Do you want to know what earned media is and how you can build an effective earned media strategy?
Here’s a concise guide to help you get started.
Inside, you’ll find a simple earned media definition, what’s the earned media value for businesses, four earned media examples to inspire you along with a process to getting media coverage for your business
Lots of interesting things to cover, so let’s get started.
Key Takeaways:
- Earned media is third-party validation you didn’t pay for. Reviews, brand mentions, podcast features, social media shares, and citations inside listicles all count. They build credibility in ways owned media and paid promotion can’t replicate.
- It compounds over time. Unlike paid ads that stop the moment your budget runs out, earned media keeps working long after the initial mention. One feature in a media outlet leads to more, and trust in your brand builds with each subsequent placement.
- AI search engines now lean on earned media signals to decide which brands to cite. Brand mentions inside listicles and roundups are the strongest predictor of whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews recommend your brand in their answers.
- A modern earned media strategy mixes channels. Press releases, social media posts on your owned social media accounts, podcast features, and editorial mentions all reinforce each other. The brands winning in 2026 don’t pick one of these earned media channels. They run all of them and use the brand credibility from each to strengthen the next.
- Manual outreach works, but it’s slow. Building relationships with reporters and editors one by one delivers results but takes time most teams don’t have. Done-for-you services close that gap by handling the prospecting and outreach behind the scenes.
Link building cheat sheet
What is Earned Media?
Earned media is any kind of positive publicity about your products, services, or company that you haven’t paid for or created yourself.
Some examples of earned media are:
- Social media mentions
- Word-of-mouth and referrals
- Shares on social media, e.g. retweets
- Testimonials and reviews on sites like Yelp
- A mention that you got through a journalist pitch
- Getting backlinks through personalized outreach
- Hashtags specifically about your products or services
- Coverage from media outlets that are relevant to your business
- Online reviews of your products or services with a positive sentiment
All the above examples of earned media can be particularly valuable to the image that your brand forms online and can have a significant impact on your company’s growth.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what earned media is, let’s try to understand the difference between the following three types of media.
Earned Media vs Owned Media vs Paid Media
So far so good, but how is earned media different from owned media or even paid media?
Let’s try to break down the difference between the types, using three simple examples.
If you search for the term “Respona” on Google – we’re in incognito mode – you’ll see something like the following:
As you can see from the screenshot above, one of the first results — the one that we’ve highlighted — comes from the popular review site G2, formerly G2 Crowd.
If you scroll down the results a bit, you’ll see reviews like the following:
That’s a review that one of Respona’s customers has left for us on G2.
It’s a great example of getting “positive publicity” — not in the narrow sense of the term — that you haven’t paid for.
As you can imagine, these types of product reviews are extremely valuable when someone’s evaluating our product and considering solutions when it comes to digital PR.
The best part?
We haven’t paid for it — our customer just felt the need to spread the word about our product based on the experience they had with us.
Let’s move forward with our second example, this time for owned media.
What is owned media?
Owned media includes any kind of activity, digital marketing channel, or marketing campaign – both online and offline – that results in positive publicity for your company that you’ve created yourself.
Some examples of owned media are:
- A press release that you publish on your website
- A piece of content that you publish on your blog
- A podcast that you’ve launched and host by yourself
- Video content that you publish on your YouTube channel
- The email marketing newsletters you send to your subscribers
- Social media posts on your own social media channels, e.g. LinkedIn
Let’s see an example of earned media to make it a bit easier to digest.
If you search for “ott platforms” on Google, you’ll see that one of the first results comes from the OTT platform, Uscreen.
If you click on that result, you’ll notice that the result is an in-depth review of the top OTT platforms in the market.
It’s no wonder this content piece ranks among the top results on the search engine results page (SERP).
By having this post on its blog, Uscreen manages to reach its target audience without having to pay for it.
The best part?
People who visit the company’s website are aware of the business and may even start developing a relationship with it, for example by signing up for its email newsletter, AKA lead generation.
Owned media is probably the best type of media because having everything “living” on your own website or owned channels gives you more control over it.
Put simply, you’re not dependent on other businesses and you have full control over your content.
Let’s move on to the last media type we have for you.
Paid media is self-explanatory.
But, for those of you who don’t know what it means, here’s a simple definition.
What is paid media?
Paid media refers to any activity that promotes your products, services, or company in a way that’s positive for you, that you’ve paid for.
