The Own It, Earn It, Pay for It Digital Marketing Framework for Purpose Driven Organisations
Social Enterprises, NGO and other purpose driven organisations can often run in an imbalance of having huge amounts of ambition on the one side and little resources to fulfil their goals on the other side.
This can lead to struggles such as organisational overload, mental stress and the feeling of not moving forward at the desired speed. This issue can be found in many different fields of their operations such as: strategy formation, project management, communications, service delivery.
The primary focus of this blog post, is to provide a strategic framework, that organisations can use to make sense of their digital marketing and communication. I hope that this framework provides meaningful advice for the logic of different communication channels and in what order they should be set-up.
The basic idea is, to start growing organically as much as possible and then layer-in different kinds of, for example paid channels, as you gain traction and make progress.
I creatively call this approach the “Own It, Earn It, then Pay for It” Framework for Digital Marketing, which is derived from the idea, that their are marketing channels that you own, earn or pay for. If you work in the field of marketing and communications, this should be nothing new to you.
So let´s dive right into it:
Step 1 - Defining your marketing objectives
The first step in this framework is to have a clear understanding of your objectives. You can be guided by these questions:
- What are your goals with digital marketing?
- What do you want to achieve in which time frame?
- Are your expectations realistic
I do not want to spend too much time on goal formation right now. If you are unsure on how to find right goals, you can read up on SMART-Goals here: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/management/smart-goal/).
I personally like to use the OKR framework. For more information about that see here: https://www.whatmatters.com/faqs/okr-meaning-definition-example
Step 2 - Own it: Building an organic foundation for your marketing
After you have set yourself a clear and realistic objective for your digital marketing, you can start looking into how to achieve them. I sometimes have people coming at me, complaining that their social ads are not working, or that they do not have the budget for Google Ads, because they are just getting started. I understand that trying to buy you success seems to make a lot of sense and that is also, what the big ad platforms are trying to sell. But, if you are just getting started or have not tried any other form of digital marketing, I think ads should be the last, but defitinely not the first step of your efforts. This thinking brings clutter, confusion and even frustration, because you might just burn money.
Owned channels are defined as all the marketing channels, that you as an organisation own. Yes, you can pay your way up, but you should focus on organic growth first and see how far you will get by maximizing out the reach and efficiency of your owned channels.
Examples of owned channels are:
Your Website
Creating meaningful content, that is relevant and focusing on the SEO basics, will improve your rankings on Google and AI chat bots. This will in return get you more reach in your relevant audience. Yes, it does take an effort to keep your website up to date, but you will benefit from it. Sidenote: Paid marketing channels will also only work, if you have something relevant to show
Social Media Channels
It has been harder to gain organic reach through social media, because the space is just so packed full of content. However, I would argue that it make sense to have a systematic approach on how you are managing and keeping these channels alive. You can still reach your core-audience through platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest etc. and engage with them in meaningful ways that foster your mission.
Newsletters
Another way to grow organically and interact with your potential customers or beneficiaries are newsletters. If you create engaging social media content and relevant content for your website, you can also look into keeping your true fans in the loop with what is happening in your organisation. Sidenote: Assemble the most relevant social media postings and blog contents (events, releases,…) and send them out as newsletter.
The reach does not have to be huge, but sending out an e-mail once in a while will definitely have a positive impact on your communications.
Podcasts & Webinars
This is something that takes more effort to produce and does have higher costs than the other channels. If you have well organized and creative team, you could look into running your own podcast or webinars. Once again, you can use the content that you have produced for you other owned channels and have a more in-depth conversation about it through audio and or video.
As I have mentioned above, the idea of this approach is to first make you sort out all your owned channels. If you are accelling in those, you will have it much easier, once you expand in to the earned or paid channels, as the are massively benefiting from a solid bases and options of interactions with your organisation.
Step 3 - Earn it: Increase your reach through outside engagement
This step is somewhat passive and in-between your owning channels and paying for reach. If you do a great job at developing your owned channels, you will see organic growth one way or the other. The idea of this step is to maintain momentum and to manage this growth.
Let´s say you have created prominent social media presence with a core audience, that frequently reacts to and interacts with your content. You can not just publish something and just leave it. If people like your content, they will comment on its, share it with their friends. You are “earning” more reach, but you will have make something out of this, like replying to comments, reposting content from your community and so on. This also takes time and work, but will pay off.
Other ways that you can earn reach are online reviews about your service, mentions in other blogs or podcasts, forums and just in general, word of mouth. As seen in the above example, earned channels are less about actively communicating, but rather about passively managing different communication streams and trying to multiply your owned audience.
Step 4 - Pay for it: Strategic paid advertising
Finally, paid digital marketing. Considering that my main service is to create and fulfill paid marketing strategies, I should have put this much more to the front. However, it is truly my belief, that organisations should not pay for their reach, before they have not worked on their organic growth. I also belief that this is also what the large platforms actually want. It does not make sense to buy clicks to a half-usable or uninspiring website / social media profile. This will leave the people who click your ads unhappy and with that yourself.
Just with owned and earned media, they are many ways to approach this type of media. If you are looking for in-depth advice on it, send me a message.
Most organisations start out by boosting their social media postings. I think that this is a good way to dip your feet into paid marketing. Sometimes, these ad platforms even offer free ad-credit, for advertiser who just want to try out, how the mechanics work. I think you should make use of that, if you are ready for it.
Your paid strategy can, how else should it be, very sophisticated. Because you are now starting to spend actual money, you are also running into the risk of wasting it, but do not fear spending money. The process will be trial and error. So where to start?
I think a good first step is to analyse your options and figure out where your audience is mostly engaged. This is where you benefit from step one, two and three.
Do you great engagement on Instragram or Pinterest? Consider buying some reach from that, because you apparently are doing something right there already.
Is most of your traffic coming from Google or other search engines? Look into creating an ad account and buying some traffic for your most relevant keywords
If you done well in your owned and earned media channels, they will guide your way towards paid marketing. This is another reason why I think having this logical approach makes sense. The different channels are interacting with each and benefiting from each other. This is because you are dealing with humans after all, that consume your organisations content. They will switch from your podcast, to your instagram, to filling out a contact form on your website within 30 seconds or simultaneously. By then adding paid channels, you are building a ever more relevant customer journey that will hopefully scale and help you fulfill your goals. This is why you have started this process after all.
Wrap-Up
I hope that this post gave you more knowledge than you have had before.
One note on the logic of this model. I am presenting this as a step-by-step guide on how to approach your digital marketing. In theory, it can work like this, but practice often plays out differently. It can be the case, that you get the opportunity to invest some paid reach and it is a great chance to gain traction. Should you do it, even if your owned and earned efforts are not running to the maximum? Yes, you should.
What I am really trying to provide with this framework is a sense of direction on where to start first. Digital marketing can be messy, but if you approach it like building a house, it will be easier to decide on what is important, and what is not.
