6 Earned & Owned Media Moves Worth Stealing

Many B2B brands are sitting on a small fortune in original research, guides, and white papers. Unfortunately, much of that fortune is locked inside PDFs, where it’s harder to discover and reuse. One CMO suggested taking existing PDFs and turning them into “quick bites, and then posting and tagging them,” adding that the approach could create “great lift quickly.”

The opportunity is bigger than simply chopping a 30-page report into 30 LinkedIn posts. Refresh the research. Turn individual findings into useful articles. Add summaries and FAQs. Answer the questions your buyers are actually asking. As another Huddler noted, people are increasingly using LLMs as “glorified search engines.” Your best thinking can’t help your buyers, or the bots helping your buyers, if nobody can find it.

Reports of the press release’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Its job description, however, may need updating. One CMO admitted, “We’re finding a lot of the press releases are not being picked up.” Another offered a different way to look at them: “We need to put this somewhere on our website, and this is the best place to put it so that people can find this announcement.”

That changes the math. A release that doesn’t generate coverage can still become fresh, indexable owned content. Make it work harder with a succinct summary, clear headers, useful Q&A, and structured information that humans and machines can digest. This doesn’t mean releasing every time someone in sales sneezes. As another CMO argued, the goal is still “quality versus quantity.” It just means the press release can earn its keep even when it doesn’t earn press.

Timing still matters, especially when your market gathers in one place. One Huddler launched a new platform at her industry’s largest event and generated “about 670 pickups, from a press perspective.” The product was ready, customers were using it, and journalists had descended on the event looking for stories. Sometimes the best media strategy is simply having something interesting to say exactly where people are ready to hear it.

But 670 pickups weren’t the finish line. The launch became part of a broader integrated program spanning earned, owned, and paid. As this CMO explained, “We are trying to hit from all angles,” including customers, journalists, consultants, and internal evangelists. The lesson: don’t spend six months building toward a launch only to stop marketing the day after. Make the splash, then ride the ripples.

Speaking of customers, every B2B marketer knows the drill. You land a marquee account, celebrate appropriately, and then ask, “Can we use your logo?” Cue the sound of crickets or lawyers. The Huddles surfaced several ways to make customer advocacy less of an afterthought, including building incentives into agreements and creating recognition programs that customers actually want to join.

The larger idea is to start thinking about advocacy before you need the case study. Customer quotes, reviews, awards, references, and stories add credibility to owned media and ammunition to earned media. One Huddler trying to improve market visibility described the goal as getting “as many third-party experts, customers, journalists [and] consultants talking about us as possible.” Your customers may be your most credible marketers. Help them help you.

Measuring earned media has never been easy. One CMO tracks share of voice against major competitors and has seen “steady growth year over year.” Her team is now applying the same concept to LLM visibility, monitoring agreed-upon prompts to understand how often the brand appears relative to competitors. That’s one useful signal, but hardly the only one.

The same CMO also looks at anecdotal evidence in Salesforce: “So-and-so saw an article here, or an article there.” Other Huddler conversations surfaced backlinks, referral traffic, and sales feedback as useful evidence. None alone provides the magical PR-to-revenue attribution formula CMOs have been promised for what feels like forever. Together, however, they can reveal whether your market presence is expanding. Measure the echoes, not just the original shout.

It’s tempting to think about AEO or GEO as entirely new disciplines requiring entirely new playbooks. One CMO offered a refreshingly simple approach: “Search and AEO are really one thing. So, be really good at the fundamentals.” Another landed on an equally useful mandate: “Design for humans, design for bots.”

That means useful content. Clear answers. Consistent messages across earned, owned, and paid. Credible third-party voices. Accessible web pages. And, critically, some creativity. As one Huddler put it, “With all the automation of AI, to be able to find stuff that’s actually going to resonate and get a response with a prospect and customer takes the human touch.” The tools will change. The need to be interesting, useful, and credible won’t.

 [Pro tip: Our friends at Pepper have renamed this as “Search Everywhere Optimization” (SEO) and are offering a free & highly strategic audit – let us know if you’d like to connect with them.]

These six ideas came from just three CMO Huddles, where B2B marketing leaders compare notes on what they’re trying, what’s working, and what still has them scratching their heads. The conversation is deliberately practical because, as one Huddler put it, “There’s all kinds of tools, there’s all kinds of tricks, but focus in on the authority content and the channels that really can help you build that authority.”