Some examples of paid media are:
- Your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, e.g. display ads, banner ads
- A paid endorsement for your company’s new product or service
- A paid partnership with an influencer, AKA influencer marketing
- A paid news story in a prominent publication for a noteworthy event
Want to see an example?
ZuluTrade is one of the leading copy trading platforms in the world.
If you search for “zulutrade” on Google, the first result you’re going to see — above the organic search results — is a paid ad, with the label “Ad”, placed by the company itself.
Obviously, ZuluTrade is likely doing that because, as a big company, it has many competitors bidding on its main branded term of “zulutrade”.
What’s important here, though, is that this is a form of paid media, or paid advertising.
We believe that it can be more effective when combined with other forms, such as owned or earned media, that we saw earlier.
Now that you have a solid understanding of what earned media is and how it’s different from other types of media, let’s get into the next section, where we’ll discuss the importance of earned media for your business.
Why is Earned Media Important for Brands?
In this section, we’re going to explain why earned media is important for brands and why it should be an integral part of a marketing strategy.
Let’s get started.
Reason #1: Cost-effective way for raising awareness
The first reason why earned media is important is that it’s a really cost-effective way to raise brand awareness.
That’s not to say that owned and paid media are expensive — after all, we don’t have any data that can prove that — rather than to say that earned media can really help you move the needle, without having to break the bank.
Reason #2: Diversification when it comes to your acquisition channels
An important reason why earned media should be a part of your marketing mix is that you can’t, and shouldn’t, rely on just one channel when it comes to your company’s growth.
It’s highly recommended that you have multiple channels working together to support your marketing efforts.
If that’s not enough, then think about the fact that, on several occasions, individuals and brands have lost their channels on properties like YouTube…
Diversification is super important when it comes to building a sustainable and long-standing business and earned media can help you achieve that.
Let’s get to reason number three.
Reason #3: It has a compounding effect over time
Earned media has a compounding effect over time.
Simply put, the more the people who talk about you, the more the people who are going to hear about you.
The same doesn’t apply when it comes to paid media, where you get results only for as long as you keep paying to be advertised.
For example, take a look at the following graph by Exploding Topics on the interest around the term “visme”.
It’s clear that more and more people are searching for Visme online.
As they do, it’s also likely that more people are going to be trying Visme and then talking about it online, after having a great experience with the software.
That creates a compounding effect over time that can help you grow faster, after you reach a certain point.
Let’s get to the last reason we have for you.
Reason #4: It has SEO value for your brand
In the updated Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines from Google for 2020, there’s a concept called EAT.
This stands for…
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
… and, it’s one of the ways Google uses to evaluate the quality of your website.
Part of that is getting recognized by authoritative publications in your industry as an authoritative source when it comes to the topics your website talks about.
We’re not going to get into the specifics of that, but you need to know that one of the ways to achieve that is through making meaningful connections with people who cover topics similar to yours on prominent media outlets and letting them know that you exist.
This kind of digital PR becomes increasingly important when it comes to getting higher rankings and to how Google views your website in general.
That’s also confirmed by Google’s John Mueller, who left the following comment in a relevant Twitter thread in early 2021:
Thus, besides the obvious benefits of earned media for your business, there are other, not so obvious ones such as improving your SEO.
Let’s move on to the next section, where we’ll share four inspiring examples we’ve prepared for you.
Reason #5: It Builds AI Search Visibility
Here’s the benefit nobody talked about two years ago and everyone’s catching up to now.
AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews don’t generate answers from thin air.
They lean on the same authority signals search engines have always rewarded: who’s writing about your brand, where those mentions appear, and how often your brand shows up in trusted publications.
Earned media is the engine behind those signals. When your brand gets mentioned inside a “best of” listicle on a high-authority site, AI engines treat that as a vote of confidence and are far more likely to recommend your brand when a user asks for suggestions in your category.
Mentions in trusted publications, brand mentions on industry blogs, and citations inside related articles all feed into how AI models decide which brands to trust. The wider audience you build through earned media translates directly into AI visibility.
The snowballing effect we talked about earlier matters even more here. Each new mention adds to the body of evidence an AI model uses to evaluate your brand, and the brands accumulating mentions today are the ones AI engines will cite tomorrow. This kind of authority, built across multiple earned media touchpoints, is the foundation of long-term AI search visibility.
This makes earned media one of the highest-leverage marketing activities you can invest in right now.
A single placement in the right listicle can drive AI citations across every major platform for months. For brands serious about long-term growth, earned media content built around listicle inclusion is increasingly non-negotiable.
