What Is Earned Media Value (EMV)?

To understand EMV, it is important to define Earned Media. Earned Media is any media created by your community that talks about your brand that your brand does not own and did not produce. It comes in the form of the following:

• User-generated content
• Influencer marketing
• Brand partnerships

According to Forbes, brands should consider Earned Media to be “the return of good-old ‘word-of-mouth marketing,’ albeit with a modern twist”. As such, Earned Media Value (EMV) is a metric used to quantify the value of branded content created by your community. In modern marketing, this often means measuring influencer effectiveness — though you’ve potentially paid for the media through sponsorships, it isn’t created by you and is perceived differently by your audience than other owned and paid marketing mediums.

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Earned media value has become increasingly popular in recent years. This growth in traction can be attributed to the continued sophistication of brands’ creator and influencer marketing programs. As these programs continue to mature, influencers of different sizes and audiences are being included (as opposed to traditional tactics, which heavily favored larger influencers). With EMV social media becoming more creator-driven with the emergence of the short-form video format, this trend is expected to continue and earned media value will become more prevalent as an industry standard.

How Is Earned Media Value Used?

At Dash Hudson, earned media value is used to accurately estimate the value of influencer posts and relationships, using an algorithm that considers the reach of a post, post engagement and follower growth rate. It gives an apples-to-apples comparison between creators and individual pieces of content that brands can use as a baseline for measurement.

In many cases, micro-influencers (less than 10,000 followers) can be more effective than macro-influencers (100,000+ followers) because they have highly engaged, niche target audiences. However, if a brand is evaluating its influencer program as a whole, it becomes extremely difficult to accurately measure and compare the ROI of each influencer, especially since partnerships with smaller influencers are less expensive. EMV allows brands to compare influencers of different audiences to determine which content creators drive the most return in their marketing strategies.

How To Calculate Earned Media Value

There is no industry standard for how to calculate earned media value on social media analytics platforms. Some calculate EMV based on the channel that the post is on — in order to compare Instagram content solely with Instagram content — while others have a global metric that isn’t channel-specific. There are also discrepancies in the equation, with some focusing on impressions and others focusing on growth. These discrepancies may lead to confusion when brands compare metrics across social analytics tools.

Dash Hudson calculates the EMV by social channel, to make sure you’re optimizing your content for each channel. Dash Hudson’s earned media value is based on an algorithm that takes into account metrics like reach, as well as follower growth rate.

A general, but simplified earned media value formula is: EMV = impressions x cost per 1000 impressions x adjustable variable. The adjustable variable can be anything you are looking to track like engagement or impressions.

What Is Earned Media Worth?

Earned media has priceless intangible value. But marketers want facts and figures when it comes to measuring influencer marketing's return on investment. The first thing to understand is that not all earned media is created equal, so its value will also differ. 

With Dash Hudson, brands can estimate the dollar value of earned media through an algorithm built using a combination of estimated reach, growth rate and engagement to ensure that every piece of content earned by their brand is attributed a unique value.

That was the long version. Here's the short one: the worth of earned media value depends on the person who posts. Each of your relationships is worth something different if you put a price on them; therefore, each is calculated differently.

Using EMV as a Baseline for Your Influencer Marketing

While EMV is only one piece of an influencer management strategy, it provides a useful benchmark to understand social media content and influencer performance. As a result, it is recommended to serve as one of the baseline metrics brands use to evaluate their influencer marketing programs. An impactful and complete audit relies on access to accurate data, as well as dedicating the time and effort to make strategic decisions based on that data. EMV, especially when calculated with true data from a badged social media partner (such as Instagram Marketing Partners), can provide a great baseline to measure both overall performance and ROI.

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From there, teams should take a deep dive into other metrics such as followers gained, total engagement, as well as conversion data. For example, if a particular piece of content from a typically high-performing content creator has a low EMV, that’s an indicator that you should dig into that piece of content and compare it with similar content that has done well. It is recommended to review factors such as posting time, caption, medium (feed posts versus Stories) and style of content (static shot versus lo-fi, video versus tutorial-style).

The Power of EMV

Earned media value is a way to get an apples-to-apples comparison of one influencer to another, as well as one piece of content to another. While EMV is shown as a dollar amount, it’s merely an objective measure of performance. Using an unbiased engagement metric as an indicator of performance empowers teams to spend more time focused on marketing efforts and less time using vanity metrics to figure out if those efforts are worthwhile.

Start Your Earned Media Strategy

Measuring the ROI of your influencer relationships is vital, and that goes for whether your brand is a huge conglomerate or a tiny burgeoning startup.

The Dash Hudson EMV tool for calculating earned media value is finally bringing a tangible measurement to the worth of influencer partnerships. That's powerful.