Digital Media and the Branding of Downtowns: Strategies for New Business Development Using Paid, Owned and Earned Media November, 2013 | Page 10

Earned media complement this owned content. Using social media platforms you can spread the
website’s message to a new audience by sending links through social media. This amplifies your content
to a group of potential customers who don’t visit your site often. If the message is strategic and well
communicated, there’s a good chance your social media audience will help repeat the message to their
social circles.
See what just happened? You listened to the
customer, created a great content hub, and then
provided an easy way for them to find it. They liked
it so much they told their friends about it, boosting
your message at zero cost. Like a good movie or a
great restaurant experience, your content can
inform and excite your customer base.
It may be a good time to take a fresh look at your
website. Is it intuitive? Is it easy to navigate? Make
sure the flow of information is designed around your
user’s needs more than your own.
“Most government and chamber and downtown
sites are so complicated and hard to use and hard to
find, it ends up being frustrating,” said Matthew
Coppedge of Downtown Durham, Inc.
Paid media is also an important part of this model. Two digital formats that work especially well are
online display advertising and paid search advertising. Online display ads can be placed on portals or
third-party sites much an ad placed in a magazine or newspaper.
The beauty of online display ads lies in their function. Unlike print ads, they’re dynamic; one click links
back to your site. These are popular on websites and some social media platforms such as Twitter and
Facebook. These ads can also be tracked. You can gauge the success of which words worked, which
images attracted the most clicks and which target audience was most responsive. Paid digital ads are
dynamic in a way that static ads simply can’t match.
Paid search ads are often lines of text that show up in or near search results. There’s a good chance
you’ve seen these on Google and Bing. Let’s say you’re considering a cruise to the Caribbean. You fire up
your favorite search engine and look for the words “cruise, vacation, tropical and discount”. As you click
to see the results, you notice several lines of text on the screen about cruises. The cruise companies paid
the search engine to put them in front of you when you searched for their key words. Like the display
ads, you can click on the paid search ads and end up at an owned content hub.
For traditional paid advertising, you should include your website address in most, if not all, of your ads.
A simple name should be easy to remember (much easier than the phone numbers of yesteryear) and
intuitive. The paid advertising is then just a conduit to get them back to your owned content.

Page 10