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Driving 30% more from your marketing investment with the Earned Premium

advertising + marketing for innovative brands

As an agency, we like to figure out the hard stuff. And for B2B marketers, the hard stuff is everywhere these days.

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Budgets are static.

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While buyers’ information and media world is changing every day.

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The good news: the buyer has more control and more choice than ever before.

The bad news: the media environment is mind-numbingly crowded and complex.

The truth? Most content—even great content the buyer wants and needs—never finds its audience in

the zettabyte era.

And earned channels by themselves reach only a small segment of who you want to talk to.

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Marketers are doing their best to respond.

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But they end up placing lots of small bets on the margins—on digital, social, mobile, and content marketing—rather than fundamentally rethinking their marketing mix.

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These small bets generally don't pay off against the big marketing goals: getting famous, changing perceptions, or selling more.

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Goals, by the way, that haven't changed at all.

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It’s time to rethink campaigns from the ground up.

The earned premium

Campaigns built from the ground up with participation in mind will generate an incremental impact—audience engagement beyond what you pay for—of 20 to 30%. We call this bonus the Earned Premium.

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And across many research studies, an impression shared from a peer is quantifiably more valuable than paying for one. 

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We all want that premium. Follow three imperatives, and you can achieve it.

BE INSPIRED

Start with an idea worth spreading. 1

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The three imperatives are:

BE INTEGRATED

Treat paid and earned media as mutually supporting strategies, not moral opposites.

BE INVITING

Take the word “earned” seriously by giving your audiences a reason to participate.

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So how do we get there?

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MAKE The promise

KEEP The promise

EXPERIENCE The promise

1. Be Inspired. The most inspired creative ideas are rooted

in a platform your brand can support over the long term, and a role that you play in your buyer’s lives.

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Brand platform.

›❯  A core idea that helps focus marketing investments over time

›❯  Idea is big enough to spawn multiple campaign expressions – for different objectives and audiences, and over time

Dove: Campaign for real beauty. ›❯  For more than ten years, Dove has explored ways in which their

marketing can reflect themes of positive self-esteem and inspiration for all women and girls to reach their full potential.

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2. Be Integrated. Think PESO—find the right mix of Paid, Earned, Sponsored, and Owned that helps your buyer move from left to right.

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3. Be Inviting. Find the participation idea: the rational (it’s useful to me) or emotional (it captures my imagination)

reasons that make people feel good about sharing.

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Participation idea.

›❯  Big ideas that invite buyer, customer, influencer and employee participation – including content creation, sharing, and any other form of participation we can think of.

Prudential: Blue Dot ›❯  Found a way to get people to participate in contributing data to

help personalize a visualization of the retirement gap.

That's the idea. Here are some examples from our practice:

Infor Global campaign that got the influencers talking, tweeting, and sharing—and placed Infor in the same tier as Oracle and SAP

The Challenge: Infor was pretty much an unknown, and a distant

3rd place in the ERP market. They couldn’t match the ad buys of Oracle and SAP, so buying their way into

the top tier was out of the question.

EARNED PREMIUM:

Be what buyers are interested in We created a campaign around what buyers are already talking about—frustration with the ERP duopoly and the need for an alternative. We personified that duopoly through a couple of fun, over-the-top characters.

EARNED PREMIUM:

Invite influencers to help spread the word We built a multi-part social campaign, with a “Big ERP” Twitter feed that engaged analysts and editors as the core. Payoff was more than a million earned impressions through social mentions and press coverage, including a CIO Magazine Q&A with the Big ERP guys.

Earned premium: The outcomes Infor nearly doubled its credibility and likelihood to recommend scores. More than a quarter of campaign interactions were earned through social media and press attention.

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The Unconventionals Content platform that features disruptive businesses deserves a disruptive media strategy

EARNED PREMIUM: Disruptive is more interesting than me-too Our goal is to connect with marketers who see themselves as innovators and change-agents. We launched a radio show and related social content that tells the story of companies—like Warby Parker, Converse, and Dollar Shave Club—who have created an outsized impact by “doing business the other way” in their categories.

EARNED PREMIUM: There is a price for people’s attention Social and 3rd party sponsored platforms (Forbes and Columbia Business School) are main distribution channels, but paid content promotion significantly increases reach and drives a 50% increase in viral engagement

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Facebook and YouTube are main “owned” engagement channels. Short snackable videos on YouTube Quickly became lead generator of engagement

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Partnerships with Forbes CMO Network and Columbia Business School provides significant reach and credibility

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Social media activities provide majority of reach, but native ads and social promotion of key program content increased reach and viral sharing

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EARNED PREMIUM:

The cumulative effect of paid posts is a 50% increase in viral and organic reach

Cumulative organic and viral reach of paid posts

Cumulative organic and viral reach of unpaid posts, using baseline as a constant

+ 50%

Red Hat The Enterpriser's Project: Content partnership (ground game) replaces advertising (air cover) as primary paid distribution strategy

The Challenge: Red Hat is the first billion dollar open source company, and a hugely successful software company by almost

any standard. But the market has not given the company credit for enterprise solutions in virtualization, cloud,

and storage. Red Hat needs to create awareness among innovation-minded CIOs and build credibility as an

enterprise-level partner.

EARNED PREMIUM:

An idea worth sharing Connect with "enterprising" CIOs–those who see themselves as drivers of business innovation. Invite them to join a community-powered conversation about the future of business.

C?O 312weekCIO enterprising

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10,000 1,000 The Program: A traditional corporate ad campaign wasn’t in the budget, nor did it fit Red Hat’s culture. Using an earned premium approach, we inverted the funnel. We started by building engagement from a core audience of CIOs through events and by inviting them to join an editorial board. As we build the core ("100"), we are generating a larger conversation through content, useful online destinations, and social promotion (“1,000”). The 3rd stage is to capture the best of the content and conversation and distribute it at scale (“10,000”).

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*program in process, launched Q3 2013

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EARNED PREMIUM:

Leverage trusted brands Our primary paid strategy is sponsorship. Red Hat doesn’t have the visibility with senior IT, so we negotiated a partnership with CIO (the lead brand) and Harvard Business Review (the ingredient brand). Red Hat is the catalyst, CIO and HBR bring reach, credibility, and content.

The Lead Brand

•  Quality traffic

•  Senior IT editorial

•  High-credibility research

•  CIO events

The Catalyst

•  Bring voices together for iterative conversation

•  Co-brand events and content

•  Senior Red Hat participation

The Ingredient Brand

•  High-credibility business brand

•  Valued business content and tools

•  Business editorial

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EARNED PREMIUM:

Be useful: create and spread content that enterprisers are craving

CIO Conversation Platform

Red Hat campaign “home base”

Social Sharing

Durable registration-worthy research studies

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EARNED PREMIUM:

Building momentum*

8 CIO-level editorial board members, 25+ pieces of content 27 CIO videos with 15,300 views 40+ CIO round-table attendees 200+ blog posts and articles 550+ comments 2,000+ Twitter followers 30,000+ unique visitors

*through 60 days of program

We’d be happy to share more earned premium stories, and talk about how your company can get a little more than it bargained for when it comes to marketing. Please contact Greg Straface at gstraface@agencypja.com or (617) 234 7371.

advertising + marketing for innovative brands

Thank you