Earned Media Value (EMV) is a critical metric for understanding the impact of your marketing efforts. It quantifies the monetary worth generated through 3rd party sources like influencer mentions, PR campaigns, social shares, and positive reviews.
Calculated by multiplying impressions from 3rd party sources by a set CPM (more on this later), it enables you as a marketer to come up with a quantitative way to measure the success of your PR or influencer campaign.
This guide breaks down the different ways to use EMV, explaining its importance, how it’s calculated, and its role in shaping successful marketing strategies.
Earned Media Value (EMV) is a metric that quantifies the monetary worth of organic, unpaid exposure your brand receives across various platforms. This includes influencer mentions, social media shares, customer reviews, press coverage, and word-of-mouth promotion.
EMV provides an estimate of what it would cost to achieve the same level of visibility through paid advertising.
By measuring EMV, marketers can assess the success of their campaigns, optimize strategies, and better understand the return on investment for their earned media efforts.
Below are some of the most important marketing forms which use EMV as a metric to measure success.
Measures the value of influencer posts, stories, and mentions driving organic reach and engagement.
Evaluates press coverage, interviews, and media mentions in relation to their monetary impact.
Captures the worth of customer recommendations and testimonials spreading organically.
Marketing activities which are conducted by the brand itself are not included for EMV calculations. These include:
Paid ads on Meta, TikTok or other platforms paid for by the brand
Organic reach through social media posts on the brands own account
In marketing there are typically three forms of media. Earned, owned and paid. Let’s take a look at all three to understand the role of earned media value among the other forms.
Owned media consists of platforms and assets directly controlled by your brand, such as your website, blog, email newsletters, and social media accounts. It serves as the foundation for your marketing strategy, allowing you to publish and manage content that aligns with your goals. Typical marketing channels for owned media include:
Paid media involves any form of advertising where you pay to promote your brand on different platforms. Typical channels for paid media are:
Earned media refers to organic exposure your brand receives. This type of media builds credibility as it represents authentic endorsements from users and third parties. Typical channels for this include:
Calculating Earned Media Value (EMV) involves assigning a monetary value to the organic exposure your brand receives. There are different ways to calculate earned media value but the most common one is based on impressions based on a set CPM.
Other media equivalent rates which can be used to determine EMV are:
EMV = ( Total impressions / 1,000 ) X CPM (Cost per mille)
As previously mentioned the most common way to calculate EMV is using CPM. The reason for this is because engagement and clicks can sometimes be more difficult to measure.
Let’s take a look at an example based on impressions first. For this example we will use a post made by the Tiktok celebrity Charli D’Amelio.
The video in this example mentioning Essence Cosmetics got 54.7M views. Lets calculate this EMV based on this example.
This is easy as the impressions on TikTok are public. This becomes more challenging if you have to determine EMV on Instagram as the number of views is not public for feed and story posts (more in this later). For this example the video received 54.7M views.
The best way to determine a CPM to calculate your EMV is to take the equivalent rate you would pay using paid ads and adding a premium / markup of around 50% -100 %.
The reason we recommend adding a markup is because not all impressions are equal. We argue that an impression received from an influencer recommending a product is worth a lot more compared to an impression received by an interruptive ad while someone is scrolling their feed. The attention on an influencer recommendation is higher resulting in a higher value.
For this example let’s assume that the CPM on TikTok is $10. Adding a 50% markup on this would lead to an CPM of: $15 which we can use to calculate our EMV.
Now that we have determined the impressions and the CPM we can simply plug these numbers into our formula to calculate EMV.
EMV = ( Impressions / 1,000 ) X CPM
Which in this example would be:
EMV = ( 54,700,000 / 1,000 ) X $15 = $820,500
The EMV for this post is $820,500.
If you want to calculate the EMV based on other metrics such as CPE (cost per engagement) or CPC (cost per clicks) you need to gather the respective data.
To calculate the EMV based on CPE simply multiply the number of engagements of a post by a set CPE.
To calculate the EMV based on CPC multiple the number of clicks the post received by a set CPC.
Below are some of the key benefits for brands using EMV.
EMV helps brands measure the monetary value of organic exposure, such as influencer mentions, social shares, and reviews. As the exact ROI and value provided by influencer marketing is sometimes difficult to measure, EMV provides more guidance for marketers having to measure success.
By comparing the value of earned media to paid campaigns, brands can assess the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and allocate budgets more efficiently.