4 Earned Media Examples to Inspire You
In this section, we’re going to see some examples of earned media.
Each of them presents a different angle that’ll hopefully help you understand that there are different ways to approach the topic.
Let’s get into it.
Example #1: Blindlee
Blindlee is a dating app that allows you to “connect over 3-minute blurred video calls”.
The app operates in a category that’s somewhat cluttered and competition is pretty intense, with top players in the category almost dominating the online dating game.
However, back in 2019, Blindlee managed to get press coverage through various prominent publications such as TechCrunch…
… Forbes…
… Marie Claire…
… and many others.
From the outside, that would seem like the result of the work of a highly paid public relations agency.
However, the truth is that Blindlee made their own luck; they’ve managed to get coverage through effective PR outreach.
Getting publicity through popular publications such as the ones we just noted is a great example of using earned media to raise awareness and reach your target audience.
The best part?
The investment you need to make is significantly higher than paying for these articles or even for running PPC campaigns or any other form of paid media.
Moving on to the next example we have for you.
Example #2: 10to8
10to8 is an appointment scheduling software.
As you can imagine, appointment scheduling is another cluttered category with many players competing for their piece of share in the market.
In fact, according to G2, there are 346 tools currently available in the category.
That’s a lot of tools!
How can you stand out from the crowd and spread the word about your own online appointment scheduling service?
10to8 did it by participating in podcasts, represented by the company’s Head of Marketing, Anna Kocsis.
Of course, that’s only one of the tactics 10to8 used to raise awareness about the product and the company.
It’s a rather effective way though.
Getting featured on podcasts — without having to pay to be a guest — is a powerful and cost-effective way to spread the word about your company.
This is a great example of earned media that 10to8 achieved through highly-personalized outreach.
Moving on to the next one.
Example #3: Visme
In April 2021, our sister company Visme launched its desktop app on ProductHunt.
The product became the #1 product of the day and got raving reviews, as you can see below.
What’s exciting about this product launch is that all the feedback and wide acceptance that we managed to get, both on ProductHunt and on other social networks, was exclusively through earned media.
We didn’t dedicate any promotional budget to the campaign, nor did we have any other plans for attracting potential customers.
The reviews that you see above created a compounding effect that led many users to download and start using the desktop app after the launch.
What’s important to note is that you can’t expect to have this level of support and enthusiasm if your product isn’t exceptional.
Simply put, if Visme was a different product, the positive feedback that we got wouldn’t have been the same.
This means that earned media and the other types of media that we discussed earlier can only be effective if you have a substantial product or service to support it with.
Let’s move on to the last example we have for you.
Example #4: Whereby
In May 2021, Ryan Bonnici, the CMO at Whereby, shared the following post on social media:
In a world of sameness and repetitiveness, this amazing campaign makes a difference and helps Whereby to stand out from the crowd.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the post got 466 likes and 103 comments.
Needless to say that, with this kind of engagement, thousands of people must have seen this post and were exposed to the way Whereby does marketing as well as to Whereby as a brand – for those who didn’t already know about it.
Whereby may have paid for the initial campaign, such as designing, printing, and installing the ads on the streets, but the exposure that the brand got from this post was absolutely free.
This is a great example of creativity along with boldness creating great earned media coverage and attention.
Obviously, not every brand can do something like this, but as you can see from the results above, people appreciate outside of the box thinking and execution.
Well done, Whereby!
Now, let’s share with you a simple step-by-step process for getting media coverage without having to pay for it.
How to Get Earned Media Coverage?
Getting earned media isn’t complicated, but it does take consistent effort. Here’s what the manual process looks like.
Start by identifying the publications, podcasts, blogs, and writers who already cover your space. Build a list of editors at relevant publications, podcast hosts whose audiences overlap with yours, and the bloggers writing the listicles your potential customers read.
Public relations work begins with knowing who matters in your category, then researching what each writer has covered recently so your pitch references their actual work instead of landing as another generic email.
Once the list is built, write personalised pitches that lead with what’s in it for them. Whether you’re pitching a story angle, an expert quote, or a roundup inclusion, the value to their readers has to come first.
Then follow up two or three times spaced four to seven days apart, and track everything: who replied, where placements went live, and which mentions drove the most downstream traffic.
Many social media users will discover your brand through these mentions before ever visiting your social media profile, so consistency across channels matters.
That’s the playbook. It works. The problem is it takes hours every week, and most teams can’t sustain it long enough to see compounding results from public relations outreach.
This is also where social media marketing alone falls short, because earned media goes beyond what you can post on your own social media account.
