Combination of earned and paid media boosts awareness, favorability and purchase intent
Earned media makes up a key part of many marketers’ strategies, fulfilling a need for trust and information that paid advertising efforts often cannot meet. Research indicates that earned media can be more effective for certain purposes than advertising, but it’s the combination of earned media with other forms of marketing that brings the strongest levels of success.
A study by Synaptic Digital and Kantar Video exposed respondents to three different forms of marketing, alone and in combination. The study looked at several major branding metrics to determine what type of marketing provided the biggest lift.
Earned media was more powerful than brand creative or paid advertising at raising brand awareness, with a lift of 23 percentage points above control. A combination of earned media with paid or with paid plus brand creative lifted awareness even further.
Those combinations were also most effective at boosting purchase consideration, lifting responses 10 to 11 percentage points above control, vs. 5 to 7 points lift for a single type of messaging alone.
Similar results held for brand message association and brand favorability, with the combination of earned media along with some form of paid advertising consistently lifting branding metrics highest. On their own, earned media did most to increase awareness metrics, while paid media tended to lift persuasion metrics.
The research also tested different orders of exposure to messaging, finding that first viewing paid advertising, followed by brand creative and then earned media, performed best.
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Check out today’s other article, “The Seven Performance Metrics that Matter Most.”