What is Earned Media Value?
Earned media value (EMV) is a method to calculate the importance of branded content gained through marketing or PR efforts, that is not paid media (not advertising) and not from owned (didn’t come from your media channels). This includes blogs, referrals, social posts, influencer marketing, reviews, and more.
How to calculate Earned Media Value
The first question is, how to measure earned media value? Much like advertising value equivalency, EMV is an attempt to provide a formulaic method of calculating your digital marketing strategy impact, by comparing it to similar media outreach.
The typical earned media value formula usually includes:
- A reach metric. Whether that’s potential audience, number of followers, impressions.
- Multiplied by an equivalent cost per thousand - so if you were measuring the reach of a Facebook campaign for example, you would use the cost per thousand you’d expect from Facebook paid advertising).
- Multiplied by another factor depending on the use-case or person doing the conversion, to help align the results with the brand needs.
Here you can start to see the problems.
First off, subsequent to the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, both Facebook and LinkedIn have shut the door on reach (it's no longer available via the API).
In addition to not having reliable data on the number of followers, impressions for personal profile posts are a closely guarded secret.
Beyond data accuracy issue, there are other intrinsic problems with Earned Media, namely vanity metrics.
“Vanity metric voodoo”
~Jeff Ernst - CEO & President, Symec - writing on CMO.com
The issue with these earned media value equations, is that they rely on a lot of vanity metrics. Each of the above could help lead to misleading results -
- Potential reach/impressions. This isn’t always the number of social media users that have seen your message. Just the people who may have done. We all know how we scroll through our social networks, and how quick those ads come and go. Did that impression really make a difference? Did a follower really see that post? If no, then how does that impact your brand?
- CPM equivalent. With this, you’re comparing one value against another. It’s apples and oranges. Earned media works very different to advertising. 84% of millennials don’t trust advertising. Yet, coincidentally 84% of consumers trust peer recommendations above all other sources of advertising. By comparing the EMV of recommendations to ads on the same platform, you could actually be undervaluing your efforts.
- Other factorials. And here’s where the distrust can come in. By adding in extra numbers, you risk massaging the figures to help demonstrate success without actually providing value to your company. It also makes it difficult to compare your different campaigns, if you use different factors across channels or regions.
Why We Chose Media Points (Instead of Earned Media)
Because of the number of misleading factors prevalent in EMV, we decided to create our own metric - Media Points. We feel that Media Points more accurately reflect the replacement cost of your employee advocacy program by incorporating engagement and sentiment into the formula as well as a factor more relevant to your business and industry - the actual cost of a click.
More specifically:
Average CPC
After doing a deep dive on the average cost per click (CPC) on Facebook across all industries ($1.72) and a similar analysis on the average CPC on LinkedIn ($5.26) we were able to extrapolate what we consider to be reasonable cross-industry values for engagement listed below.
While these values provide a great generic cross-industry starting point, it is always better for us to talk directly to your PPC team to get accurate Average CPC values for your specific industry.
Once you obtain accurate Average CPC values for your company, we can make changes to our default Media Points to reflect the specifics of your industry.