This is where Respona comes in.
Instead of managing the outreach yourself, you share your target pages, keywords, and AI prompts you want to start showing up in, and the Respona team handles the rest.
Prospecting, pitching, follow-ups, negotiation, and securing live placements on listicles, roundups, and editorial pages that already rank in Google and already get cited inside AI engines.
The focus on listicle placements matters because those are the article types AI models lean on hardest when deciding which brands to recommend.
A placement on a well-ranked “best of” listicle does two things at once. It builds earned media credibility with real readers and it strengthens the citation signals that drive AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Every opportunity can reviewed and approved by the client before outreach goes out, so the quality of placements stays consistent. Built-in tracking shows how each placement translates into brand mentions and AI citations over time.
Pricing is pay-per-placement rather than a monthly retainer, so the model fits whether you’re starting small or running an aggressive earned media strategy across multiple campaigns.
For brands serious about both traditional editorial mentions and the newer AI visibility layer, done-for-you link building turns the slow grind of manual outreach into a repeatable system. It complements your existing content strategy and amplifies the credibility of every other promotional channel you’re running.
Link building cheat sheet
Now Over to You
The biggest takeaways from this post are the following.
Anyone can build a strong earned media presence without spending heavily on paid promotion.
A strong earned media strategy in 2026 covers both traditional outlets (editorial features, podcasts, reviews) and the new AI visibility layer (listicle placements that get cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews). Smart teams treat both as essential rather than optional.
Relying on just one channel for growth, whether content marketing, a single social media channel, or paid promotion, isn’t sustainable.
The brands winning right now diversify their promotional efforts across owned media, paid media, and earned media simultaneously. Shared media (the social media platforms where audiences amplify mentions on their own) reinforces all three.
Getting featured across different outlets takes work, but the compounding effect on trust, traffic, and AI citations makes it one of the highest-return marketing investments available. Press mentions, podcast features, and every social media post that amplifies your work feeds into the same flywheel.
If you’d rather skip the prospecting and outreach grind, Respona’s done-for-you link building handles the entire earned media outreach process on your behalf, including the listicle placements that drive both press credibility and AI search visibility.
Place an order for your target pages and keywords, and the Respona team takes care of the rest.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between earned media, owned media, and paid media?
Earned media is positive publicity you didn’t pay for or create yourself. Owned media is content you publish on channels you control, including your blog, email newsletter, and social media accounts. Paid media is anything you paid to promote, including sponsored content and influencer marketing partnerships. The strongest digital marketing strategy uses all three.
How do I measure the value of earned media?
Earned media value is typically calculated by estimating what the equivalent paid spend would cost to reach the same audience. Some teams also track media mentions, share of voice across the outlets covering your category, referral traffic from each placement, and downstream conversions. In 2026, smart teams also track AI citations, since a single mention inside a listicle can generate ongoing visibility in AI search for months.
Is earned media better than paid media?
They serve different purposes. Earned media builds long-term trust and tends to compound over time, but it’s harder to predict and slower to generate. Paid media is faster and more controllable, but it stops working the moment the budget ends. Most companies running a serious earned media strategy combine both, layered with owned media for full reach.
How long does it take to see results from an earned media strategy?
For traditional editorial mentions, expect 30 to 90 days from first outreach to a published piece. For AI visibility, the compounding effect kicks in a few weeks after listicle placements go live, as AI models incorporate the new citations into their training and retrieval pipelines. Sustained earned media efforts deliver the best results over six to twelve months.
What kinds of earned media content drive the most AI visibility?
Listicle placements (“best X tools,” “top Y companies,” “leading Z services”) are currently the strongest driver of AI citations. AI models trained for recommendation queries pull heavily from these articles when generating answers. Editorial features in trusted publications also feed strongly into how AI engines build their list of trusted sources.
How do you build relationships with editors and reporters?
Most pr professionals start by following the writers they want to reach across social media platforms, sharing their work, and engaging genuinely before ever pitching. When the first pitch eventually goes out, it’s personalised, brief, and offers something useful to the writer’s audience. Long-term relationships beat one-off pitches every time.
Can small businesses build a strong earned media presence?
Yes. Small businesses often have an advantage because their stories are more specific, their founders are more accessible, and their wins are easier to frame as narrative-driven mentions. The same outreach principles apply. Start with niche publications, build relationships before pitching, and focus on getting included in roundups and listicles relevant to your category. The social proof of one strong mention often opens the door to several more.
