.
Traditionally, paid media marketing is what comes to mind when most old school marketers think of “outbound marketing.” Now, paid advertising can be really helpful in reaching a wider audience that you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to reach organically, especially if your firm is small or new. But beware! In the modern marketing era, your buyers are more equipped control what they see on their screens through spam filters, ad blockers, and the like, which is why it’s important to focus on relationship building in digital marketing (as opposed to blindly shoving banner ads on every corner of the Internet).
2. Owned Media
Again, pretty obvious. This type of media includes your website, blog, social media channels, and any other media outlets that you have complete control over the distribution of content. So many marketers have fallen prey to the "build it and they will come" fallacy; however, owned marketing in and of itself won’t do much to boost your ranking in search engines and it’s existence alone won’t get eyes on your pages. Instead, you need to create engaging and compelling content that focuses on bringing in inbound links and traffic to your website based upon a clear value that you’re providing to your target audience.
3. Earned Media
Earned media is hands-down the absolute best type of media your firm could ask for! Ranging from mentions on Twitter, blog posts and other types of inbound links, to reviews, newspaper articles, and so much more, earned media is essential to your firm’s social media strategy. In essence, this type of media focuses on the fact that someone completely unrelated to your firm is willing to put their reputation on the line by vouching for the quality of your business. It’s modern word of mouth marketing, except it’s high-speed and the potential for virality is limitless.
So, what does this have to do with my law firm?
If your law firm is focusing on content marketing (which you should be), it’s crucial that you combine all three types of media in order to garner maximum traction on your marketing campaigns. For example, it doesn’t hurt to run a Pay-Per-Click advertisement to get more Facebook “likes,” but if you don’t have compelling content to engage your new audience, you’re not making any kind of impact. Sure, you’ll have increased your audience, but if it’s not an audience that’s going to be interested in your services long term, it doesn’t do much good. On the other hand, if you can run a Pay-Per-Click campaign (paid) using a landing page that facilitate conversion (owned) with content that people will want to read and share (earned), you’ll strike gold.
Interested in more great tips for building a law firm marketing plan that's sure to drive clients to your door? Download our free Law Firm Marketing Guide for 21-pages of tips, tricks, graphs, and resources that will help you market like a pro.
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