Your earned media isn’t just a vanity metric — it’s a direct reflection of your brand’s reputation and influence. Unlike paid media (ads you buy) or owned media (your website and social channels), earned media includes press mentions, social shares, and customer reviews — genuine third-party endorsements that build trust and credibility.
If you're struggling to measure the impact of word-of-mouth or want to maximize your brand’s organic reach, understanding earned media’s value is key. Ready to learn how to track, calculate, and leverage it for growth? Let’s get started.
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Understanding Earned Media vs. Paid & Owned Media
Earned media value (EMV) measures the financial impact of organic brand exposure by assessing the reach and influence of unpaid channels such as media coverage, social shares, and customer-driven conversations. It's an estimate of how much you would have spent on paid media to achieve the same level of visibility.
To effectively use EMV, you need to distinguish it from paid and owned media:
- Earned media: Free brand exposure generated through press coverage, user-generated content, organic social shares, and word-of-mouth recommendations.
- Paid media: Includes advertising efforts such as PPC ads, sponsored posts, influencer partnerships, and display advertising.
- Owned media: Digital assets a company controls, including its website, blog, email lists, and branded social media profiles.
According to Nielsen's Trust in Advertising survey, 88% of respondents trust recommendations from people they know more than any other form of marketing, which makes earned media pretty valuable. That’s why marketers spend nearly a quarter of their digital marketing budgets on it, with 25% going to paid media and 32% to owned media.
How To Calculate Earned Media Value
Calculating EMV involves assessing the impact of organic marketing efforts based on engagement, sentiment, and base value.
Breaking it Down
EMV Formula:
Base Value × Engagement Weight × Sentiment Weight = Earned Media Value per Interaction
- Base Value: Estimated monetary worth of an impression, like, share, or comment (e.g., a social share may be worth $1, while a comment may be worth $3).
- Engagement weight: A multiplier based on interaction significance (e.g., a retweet may be worth more than a like).
- Sentiment weight: A factor that adjusts EMV based on positive, neutral, or negative sentiment.
Alternative Methods To Measure EMV
If you didn't have a calculator like ours handy, the other methods you could use include:
- Equivalent ad value (EAV): Compares earned media to the cost of a paid campaign with similar reach.
- Engagement-based calculation: Assigns fixed values to different social media interactions.
- Referral traffic analysis: Measures web traffic coming from third-party sources like blogs and social media.
Challenges in Measuring EMV
While useful, EMV does have some limitations, namely:
- Attribution difficulties: Not all earned media directly translates to conversions, making it difficult to connect organic exposure to tangible revenue. While brand mentions and shares increase awareness, tracking how they influence purchasing decisions or customer actions requires deeper analytics.
- Sentiment variability: Not all mentions are positive, and negative press or critical user discussions can skew the perceived value of earned media. Understanding sentiment helps brands gauge whether earned exposure is beneficial or if damage control is necessary.
- Lack of standardization: No universal formula exists for calculating EMV, meaning brands must define their own metrics based on industry benchmarks and campaign goals. This makes comparison across companies or industries challenging, requiring tailored evaluation methods.
Strategies and Best Practices To Increase Earned Media Value
Primarily, successful earned media strategies focus on building authentic connections with your target audience. Here's how you can maximize your earned media value through proven approaches:
- Leverage social media for organic sharing
- Build strong public relations (PR) & media relationships
- Encourage user-generated content (UGC)
- Partner with influencers for organic mentions
- Best Practices to follow
1. Leverage Social Media for Organic Sharing
Creating shareable content is essential for increasing earned media value. Engaging formats like memes, infographics, and viral challenges can encourage users to spread your message organically. Using branded hashtags and interactive campaigns helps boost visibility and fosters community engagement. Additionally, optimizing posts based on timing and platform algorithms ensures that your content reaches the largest possible audience, increasing the chances of organic shares and conversations.
