Integrate All Media Channels for Maximum Impact Using PESO
Break down silos for a holistic, streamlined, and optimized approach
Public relations and advertising used to live in two different realms. With online marketing becoming an ever more complex weave of tactics, strategies, platforms, and channels, this siloed approach no longer works. To break through the noise, to be where your customers are, marketers need a holistic model that brings together all marketing efforts across all channels.
| Media Channel | Definition | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Paid | Paying money to distribute content online and in-person | Sponsored content, social media ads, fan acquisition, paid publishing, and experiential and events marketing |
| Earned | Achieve critical third-party validation with media appearances | Articles and company mentions, thought leadership contributions, interviews, link building, etc. |
| Shared | Social networking, community, and partnership building | Forums, user-generated content, content curation promoted in social media, email marketing |
| Owned | Producing and distributing content via website and blog to better control messaging | Whitepapers, videos, webinars, podcasts, customer stories, etc. |
Leverage PESO Better by Understanding Each Channel’s Pros and Cons
You may be more comfortable leveraging media you’re more familiar with, but those who integrate all available channels will see better results.
The PESO approach builds on each channel’s intrinsic strengths; it also balances each’s innate weaknesses. The first step to using PESO to maximize your marketing efforts is to pinpoint each channel’s pluses and minuses.
Paid Media presents opportunities to more easily target high-intent customers; better control your message and immediately place it in front of your audience; and clearly define and track metrics. You’ll also be better able to manage exposure by using a variety of ad tools, as well as expand your reach by simply investing more money. Of course, paid media IS expensive, with diminishing response rates and reduced returns once you stop investment. You’ll have to cut through a cluttered environment and face low credibility as very few people believe in paid placements. You’ll need to constantly flex to maintain reach and engagement.
Earned Media gets you the much-desired endorsements of industry experts, enabling you to boost brand awareness, expand reach, and reinforce customer trust, credibility, and authority. Moreover, it’s a cost-effective channel that lets you leverage established, highly targeted audiences, as well as gain long-term SEO benefits from past media placements. Downsides do exist, of course. You can’t always control the message or guarantee a response from the media. This medium is also time- and effort-intensive, requires long-term investment, and presents difficulty in measuring response. As always, that ever-present chance of negative publicity is possible – but that’s possible even if you do nothing.
Shared Media expands your organic audience, increases customer trust — peer sentiment wins over paid ads when it comes to credibility, and personalizes your organization. Shared promotes business-customer dialogue and builds long-term brand identity via consistent exposure – and all this with a reduced investment. On the other hand, you’ll have to overcome a number of obstacles, including unpredictability as it’s hard to know what audiences will like and share; lack of control; potential that negative publicity may also be shared; and your exposure’s dependence on platform algorithms. Furthermore, more content doesn’t always mean more shares.
Owned Media is the medium that guarantees you complete control at reduced costs. It gives the ultimate in convenience – you’re publishing directly on your site, reaching the niche audiences already interested. Enjoy lower risk with continuous operations not dependent on algorithms or policies; longevity and continuous expansion with relevant and evergreen content; and ongoing audience-building when aligned with Paid, Shared, and Earned. Your owned audience will be narrow and takes time to build; you must make big content investments, focus on the long term, and overcome people’s lack of trust in company communications – unless that content is objective and useful.
Get Our Guide to Determining Your Best PESO Strategy
Use PESO to Deliver Great Content Results
Content is just a bunch of words if it does not support your business goals. Here’s how PESO can drive better content marketing results:
Goal: Establish your brand
PESO: Deploy an orchestrated outreach strategy across all channels to extend reach, increase overall effectiveness, and boost brand loyalty and revenue.
Goal: Broaden your market
Integrate all four media channels to leverage media that works best for your audience and goals – i.e., paid to bolster content and exposure; earned to establish credibility; shared to find new audiences and engage current ones; and owned to enjoy total control of your content and strengthen thought leadership.
Goal: Visualize your total communications picture
Integrate all channels – even as each plays a different role in your content efforts – so you can see the big picture and conduct an effective assessment of your actions.
Goal: Achieve maximum content value
Create content that addresses your audience’s needs at different stages in their buyer’s journey and blanket all four channels with your brand message to push more potential clients to become qualified leads.
Goal: Effectively measure your content results
Assess content performance metrics across all channels to decide which content performed best in different media so you can customize future content.
