For all marketing tactics, including influencer marketing, tracking the metrics of your campaigns helps gauge their performance. But not all metrics are created equal and some hold less weight than others. Earned media value, or EMV, is social media exposure gained through recommendations, word-of-mouth conversations, or conversations about a brand. EMV can come from reviews,...
For all marketing tactics, including influencer marketing, tracking the metrics of your campaigns helps gauge their performance. But not all metrics are created equal and some hold less weight than others.
Earned media value, or EMV, is social media exposure gained through recommendations, word-of-mouth conversations, or conversations about a brand. EMV can come from reviews, mentions, or user-generated content. Many brands use EMV as a key performance metric, but it’s a metric that’s often more confusing than it is helpful.
While EMV has become a popular metric to measure, it’s not the best way to track how campaigns are performing. In this post, we’ll cover why EMV isn’t a reliable metric and what you should measure instead.
What’s the difference between earned, paid, and owned media?
Knowing the difference between the types of media is key to understand how they impact campaign performance.
Paid media is any media that a brand pays for, such as ads or commercials. Paid media is useful for driving brand awareness and boosting a brand or company’s exposure beyond the white noise of all the marketing content.
Owned media is content created and owned by a brand. This can be a brand’s website, blog, and social media accounts. Owned media helps provide value to potential customers as they move through the sales funnel and is fully controlled by a brand.
Unlike paid or owned media, earned media isn’t controlled by a brand or company. Earned media can show how people are engaging with a brand and spreading the word about it. It also helps build social proof in a time where customers value authenticity and transparency from brands. Earned media is useful, but measuring it is complicated.
Micro influencers get macro engagement
One of the reasons why EMV isn’t a useful KPI to measure on its own is that there isn’t one set measurement for it. Most brands come up with their own formula by setting a specific value for each interaction. For example, Octoly calculates EMV as 0.6 cents per YouTube view and 0.3 cents per like on Instagram.
Since every brand or marketer sets its own value, EMV is wildly inconsistent. This makes benchmarking campaign performance against any kind of average or against your competitors is essentially worthless. Brands consider earned media value an important KPI, and earned media is useful for driving brand awareness and social proof, but it’s not a clear measurement for PR or social campaigns.
What should you focus on instead?
There are other KPIs brands should focus on if they want clear and consistent metrics. These include actual reach, interactions, and engagement rate. Since some of these are metrics you can get from public insights, they’re much more reliable than EMV.
If you want to track the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns with more accurate metrics, you can measure interactions by combining post likes and comments. If you want to know actual reach for specific posts, your influencers can provide those numbers on a campaign by campaign basis.
To measure marketing campaigns, including influencer marketing, it’s important to have KPIs that are consistent and can be compared from campaign to campaign and against industry benchmarks. Since every marketer or company determines its own value for earned media, it’s better to focus on other metrics like interactions and engagement rates to determine campaign performance.
Request a Demo
Octoly makes it easy for brands to build authentic text reviews and amazing influencer content with product seeding campaigns at scale.