Digital PR has transformative applications in SEO and is almost a requirement to rank in the top positions of Google. However, not all digital PR techniques have an application in SEO.
Owned asset marketing is a strategy tailored to SEO.
What is Owned Asset Marketing (OAM)?
OAM is a digital PR for SEO strategy that optimizes the digital PR process to earn links and brand mentions efficiently from local, national and trade media: podcasts and press.
The essence of OAM is to market company-owned assets in a way that earns links and mentions at scale by focusing on three key elements: unique data, expert insights, and media trends.
These links and mentions are unique as they build overall site authority and EEAT, as press and podcasts are specialists at selecting experts and trusted sources to support their content.
In contrast to traditional or digital PR, OAM optimizes the digital PR process to increase a brand’s ability to obtain links and brand mentions.
Want to learn how to execute your own OAM strategy? Sign up for the Digital PR for SEO Mini MBA by PureLinq.
Campaign Design
OAM focused on marketing a few types of assets:
- Homepage
- Research blog articles
- Expert bio pages
OAM uses specific types of content and resources that significantly enhance a brand’s ability to earn links and brand mentions with a high placement rate.
OAM marketing assets include:
Fast Data
Offers exclusive data, attracting attention and demonstrating commitment to industry advancement.
Here’s an example from ZD Net, which published a story about new data about HR and generative AI. This article demonstrates how a lot of publishers are creating content around new data.
However, some data is more difficult to gather than others. The OAM strategy focuses on finding data that already exists or is easy to access.
This table contains data that the PureLinq research team gathered about the potential earnings of NCAA players as social media influencers on TikTok.
This data already existed, but the team gathered it from multiple sources to uncover meaningful insights. This saves journalist and press a lot of time.
Expert Insights
Internal experts provide commentary or frame topics for media by analyzing data or trends to provide insights. This can come in the form of commentary or recommendations.
- Commentary: Comment on trending events to provide authority to journalist’s stories.
- Resource Lists: Curates essential tools and information, demonstrating knowledge and helpfulness.
- Templates and Checklists: Provides practical, ready-to-use tools that solve problems and facilitate tasks, encouraging engagement.
- Trend Analysis: Identifies and analyzes industry trends, positioning the brand as forward-thinking and informative.
- Market Insights: Digests complex data into actionable insights, saving audiences time and informing decisions.
Commentaries can come from individuals or companies.
Using the ZD Net example, you can see that the company Valoir conducted the research and provided insights to ZD Net.
Expert insights can also come from direct commentary or quotes from internal experts.
This next example shows a company VP providing quotes framing the data.
Tip: It’s important to find your area of expertise to be seen as a trusted and authoritative source on a given subject area or domain.
Several digital PR techniques have a higher placement rate with these types of assets.
OAM Techniques
Each strategy targets specific media outlets and content creators, from national and local press to trade publications, podcasts, and digital platforms.
Here’s an updated overview of the pitching strategies integral to a comprehensive OAM approach:
Reactive PR: This strategy involves quickly responding to current events, breaking news, or trending topics with relevant assets that offer fresh insights or commentary. It requires staying vigilant and ready to engage with media outlets at the right moment.
Key Assets: Expert commentary, immediate analysis, hot takes on current events.
Data Campaigns: Leveraging publicly available or proprietary data to create compelling narratives or insights. This approach involves analyzing data to uncover interesting stories or trends that can be pitched as unique content to media outlets.
Key Assets: Infographics, data-driven reports, trend analyses.
Podcasts Pitching: Tailoring pitches to podcast hosts and producers, offering your experts as guests who can provide valuable insights, stories, or commentary relevant to the podcast’s audience. This strategy taps into the growing podcast market for in-depth discussions.
Key Assets: Experts with compelling narratives, exclusive research, and engaging storytellers.
Inbound PR: Optimizing your digital assets (data, research, case studies) for search engines to ensure journalists and content creators find your content when researching specific topics. This strategy involves identifying and targeting relevant keywords that these professionals are likely to search for.
Key Assets: SEO-optimized blog posts, case studies, and white papers.
The OAM Process
Step 1: Identify Expertise
Begin by pinpointing the areas where your organization or stakeholders have substantial expertise. This could range from industry-specific knowledge, innovative research, to unique perspectives on trending topics.
Journalists are typically talented at vetting experts to identify how their areas of expertise fit into the story topics or subject areas.
To identify your strongest area of expertise, identify these facets of the expert’s background:
- Professional background
- Publications & speaking
- Contributions & achievements
- Social proof
- Passion projects
- Problems solved
- Memberships & affiliations
This Google Sheets template from PureLinq’s Digital PR for SEO Mini MBA course provides a simple format to gather and organize the information above
Pro Tip: Journalists are looking for experts who have a perspective in relation to the story angle.
Step 2: Trending Topics
Analyze the current media landscape to identify trending topics and areas of interest for story topic ideation. This involves staying abreast of the news cycle, understanding audience interests, and foreseeing potential shifts in industry discussions.
- Select topics: Identify topics that the company or internal team are experts in.
- Analyze trends: Use tools like BuzzSumo or Google News search to analyze how the media is covering stories. Identify broader trends using Google Trends or Exploding Topics.
- Select topics: Identify specific topics that can benefit from fast research and expert insight assets.
This topic map template is helpful for organizing topic ideas related to trends.
Step 3: Create Fast Assets
Develop data-based assets based on the areas of expertise and media trends. Then, identify expert-led insights that provide significant value to the journalists’ audience.
To shorten the time it takes to gather data, try publicly available sources. These can include public databases or website crawls. Examples are cdc.gov or Kaggle.
An expert should review the data and provide insights or commentary that can provide value to the reader. Insights can include trends to watch out for, important data points, or a point of view to frame understanding.
The goal is to create valuable, shareable content that packages the story for the journalists and provides them with all the resources they need to write.
Step 4: Market Assets
Craft tailored pitches for different media outlets, highlighting the unique angle or insight your marketing assets bring to their current trends, narratives or content needs. This personalized approach increases the chances of your content being picked up and featured.
Assets can be marketed through outbound and inbound PR:
Outbound: Pitching assets directly to journalists, editors and podcast hosts through email and social outreach.
Outbound has two key assets:
- Press release: A release explaining the data, insights, and why it matters.
- Email: Create a quick email summarizing the asset and why it’s important.
Inbound: Optimizing assets to be found by content creators when they are researching topics for unique insights, data or trends.
As journalist research topics for their stories, they will use search engines or social media to find data.
Write a blog post or research report article and optimize it for keywords that journalists would search for. An example is “percentage of people in US that does X,” or “{topic} statistics 2024.”
OAM vs Link Building
OAM
High-authority links and brand mentions to showcase EEAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, and Experience)
Digital PR techniques, leveraging media relations and quality content for reputable sources
Enhances EEAT, contributing to long-term credibility and trust
Emphasizes quality and relevance of connections to elevate brand stature
Link Building
Blogs and any websites willing to host backlinks
Guest posting, directory submissions, broad website outreach
Boosts SEO through increased volume of backlinks
Focuses on quantitative aspect of SEO, aiming for more links
Sum it up
Organic Asset Marketing (OAM) emerges as a powerful digital PR strategy, indispensable for brands aiming to secure top rankings on Google.
By emphasizing the creation and marketing of diverse owned assets, OAM not only supports SEO efforts but also fosters brand authority and audience engagement.
Its strategic approach to leveraging media trends and crafting unique content positions brands as leaders in their industry, ready to meet the dynamic demands of the digital landscape.
