Earned Media vs Paid Media: What’s the Best Bang for Your Buck?

Paid media, is in effect, an advert expressing “how great we are” created with the intent of selling, whereas PR is third-party endorsement, “look at how great they are.”

If you are a young enterprise, you may carry the perception that paying for advertising early on in your business journey is a quick and easy win to facilitate brand awareness and sales. Unless you have an endless budget to nurture an advertising campaign over the long-term, you may be wondering a) where you would start, and b) how you would justify apportioning precious funds to adverts.

As the saying goes, “advertising is what you pay for, publicity is what you pray for." So, is paid media the low-hanging fruit that we think it is? We break down some of the optics and share our thoughts below.

The authenticity factor

We know that consumers crave true and authentic connection to the human side of a brand.

The alternative to fostering the “here we are, pay attention” approach that paid media aims to achieve is an organic, slow-burn of building your brand’s reputation from the ground up. This model favours businesses of all affordability as the biggest investment that is required is strategic planning and time.

So what does organic infer? Embracing the time and effort it will take to build relations, to finesse your offerings, to learn from feedback, and to solidify your place in the market. This way to the top will earn your brand the kind of attention that can’t be bought with advertising.

Buying loyalty and sales, which are far from guaranteed, is the ultimate antidote to authenticity.

The credibility trade-off

Even if you have the funds for a healthy advertising budget, in relying too heavily on advertising to build brand loyalty and win sales, there is a trade-off in credibility.

The way an audience perceives what they are watching, reading or hearing plays an important role in a brands overall credibility. They know when they come across any type of ad that it was placed there through paid means, and with that comes a degree of scepticism and indifference.

Media professionals and journalists are not obliged to feature brands, which is why when they do give credence, there is instant trust in their authority. We know through countless research that next to word-of-mouth marketing, the ripple effect of an editorial feature, pulled off by a PR, far outweighs advertising.

Remember: believability equals credibility.

Budgetary considerations

Any PR worth their salt will be upfront about the inescapable fact that much of PR activity is difficult to measure, and is therefore almost impossible to quantify. Even though there is a perception that money spent on PR is entirely speculative, advertising in reality is no different.

By far the more expensive option when you consider the cost of creation and distriubtion of the space, and the time for creative designs and production costs, one advert is usually not enough, and needs to be repeated several times before a consumer can be influenced into a purchasing decision. There is no guarantee of kick-back, which can make the lack of return a harder pill to swallow.

A press release on the other hand can provide extensive reach and if it’s picked up just once, can be the gift that keeps on giving as earned online placement, whether by an article or social media post, is evergreen.

Question how long will you need to maintain a budget for ads versus PR activity that should ideally already be part of your overall business strategy.

The modern way

Culturally, senior management across industry traditionally opted for large advertising drives because the message was controlled and the placement guaranteed, allowing them to push specific business agendas.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, public relations depends and thrives on story-telling to get to the who, what, when, where, why and how.

Although earned media is at the traditional core of public relations, the advent of social media has given PRs and brands new platforms to expand on opportunities to generate good publicity, welding third party endorsement with a modicum of control over their narrative.

By its very nature, in chasing the glory of good publicity, public relations forces businesses to connect with their audience and to communicate who they are and what they offer in a relatable way. An advert doesn’t require a brand to look beyond what they are trying to sell in quite the same way.

PR wins are undoubtedly sweeter because they inevitably require more honest and fruitful work to be done continually in the background.