Earned media is perceived as more authentic than paid ads. EMV showcases the value of customer trust and advocacy, which directly impacts brand reputation.
With EMV, brands can evaluate the performance of influencer collaborations by assigning a monetary value to mentions and posts, ensuring partnerships are result-driven.
EMV is especially useful for larger brands and enterprise companies where tracking often becomes extremely complicated. As it is difficult to determine which campaign and marketing activities resulted in increased sales when your top line revenue is hundreds of millions or even billions this becomes very challenging. In this setting EMV is a valuable metric for marketers to explain their marketing impact.
Below are some of the most important arguments why EMV is important to measure for brands.
What is important to note when creating reports on your influencer marketing campaign to analyze EMV alongside other metrics to get a complete picture on the impact of your influencer marketing campaign. As with most marketing metrics, looking at them in isolation can cause problems.
Below are some of the most important metrics to analyze along side EMV.
Access our detailed article on the most important influencer KPI’s to measure here.
With tools like Influencer Hero you can automate your influencer reporting as everything is synched within your influencer CRM. The reports include all these metrics which can be easily accessed, analyzed and shared. You can also export all your data as CSV in order to run further analysis using excel.
Below are some of the most important drawbacks and challenges when using EMV.
EMV lacks a universal calculation formula, leading to inconsistencies across brands and campaigns. Different marketers use varying metrics like CPM or engagement rates, making comparisons difficult.
EMV provides a proxy for value but doesn’t directly link to sales or revenue. Brands might see high EMV figures without seeing proportional business results, making it harder to justify the metric. Only looking at EMV could lead to difficulties if not analyzed alongside other metrics such as conversions.
For small businesses cash flow and conversions are often crucial to sustain growth. Higher level metrics like EMV which primarily based on top of funnel metrics such impressions, clicks or engagements are not always useful for small businesses which need to see direct impact on sales to continue to invest in a marketing channel.
Assigning a monetary value to organic mentions can sometimes overestimate their actual impact. For example, a social share from a disengaged audience may not translate into meaningful brand awareness or conversions.
EMV relies heavily on data from third-party platforms, like social media or influencer tools. Limited access to precise analytics or algorithm changes can affect the accuracy of calculations.
Unlike paid or owned media, earned media is unpredictable. You can’t control how much exposure you’ll receive, making it harder to plan campaigns around EMV.
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If you are considering partnering with an influencer it might be useful to forecast an expected EMV so you can make a case with finance to request the budget.
To forecast EMV take the average views an influencer is receiving on their video’s and multiply this with your set CPM.
Let’s take the example below for @charlidamelio
Based on her last 10 video’s the average views she receives is: 7,732,130 views.
With a target CPM of $15 the EMV you can expect on a sponsored post would be:
EMV = ( Expected impressions / 1,000 ) X CPM
EMV = ( 7,732,130 / 1,000 ) X $15 = $115,982
We then recommend taking a discount on this rate to account for risk as well as for slightly depressed reach due to sponsored content. This doesn’t always have to be the case as TikTok for example rewards viral content the reach of your sponsored content could be even higher than the average in case the video / content is made well as we saw with the previous example with the post for essence cosmetics. But on average organic non sponsored content typically has a slightly higher reach.
In this example you could for example multiple the expected EMV by 70% to discount for risk.
$115,982 X 70% = $81,187
As calculating this out manually can be time intensive you can also use our free EMV calculator to forecast EMV alongside other useful metrics such as engagement rate, follower growth and audience location.
If you want to conveniently access this tool while browsing the web you can also use our free influencer audit chrome extension here.
As previously mentioned Instagram can be challenging as the views for feed and story posts aren’t public. In this case the best way to create your report is to ask the influencers for a screenshot of their analytics after the campaign.
On TikTok and Youtube on the other hand the impressions are public making it easier to compute your EMV calculations. Keep in mind that especially for Youtube the number of views can often increase significantly over time due to the evergreen nature of the videos.
Because of this we recommend to include a premium for calculating EMV on Youtube over TikTok and Instagram where content is often short lived.
Earned Media Value (EMV) is a vital metric for understanding and optimizing your marketing efforts. By quantifying the impact of organic exposure from influencers, PR campaigns, and customer interactions, EMV provides actionable insights into campaign success. While it comes with challenges like lack of standardization and difficulty linking directly to ROI, EMV remains a powerful tool for brands aiming to measure their influence and credibility. Use this guide to implement EMV in your strategy and drive informed, impactful marketing decisions.
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