The New Paid Media
The landscape of paid media has shifted. Traditional paid media — paid search and display ads — has merged with new paid media — influencer marketing. Both are requirements in a fully-leveraged marketing strategy targeting developers.
Freeman & Forrest are the market leaders of new paid media in tech, activating influencers and content creators to create custom content for customers. We lift the voice of our customers with strategically-selected influencer sponsorships to expand brand visibility to their motivated audiences.
Allocating Resources
Owned Media
A company’s website, blog and developer documentation provides the greatest control for any brand, but with moderate-to-low ROI. The content is produced (typically) by company employees for a company-owned digital property, meaning the messaging is exact and the sales funnel from blog to buy is entirely visible.
However, owned media requires potential users to come to you, meaning they already 1/ are aware you exist and 2/ trust your brand. Owned media typically delivers a moderate ROI. By the time a user relies on owned media they’re either already a customer or bought into brand offerings and are looking to buy.
Earned Media
The gold standard for any brand awareness campaign, earned media comes for free from satisfied (and occasionally extremely grumpy) users. Earned media denies brands any control over messaging and the entire sales funnel is obscured from view. There is simply no way to know how many inbound customers have been driven from a great review or third-party blog post. Still, the value of earned media cannot be understated. Happy customers become organic advocates of brands and highlight the company whenever they can.
Paid Media
Brands can achieve high-to-moderate control and extremely high ROI with paid media. Paid media is utilized to build brand awareness, engage potential customers to learn more, and drive signups.
Traditional Paid Media
Paid search: Ads targeting customers when they search for similar products or services.
Display ads: Ads shown to customers on properties relevant to a target user such as on social media.
New Paid Media
Influencer sponsorships: Ads written by influencers to target their specific audience on their newsletter, LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast.
Custom content: Blogs, tutorials, and how-to videos created by influencers to highlight a specific problem for developers and show how to solve it with your product or service.
How much budget to allocate between traditional paid media and new paid media depends on three factors: 1/ target audience, 2/ competitive landscape, 3/ existing brand awareness.
If your target audience is overwhelmed by options and/or naturally suspicious of traditional marketing (e.g. developers), new paid media offers a chance for potential customers to hear about your product from industry leaders and peers they already trust.
Control vs. ROI in Marketing Approaches
Why Influencers?
Technical practitioners and decision-makers don’t pay attention to traditional PR. And they’re getting harder to reach via the increasingly fragmented social media landscape. Technical leaders listen to trusted friends and peers. And that’s where influencers can help — IF you use them effectively.
Through influencer marketing, we’re able to sponsor content creators and coordinate the release of a steady stream of high-quality, product-focused content in a short burst. This raises brand awareness and engages developers — converting users into customers. In addition to creating calls to action (CTAs) focused on getting started guides, GitHub documentation and product pages, we find the most successful campaigns include some CTAs leading to developer-focused content that highlights the problem a potential customer is facing and shows how to solve it with your product or service. This creates a funnel from the influencer highlighting deeper technical content written by an expert and eventually a CTA (call to action) that leads directly to getting started. This approach builds trust at every level. We know that 63% of consumers are likely to buy products from an influencer they trust (Traackr, 2024). A broader network of influencers can lend their social trust to your brand.
Measuring Influencer Marketing
It’s important to have both input metrics and outcome metrics with any influencer marketing campaign. This campaign will utilize reach, measured in impressions, as the input metric and will continually measure the output KPIs of total engagements, engagement rates, and conversions through influencer data and trackable links.
We allocate reach based on an influencer’s relevance and engagement. There will be zero empty-calorie impressions. Performance data is reported monthly and utilized to re-evaluate allocation of sponsorships across various influencers and platforms on a continual basis — ensuring successful outcomes for our clients, every time.
Reach (impressions) is the lever we will utilize to ensure we’re getting your content in front of a large number of high-quality technical audiences through top-tier influencers.
Input Metric
| Reach
Measured through impressions
Output KPIs
| Conversions
Clicks through to the CTA (call to action)
| Total Engagement
Likes, comments, shares, etc.
| Engagement Rate
Number of engagements divided by reach
Converting Users
While we all appreciate the need for brand awareness, the category is too squishy for most companies who need to ensure immediate ROI. This is why we emphasize two phases of your sales funnel: 1/ awareness and 2/ consideration. We don’t believe in zero-calorie impressions, meaning we’re never going to put your ads and content on platforms that appear to have great reach but never convert. This includes most news-aggregator newsletters and social platforms like X/Twitter. The numbers look impressive but we don’t believe the value is worth the cost.
We target highly-niche influencers and platforms that not only drive awareness of your brand’s offerings but also engagement.
Industry Benchmarks
Our content creators and influencers have some of the highest engagement rates in the tech industry and beyond.
| All Industries | Tech Industry | F&F Influencers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Engagement Rates | 0.92% | 1.03% | 4.45% |
| Email Open Rates | 31.58% | 24.60% | 50.50% |
We believe in delivering value through direct ROI for every brand. Our customers receive a detailed report every month that includes the impact of influencer content and sponsorships, reach through impressions, engagement and conversion data — providing you the ultimate balance of control, visibility, and ROI through new paid media.