2. Build Strong Public Relations (PR) & Media Relationships
Establishing meaningful connections with journalists and media professionals requires a strategic approach. In particular, personalization plays a crucial role – addressing journalists by their first name creates the strongest connection to their identity and individuality. These relationships can lead to increased media coverage, with the right approach.
QGP CEO Kosta Hristov shares four key tips for overcoming this challenge:
- Be persistent: Trust takes time, so maintain consistent, thoughtful outreach.
- Establish your brand first: Journalists prefer engaging with credible, well-known brands.
- Respect their time: One well-crafted pitch is better than multiple follow-ups.
- Provide valuable content: Offer relevant, high-quality insights to build trust and secure media coverage.
3. Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)
Encouraging customers to create content featuring your brand is a powerful way to amplify earned media. Running contests and challenges motivates users to share their experiences, while showcasing customer stories, testimonials, and real-life brand interactions builds trust and authenticity.
Offering incentives like discounts or loyalty points further encourages engagement, making users more likely to participate and share their experiences.
4. Partner With Influencers for Organic Mentions
Collaborating with influencers can amplify earned media value, but authenticity is key. To get that right, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Work with nano and micro-influencers for authentic recommendations.
- Encourage influencers to create content without overt sponsorship, making it feel more genuine.
- Focus on influencers whose audience aligns closely with your target market.
5. Best Practices To Follow
To make the most of earned media, brands must take a proactive approach to tracking and optimizing their exposure. Implementing the following best practices can help you enhance visibility, engage audiences, and refine your marketing strategies.
- Track performance continuously: Monitoring social shares, brand mentions, and engagement levels allows businesses to measure the impact of their earned media efforts. Regular analysis helps identify high-performing content and areas for improvement.
- Optimize for dark social: Many users share links through private messaging and email, making it difficult to track referral sources. Including copy-link buttons and UTM tracking enables brands to capture more data on dark social sharing.
- Repurpose earned media: Positive press, customer testimonials, and user-generated content shouldn’t be limited to their original platforms. Featuring this content on company websites, email campaigns, and social media channels extends its reach and amplifies its impact.
- Engage with earned mentions: Actively responding to comments, sharing user-generated content, and participating in conversations around your brand fosters stronger relationships. Acknowledging and amplifying earned mentions encourages even more organic engagement and brand advocacy.
Tools & Analytics for Tracking Earned Media Value
Effectively measuring earned media value requires the right tools to track engagement, sentiment, and media coverage. The following platforms help to monitor earned media impact, analyze trends, and optimize strategies based on real-time data.
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics measures earned media impact by tracking referral traffic, social shares, and backlinks. It helps businesses identify which media mentions and third-party sources drive the most engagement and conversions.
- Brandwatch & Meltwater: For monitoring brand sentiment, media coverage, and online conversations, Brandwatch and Meltwater are popular choices. By analyzing trends, businesses can assess brand perception, amplify positive media, and manage reputation risks.
- Hootsuite & Sprout Social: Hootsuite and Sprout Social provide analytics on social media engagement, viral reach, and content performance, helping brands track shares, measure campaign success, and optimize strategies.
- Cision & Muck Rack: Cision and Muck Rack analyze PR impact, track journalist outreach, and monitor media coverage, helping brands measure engagement from press mentions and strengthen media relationships.
5 Real-World Examples of Earned Media Success
The following examples showcase how companies have leveraged earned media to amplify their reach and drive results.
- Home Depot’s viral Halloween sensation
- Ocean Spray’s TikTok-fueled brand boost
- LEGO’s "Rebuild the World" and UGC success
- DoorDash’s local restaurant support initiative
- Dove’s "#TurnYourBack" campaign
1. Home Depot’s Viral Halloween Sensation
Home Depot’s 12-foot skeleton decoration became a social media phenomenon, leading to a surge in demand and making it a must-have Halloween item. The product gained traction through organic social shares, viral TikToks, and news coverage, ultimately selling out quickly.
