Earned media
urnd MEE-dee-uh
Publicity and attention you did not pay for. Press coverage, social shares, word of mouth, and organic mentions.
Earned media is attention you did not pay for and do not control. A journalist writes about your product. A customer tweets about you. An analyst mentions you in a report. A podcast host discusses your approach. You earned that attention through product quality, thought leadership, or doing something worth talking about.
Earned media is the most credible form of marketing because it comes from a third party. A customer saying 'this product saved us $200k' is more persuasive than you saying 'our product saves companies $200k.' The messenger matters.
The challenge is that earned media is unpredictable and hard to scale. You cannot buy a customer testimonial (credibly). You cannot force a journalist to write about you. You can only create the conditions: build a great product, tell interesting stories, and make it easy for others to share your narrative.
Examples
A product launch generates earned media.
The company launches a free open-source tool alongside their paid product. Developers share it on social media. Three tech publications write about it. The launch generates 50k website visits in a week with zero paid spend.
A customer becomes an evangelist.
A VP of Engineering at a well-known company gives a conference talk about how your product reduced their deployment time by 90%. The talk gets 15,000 views. Inbound leads from companies in their industry spike for two months. You did not ask them to give the talk. They wanted to.
Earning media through research.
The company publishes an annual 'State of Infrastructure' report based on data from 5,000 engineering teams. Industry analysts cite it. Publications reference the data. The report generates earned media for months after publication because the data is original and useful.
In practice
Read more on the blog
Frequently asked questions
How do you generate earned media?
Build a great product worth talking about. Publish original research with data people want to cite. Help journalists with timely expert commentary. Create tools and resources the community finds valuable. Support customer advocacy programs. Earned media is a byproduct of doing interesting things, not a channel you can buy.
How do you measure earned media?
Track mentions in press, social media, and analyst reports. Measure share of voice relative to competitors. Track referral traffic from earned sources. Estimate the equivalent paid media cost (how much would you have spent to reach the same audience?). But be careful: earned media value estimates are notoriously inflated.
Related terms
Any marketing channel where you pay for visibility: search ads, social ads, display ads, sponsorships, and paid content placements.
Marketing channels you control: your website, blog, email list, documentation, and social accounts. Content you create and distribute yourself.
The percentage of total market conversation that mentions your brand compared to competitors. How much of the conversation you own.
Public relations: managing how a company is perceived through media and public communication.
Want the complete playbook?
Picks and Shovels is the definitive guide to developer marketing. Amazon #1 bestseller with practical strategies from 30 years of marketing to developers.