Against the backdrop of financial difficulty, building trust and maintaining market share is much harder for brands when inflation pushes prices up and consumers are forced to make careful decisions about how they spend their money.

We’ve seen above the line budgets on the wane and as a result, brands are  being increasingly creative in the way they use their marketing spend, considering other channels and disciplines to make their communications messages travel as far as possible.

A consumer-centred earned media approach can punch well above its weight to deliver measurable impact. Not only driving brand love and purchase intent when budgets are tight, it also flexes to make use of cultural moments and create conversations like no other discipline can.

Knowing your audience

To earn attention and trust with consumers, brands need to find insightful ways to connect and ‘mean more’ to people. Earned media is powered by original, owned content that has organic reach because of an innate understanding of the issues that people will talk about and share.

When it comes to what motivates people to purchase, top of the list are brands that speak to them as individuals. This means truly understanding the cultural context of the consumer: their daily realities, the issues they care about, the platforms they use and the tone of voice they want a brand to adopt.

Earned media exists in stark contrast to paid media campaigns, which require months of planning and are therefore, understandably, rigid in their execution. So, for brands looking to build brand love with families during the cost-of-living crisis, this means communications can be delivered with greater flexibility, relevance and nuance.

For brands concerned about holding market share during the cost-of-living crisis, earned media enables marketers to be extremely targeted from a product perspective. Brands can respond to events in real-time and craft a narrative that feels authentic to the end consumer by “speaking to me as an individual” or “understanding my emotional needs”.

And if harnessed correctly, it can play a significant role in driving brand love and creating conversations through the stories that are told.

Stories can start anywhere

 And these stories can start anywhere and travel everywhere. Earned media is central to taking an integrated approach to finding, crafting, and sharing brand stories which are going to mean more to consumers – it’s no longer a ‘bold’ approach, but a necessary shift.

We know that the media are pulling stories from social listening. We know SEO and search behaviour is driving coverage opportunities. And social media is carrying articles far beyond the comment section.

By making the shift to a ‘story first’ mentality and creating a seamless integrated channel approach with earned media at its heart, brands have the opportunity to drive brand love and loyalty which will pay dividends long into the future.

We’ve set up our Cirkle team structure to champion the story first approach, working closely with our channel specialists to make those stories travel as far as possible.  And the brands we work with are mirroring this too – restructuring their internal teams to create a winning formula for the long term.

It transcends a single moment in time; instead, it adapts to culture authentically, as it evolves. It makes brands mean more to more people. A story-first approach can drive brand love for the long term, even in the most challenging times.