Sort any channel into owned, earned or paid, and say how much control and cost each one gives you.
Sort every channel you use to reach customers into one of three groups: owned, earned or paid. The group a channel sits in tells you how much say you have over it and what you spend to keep it running.
Take a nail technician in Jurong (an invented example). She put three years into her Instagram account and grew it to a few thousand followers. Most of her bookings came from people who came across her work in their feed. When the app changed what it showed people, her posts started reaching only a fraction of the followers they used to reach, and the quality of her nails had not changed at all. Her business rested on a channel another company controlled, and she learned this only when that company used its control.
Owned media covers any channel where you choose what appears and who gets it. Your website, email list, newsletter, the printed menu in your shop and the receipts you hand to customers all count. A WhatsApp broadcast list counts too, as long as the customers on it saved your number and agreed to hear from you.
Owned channels take mostly time to keep going. A website has to be kept up to date. An email list only works if you have something worth sending, and a broadcast list keeps people only while the messages are ones they are glad to receive, because the other kind makes them leave. The cash spent tends to be small, such as a domain, a hosting plan or an email tool. In return you get control, since no outside company can change the rules on you overnight. The drawback is reach. Owned channels mostly speak to people who already know you, so they do well in the later stages of the customer journey from Lesson 2.1, retention and advocacy, and poorly at finding strangers.
Earned media is attention you neither paid for nor directly control. Examples include a Google review, a write-up in a newspaper or food blog, a parent recommending you in a class group chat, and a stranger sharing your post because they found it funny or useful. People trust earned media most of the three groups, because the words come from someone other than you. A parent will put more weight on a review reading "my daughter's marks went up and she actually likes going" than on the very same claim on the tuition centre's own website.
Nobody can order earned media. You can raise the odds of getting it by doing good work, asking satisfied customers for a review when the moment is right, making your posts simple to share, and giving a journalist a story worth writing. The timing, the content and whether it comes at all stay out of your hands. It can also work against you, since a one-star review counts as earned media as well.
Paid media means any reach you pay for: search ads, social media ads, a sponsored post on another person's account, a fee to an influencer, flyers dropped into letterboxes, or a banner at a community event. It gets your message to people who would never have come across it otherwise. Of the three groups it reaches strangers fastest, and you decide both what the message says and when it runs.
The cost is money, and the reach ends when the spending ends, because the ads stop the moment you stop paying. Use paid media for people early in the journey and for trying out which message works. Lesson 5.3, "Email, ads and partnerships compared", goes into that testing.
Your social accounts seem like owned media. You created them, you pick every post, and each follower decided to follow you. The platform, though, chooses which followers see a given post, the order they see it in, and whether strangers are shown it at all. It can change any of this whenever it likes without consulting you, and it can restrict or shut down an account it thinks has broken its rules. This holds for Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and every other platform you post on.
Think of each account as rented space. You can furnish it and invite people in, while the landlord decides the terms. The nail technician's Instagram account felt like her own, yet the platform held control over who saw her posts.
Social accounts are still worth having. They can reach a lot of people without any media cost, and earned media often begins on them when people share what you post. The rule is to never let a social account be the only place customers can find you.
Make a habit of moving people from rented space into owned space where it fits. A follower who also joins your WhatsApp broadcast list or email list stays reachable after a platform rewrites its rules. A post saying "message us to join the monthly menu list" turns attention on a platform into a contact you hold yourself. If you had email addresses for four hundred past customers, you could reach every one of them tomorrow morning, whatever a platform changed in the night.
Most small businesses already use all three groups without giving the balance much thought. Putting a label on each channel shows you the mix. Mei Ling, whose home bakery in Punggol first came up in Lesson 1.2, would sort hers like this:
Owned: her WhatsApp catalogue, her broadcast list of past customers, and a simple order page. Earned: Google reviews, customers posting photos of her cakes at parties, and word of mouth among parents. Paid: the boosted posts she ran last year, and the stall fee for a weekend market.
Watch for three patterns. A business that relies entirely on paid media sees customers stop coming in the same week the budget runs out. Where one social account brings in most enquiries, one company's decisions can halve your month. A business with a strong owned list and nothing earned or paid keeps talking to the same people each month and meets few new ones.
To run the check on your own business, write down every channel you use to reach customers and mark each one owned, earned or paid, counting any social account as rented space. Compare your mix against those three patterns. Ask yourself what you would lose if a platform changed its rules tomorrow, and answer honestly even if the answer is most of your enquiries. Where it makes sense, start shifting followers onto your broadcast list or email list.
In the activity below you will list every channel you use and label each one. When you reach the question of what you would lose if a platform changed its rules tomorrow, give the honest answer, even if the answer is most of your enquiries.
List every channel you use now and mark each one owned, earned or paid. Then note which one you would lose if a platform changed its rules tomorrow.
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