In a world of economic uncertainty and pressurised budgets, it’s never been more important to leverage every touchpoint available to a marketer. At The Kite Factory, we see channels in this specific order:
- Owned Media: Media that you have editorial control over (your website, or social channels). It may cost money to create the content for these platforms, but the decision to place it is yours. This is the start point.
- Earned Media: Third parties advocating for your brand (such as fans, customers, journalists or reviewers)
- Shared Media: Other advertisers you can partner with to achieve mutually beneficial goals.
- Paid Media: Paid is the last thing we turn to because here Paid can work it’s hardest, either amplifying the best parts of Owned Earned and Shared or filling in the gaps those touchpoints cannot reach on their own.
Hot on the heels of our last webinar on Earned Media (available to view here), we wanted to turn the spotlight onto Shared…
Shared has always struck us as the most underutilised of the four. Shared is the area with the greatest headroom and can often be overlooked. Great shared media can step-change your business and make your budget work significantly harder. However, it requires specialist expertise to get the most out of it.
To uncover further insight into how you can get the most from Shared, Head of Insight, Strategy & Planning Rik Moore was joined by two great practitioners in this space: David Pickles, CEO and Co-Founder of Simbiotik, an agency specialising in value-in-kind collaborations between brands, delivering numerous compelling shared activations over the last 13 years, and Natalie Hopkins, Brand Partnerships Manager at London North Eastern Railway (LNER), with a wealth of expertise at creating Shared initiatives of all shapes and sizes.
The panel discussed their experiences creating shared media collaborations, shared case studies and identified some of the secrets of what makes a good Shared campaign. David outlined that there are four to five styles of shared partnership, irrespective of scale or tenure:
- Brand: Enhance brand values / drive proposition salience with target audiences.
- Proposition: Create value / differentiation within a proposition / move into new categories
- Channel: Secure access to new customer prospects
- Cost Reduction: Removing or reducing costs through sampling or simple goods and service barter
- Fundraising: Specific to the third sector
Both David and Natalie then reflected on different campaigns they had worked throughout their respective careers that showcased this, including brands as diverse as Peroni, Walkers, Hasbro, OK! Magazine, VisitYork, Lincoln City and Doncaster Rovers.
Having discussed the impact that the Coronavirus pandemic has had on this marketing specialism (both good and bad), the panel rounded off by discussing some elements to consider how to get the most out of Shared, including:
- Be open, collaborative, and positive
- Think laterally (your perceived ‘problem’ may solve a challenge for another brand)
- Create good relationships with existing in-house corporate partnership teams – avoid stepping on toes and learn to work together
- Ensure you have got measurement in place, and build evidence and case studies
- Sense check brand values and projects at the earliest stage to check compatibility.
- Investment is essential, in terms of a commitment to the project and making resources available, rather than just amplification within your existing communications.
To hear all that was discussed in greater detail, you can view the webinar here. After watching, you will no doubt agree that Shared will become an increasingly important weapon in a marketer’s arsenal as budgets are squeezed.