The Different Types of Media

TL;DR:

In our interview with Parthi Loganathan, founder of Letterdrop, his advice to people looking to start their own startup was that he wouldn’t recommend getting involved in a project unless the distribution plan was figured out upfront. In his opinion, distribution is increasingly becoming more important than product. Code is now becoming a commodity.

A few weeks prior I had interviewed Chris Blauvelt of Launchgood and I was a bit taken aback when he described his company as a tech startup. Launchgood is a crowdfunding platform, and since there are so many crowdfunding options now I didn’t put much thought into the underlying technology that made it possible. When the company was launched in 2014, the crowdfunding space was a lot smaller and the tech itself was valuable. Since then, there have been a number of crowdfunding platforms that have come out. What makes Launchgood valuable is not the technology itself, the technology has now become commoditized. What makes his company valuable is the network of people that are consistently checking the platform with the intent to support projects. It’s the community they’ve built.

Media is one of those forms of distribution. With media you can put your product/service in front of eyeballs that will then do business with you.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “every company is a media company.”

But not all forms of media are equal. There are four types of media: paid, earned, owned, and rented. Understanding these different media channels will allow you to not waste your resources on the wrong channel. Here’s an overview of the different channels.

Paid media is a channel where you have to pay for eyeballs. This is essentially all the different types of advertising. This channel is good for businesses that have big budgets and need to get in front of a lot of people.

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Think of this as attention you get because you’re actually good. When someone has a wonderful experience with your product or brand, they’ll share on their social media about it or write a review. This type of media is incredibly important in getting social proof and earning trust with new prospects.

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Channels where you have an audience of people tuning into you, but you have no actual control over how you can reach those people. At any given time the algorithms may change and even though people follow you, you may lose your reach.

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These are channels you own. You have access to your customer/audience and can communicate directly with them at any given time. This is basically your own distribution channel.

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The most valuable audience is the audience you own, but its also hardest to build that audience. In order to feed into your email list/text list/mailing list/etc. you have to leverage the other forms of media. The other forms of media should all lead to your own owned channels.

How you do this is by adding calls to action in your content on the other media channels to a lead magnet where they have to give you their email address or other information.