Earned media is the crown jewel in many firms’ marketing strategies. Reaching out to your target audience through email address harvesting, social media activity, and third party partnerships remain the primary avenues for growing a digital and branding footprint, yet the value of earned media remains a highly sought after target for many businesses across industries.
What is earned media?
Earned media strategies are simply the means by which firms target media producers with their advertising dollars. Building a reservoir of content that can be shared, linked, and promoted by influencers and other social media and news media users, as well as consumers, is the best way to position yourself for capitalization of the organic (and more importantly, free) publicity that comes through earned media sources.
Market pros, like Caitlin Gossage, know the value of this organic traffic and free promotional material. Gossage is an asset management professional with Forthlane in Toronto. Prior to this new role, she served as in-house legal counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Purpose investments. Asset management is a tough responsibility, and it requires a continuous interface across business segments. Gossage shows incredible poise in this role and relies on strategies like earned media to get the job done successfully every time.
This branch of social media marketing makes up a significant portion of SEO and other media strategies employed by marketing budgets all around the United States and beyond. This is because the free publicity that is granted through the expansion of a firm’s earned media profile continues to pay dividends without any additional investment. The SEO budget, therefore, is often created in order to target specialized offerings that are buzz-worthy and are likely to be picked up by bloggers, posters, and influencers in order to extend the press release, blog post, or other media rank enhancers’ value to the company’s website and free cash flow (reducing the total cash cost in the process).
Every ounce of your marketing process, media strategy, and budget should be focused on squeezing out maximum utility from these media channels. A publicly traded company’s cash flow relies on the impact of individual branding decisions, investor alerts, and the whims of the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange).
Environmentalism lies at the core of activated blogger resources and great press.
Perhaps the most potent way in which firms create this type of social media buzz around their products, services, and other offers is through a nod to social justice issues. Environmental compliance is a great asset for a firm looking to give back to its community and boost its standing within the local and international community at the same time.
Alamos Gold (NYSE: AGI) offers a perfect example of this commitment. Alamos is a gold miner that operates through a Canadian sector (Island Gold and Young-Davidson Mines in Northern Ontario), as well as at the Mulatos Mine in Mexico. In addition to these operational gold miner locations, mineral reserves are being explored in the Rocky Mountains in the United States, as well as in development projects and technical report evaluation in the Republic of Turkey.
The Turkish development sites (and particularly the Kirazli project) are exciting developments for Alamos and for investors who target mining companies for their portfolios. Alamos is working through the exploration process here, but tonnes of gold are expected to be withdrawn in the coming months and years at Kirazli and two other sites in Turkey. Each of the mineral resources teams in the Republic of Turkey expects to net over 100,000 ounces of gold per year, and at a cash flow expenditure that comes in far below the median price per ounce of gold mineralization.
The metrics here speak for themselves, but beyond the cash operating costs that Alamos has been able to reduce down to a fraction of other mining companies, Alamos Gold Inc. is committed to constant improvements to the process in order to protect the environment around their mines (Island Gold, Young-Davidson, and every other site).
Environmental conservation is a powerful means of building a great rapport with the communities within which your firm operates. For Alamos, this means constantly improving the process in order to telegraph to the world that the core beliefs and aims of the company fall in line with the things that average consumers find important. Protecting the environment is crucial, and consumers today think of this as an essential role for companies to play—in addition to the business processes that consume their routine dealings throughout the day.
Conservation is the responsibility of everyone who shares in the riches of this planet, and it’s especially important in today’s world for firms that have the ability to ruin our landscape (like mining companies) to take steps to protect it instead of simply opting for the easy way. Alamos prioritizes this, and the results show. Media and marketing take a lot of strategy and planning. Incorporating these tactics into your business processes can make a world of difference for you and your future.
