Why Marketers Should Be Owners And Not Renters

When the conversation turns to owning versus renting, you might think I’m talking real estate. But, I won’t be offering any real estate advice here.

Instead, I’m talking about your online properties. Specifically, the principle of owning the access to your audience rather than renting it.

Rented land means properties like social media profiles. Take Facebook for example. You don’t own the platform and you don’t make the rules.

This means when they change their reach algorithm and it adversely impacts the reach of brands, there’s not much you can do except pony up more cash for advertising.

It’s increasingly a pay-to-play world in the social media space.

Owned land, on the other hand, means assets like your email list or website. It refers to the properties that you own the pipeline of communication between you and your audience.

Nobody gets to regulate how often you email your subscribers. And if you have 1,000, 10,000, or even 100,000 active users you send email to, every single one is going to get delivered (straight to the inbox people check 15 times per day, on average).

Public Relations, Cigarettes, And Your Email List

So, in this article I’m making the case for a serious investment and focus on owned properties. This is a path to stop being at the mercy of the big players and take control of your marketing destiny.

On March 9, 1995, a man named Edward Bernays passed away. However, his legacy still ripples through the world of marketing.

In fact, his obituary dubbed him the “father of public relations.” His theories and practices stemmed largely from the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud.

Bernays combined social psychology with political astuteness and a savvy injection of marketing spin to run campaigns that went beyond merely selling products or promoting causes.

Bernays understood that the nervous system of PR success wasn’t only ad spots and poignant copy. He pioneered the idea of creating the right societal conditions so that a product or idea would sell itself. His landmark book Propaganda begins this way:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

His way of social engineering became the foundation of how we run marketing and PR campaigns to this day.

One of Bernays’s most notable campaigns was for the American Tobacco Company, which owned the Lucky Strike cigarettes brand. His objective was simple: sell more cigarettes to women.

He knocked this out of the park — but not by promoting a pack of smokes outright. Instead, he intensified cultural pressure around women being thin.

And wouldn’t you know it, a great solution to a few extra pounds was to opt for a few quick drags of Lucky Strikes rather than eating a bit of chocolate.

This matters for us today because as Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, says, “big blue” is using the same tactics as Bernays.

As mentioned previously, organic reach on social media platforms is taking a nosedive every year. When viewed in light of Bernays’s work, this makes total sense. Here’s how it works.

You’re encouraged to build a large, loyal, and engaged audience on a platform like Facebook.

For a while, it’s amazing. You’re capturing a free marketing channel that boasts 1.37 billion daily active users — or 66 percent of its total user base. But what’s the economic undercurrent here?

As your audience grows, your reliance on the given social platform increases. Then what do the networks do? They slowly decrease organic reach, thus increasing the necessity of paying for the same level of exposure.

Put another way, the marketplace conditions are being engineered so that ad space on social networks sells itself.

To get the return your brand wants requires you to pony up more and more cash.

This is a brilliant business model. But it’s also illustrative of why social media should not be your only way of communicating with your audience.

Email allows you to build an audience that you own. That’s good. This concept has also been described as owned versus rented property.

You own things like your website and your email list. Nobody can throttle those down.

You rent things like your social media profiles. The networks are in charge of both the reach and the rules.

Do You Rent Or Own?

So, do you focused on rented or owned land?

Are you working to grow your email list and website traffic? Or more focused on your social media presence?

My digital marketing survival guide certainly advocates both.

(In fact, there is many sections dedicated to social media marketing.)

However, never focus on rented properties at the expense of your owned properties. Play by your own rules rather than someone else’s.

If you’re ready to start your own journey to jaw-dropping results and true marketing performance, you don’t need to wait for my company to get in touch.

You can pick up my digital marketing survival guide ahead of time.

I’ll personally send you a free copy of Chapter One of the book, plus invite you to a free marketing audit session. I’ll show you 15-50 pages of data filled with your top marketing strategies and our best client results.

You’ll find helpful, insightful conversations and exclusive systems (and bonuses) just for those who schedule a marketing audit with my team.

I hope you’ll take me up on the offer and scale your digital presence today.