The overwhelming success of this campaign helped drive Home Depot’s strongest Halloween season ever, proving the power of viral product marketing without traditional advertising.
2. Ocean Spray’s TikTok-Fueled Brand Boost
When a TikTok user went viral for cruising on a skateboard while drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s "Dreams," the brand saw an unexpected surge in media coverage and sales. Instead of letting the moment pass, Ocean Spray embraced the viral trend by gifting the creator a brand-new truck filled with their products.
This move generated further media attention and reinforced the brand’s authenticity, showing how brands can capitalize on organic viral moments.
3. LEGO’s "Rebuild the World" and UGC Success
LEGO’s "Rebuild the World" campaign encouraged fans to share their imaginative LEGO creations on social media, generating massive user engagement. The campaign thrived on user-generated content (UGC) as millions of people showcased their unique builds, helping LEGO reach a broader audience with minimal paid promotions.
This strategy not only reinforced LEGO’s brand identity but also demonstrated how leveraging UGC can significantly amplify earned media value.
4. DoorDash’s Local Restaurant Support Initiative
DoorDash gained significant earned media value by launching a campaign to support local restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic. By waiving commission fees for small businesses and amplifying their stories through press and social media, the brand generated widespread media coverage and social engagement.
This initiative not only strengthened DoorDash’s brand image but also increased customer loyalty by positioning the company as a supporter of small businesses.
5. Dove’s "#TurnYourBack" Campaign
In 2023, Dove launched the #TurnYourBack campaign to combat the negative effects of TikTok's Bold Glamour filter, which promotes unrealistic beauty standards. The campaign encouraged individuals to post videos turning away from the filter, symbolizing a rejection of digital distortion.
This initiative garnered significant attention, with posts using #TurnYourBack achieving 54 million video views and over 567,000 engagements, accompanied by a 94% positive sentiment rate in key markets. The campaign also received extensive media coverage, including features in Women's Health, WWD, PopSugar, and Vanity Fair Italia.
Earned Media Value: Key Takeaways
Earned media is one of the most powerful forms of brand visibility, offering organic credibility that paid advertising cannot replicate. Calculating EMV helps businesses quantify and optimize their organic marketing efforts. While tracking it can be challenging, using weighted EMV calculations, analytics tools, and proactive strategies can help maximize impact.
The brands that thrive in earned media consistently encourage organic sharing, foster PR relationships, leverage influencers, and engage with user-generated content. You can strengthen your brand presence and turn earned media into a growth-driving force by implementing these strategies. To get it right, it helps to have industry leading expertise to leverage.
Earned Media Value FAQs
1. Is earned media more effective for B2B or B2C brands?
Earned media benefits both B2B and B2C brands but in different ways. B2C brands often see rapid, large-scale engagement through social media shares, viral content, and influencer mentions.
B2B brands, on the other hand, leverage earned media through industry thought leadership, press features, and third-party endorsements, which build credibility over time. While B2C brands may prioritize virality, B2B companies focus on long-term reputation-building and trust.
2. What role does SEO play in maximizing earned media value?
SEO plays a crucial role in amplifying earned media impact by improving visibility in search results. When a brand is mentioned in articles, blogs, or social shares, backlinks from reputable sources boost search rankings.
Optimizing content with relevant keywords, structured data, and link-building strategies ensures that earned media contributes to long-term discoverability, driving sustained organic traffic beyond the initial exposure.
3. How do you measure the lifetime value of earned media exposure?
Measuring the lifetime value of earned media requires tracking its long-term impact on brand awareness, search visibility, and lead generation. Businesses can monitor how earned media influences customer acquisition over time by analyzing recurring website traffic, sustained social engagement, and downstream conversions from PR efforts.
Additionally, leveraging analytics tools to measure ongoing referral traffic and sentiment trends helps assess the lasting value of media exposure.
