Earned Media
Earned media is publicity and exposure gained through means other than paid advertising or owned channels. It includes customer reviews, social media mentions, press coverage, word-of-mouth, and organic search visibility.
Understanding Earned Media
The media landscape divides into three categories: paid media (advertising you buy), owned media (channels you control like your website and email list), and earned media (attention you earn through quality, relevance, and reputation). Each serves a different function, but earned media carries the highest trust.
For e-commerce, the most impactful forms of earned media are customer reviews, social media posts by customers, and organic press mentions. Reviews are arguably the most valuable because they live permanently on your product pages, influencing every future visitor. A single detailed review can influence thousands of purchasing decisions over its lifetime.
Earned media is not controllable, which is both its weakness and its strength. You cannot script a customer review or force a journalist to write about you. But this lack of control is exactly what makes earned media trusted. Consumers know the difference between a paid endorsement and a genuine recommendation.
The relationship between earned media and paid/owned media is synergistic. Great products generate earned media (reviews and UGC). That earned media makes owned media (your product pages) more compelling. And earned media content can be repurposed as paid media (UGC in ads) where it outperforms branded content.
Why It Matters for E-Commerce
Earned media is the most trusted form of marketing. Customer reviews, social mentions, and press coverage carry credibility that no amount of advertising can replicate. Building a strategy that generates consistent earned media through review collection and UGC creates sustainable competitive advantage.
Related Terms
User-generated content (UGC) is any content, including photos, videos, reviews, social media posts, and testimonials, created by customers or users rather than by the brand itself.
Brand advocacy is when satisfied customers voluntarily promote a brand through word-of-mouth, reviews, social media sharing, and referrals — without being paid or formally incentivized to do so.
Review velocity is the rate at which a store accumulates new reviews over time — typically measured as reviews per product per month or reviews per 100 orders.
A micro-influencer is a social media content creator with a following typically between 1,000 and 100,000 followers, who has a highly engaged, niche audience and is perceived as more authentic and relatable than larger influencers.
More about Earned Media
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GlossaryBrand Advocacy
Brand advocacy is when satisfied customers voluntarily promote a brand through word-of-mouth, reviews, social media sharing, and referrals — without being paid or formally incentivized to do so.
GlossaryPaid Traffic
Paid traffic refers to website visitors acquired through paid advertising channels such as search ads, social media ads, display networks, and sponsored content placements.
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