Goal: Project an optimum brand image
Provide the highest-quality and strategically driven content across all media channels to establish authority, elevate search results, and optimally leverage your brand.
Get Our Guide to Measuring PESO ROI
Use PESO to Maximize Thought Leadership
An effectively implemented PESO program is an optimum tool to help project expertise and thought leadership. With PESO, building authority for your organization is inevitable. For thought leadership content to drive results, it needs to deliver in-depth industry insights translated into compelling stories that address customer needs without directly promoting the product.
The content must also offer approachability, shareability, and discoverability. Here’s a step-by-step strategy to relationship-building and sales-generating thought leadership content within the PESO model:
- Select a subject matter expert in your company, such as the CEO, a client, or a tech leader, who can turn industry insights and experiences into authentic stories
- Ensure your content is educational, engaging, and provides solutions to your readers’ pain points without being promotional
- Have a singular concept and a unique perspective on your industry, and define exactly what you want your audience to do with the information you’re giving them
- Determine in what medium you’ll want to publish your thought leadership content.
- Decide which approaches you’ll want to use to project thought leadership – content creation, thoughtful commentaries on articles of interest, or social media presence
- Give your executives media and presentation training to help them better articulate your brand and product message, actively drive interviews, and cleanly respond to criticism
- Ensure that top executives are more actively engaging in social media, sharing their expertise, and bolstering relationships with customers and influencers
Reflecting Your Thought Leadership Across PESO Channels
- Paid media: Grow your audience by addressing industry challenges while keeping commercial content on a low burn.
- Earned media: Build long-term media relationships by clearly expressing corporate messages, responding to tough questions, and providing clean, ready-to-publish objective content.
- Shared media: Share curated news with subtle corporate messages more frequently than promotional content. An 80-20 objective-promotional content balance is ideal.
- Owned media: Keep the company’s expertise and products top of mind among customers by balancing promotional and objective content.
Optimize Social Media with PESO
Social media must be synchronized with all your marketing efforts.
Paid Media benefit: Get your solution seen by lots of highly targeted, potential buyers.
How: Pay to have your company’s content published on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
Earned Media benefit: Convince a socially active influencer to get behind your brand or product.
How: Deploy this channel to capture audiences who follow tech experts and want to adhere to their recommendations.
Shared Media benefit: – Grow your brand’s social media followers, boost customer engagement, and increase potential sales.
How: Produce and share content to gain likes, comments, and retweets.
Owned Media benefit: Boost your credibility every time your content is shared.
How: Create and share unique, expert-written content that you entirely own and control. Be sure to brand your content to signal that it came from your company.
Track Your PESO Model Success
Once you’ve established PESO as the core of your organization’s customer-communication efforts, you’ll need to define the key metrics that prove its value to management – its ROI.
- Track conversion rates
- Compare results versus costs
- Analyze channel and site traffic
- Determine which topics were most engaging
- Examine the growth of your SEO rankings
Paid – Check data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google AdWords for conversions. You’ll also get answers from completed landing page forms, sponsored content results, and your email marketing database. Be sure to calculate the costs as well – of visitor acquisition, of lead acquisition, and total spending vs. traffic growth.
Earned – Tally your influencers, based on both volume and quality of site visitors. Add in UTMs to the bio section or link to your company to more easily track site visitors. Add a registration question on your site asking leads where they first heard about your company. Lastly, use Google or brand monitoring tools to track brand, product, and keyword mentions, and extrapolate value using monthly site visitor data.
Shared – Assign unique codes or URLs to your social media efforts. Calculate the number of comments, retweets, likes, and shares. Track the number of followers of someone recommending your solution. Interact with customers to learn industry trends and quickly tackle negative perceptions head on. Use shared media tracking tools to monitor not just social media shares, but also followers who endorse your brand to others.
Owned – Monitor the following: Number of times your content has been downloaded, amount of time people watch your videos, number of shares to indicate how much credibility people put in your expertise, and which content potential buyers were most engaged in. Using your analytics platform, find out your overall traffic increase, increases resulting from particular content types, leads acquired by owned content, and how often visitors shared your content with their followers.
Deliver real business outcomes. Present a cohesive marketing message across all media channels. Reach and target customers. Increase marketing and sales qualified leads – all with PESO.