The PESO marketing model is an integrated approach that stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media. You can use it to strategically plan and execute marketing efforts across different channels and touchpoints. This can help you reach and engage your target audience throughout their customer journey.
In this resource, we’ll explore each of the four elements of the PESO model, as well as look at examples of each to offer inspiration to how they can be used in your marketing campaigns.
As we’ll see, there can be overlaps, and each has very clear advantages and disadvantages.
What we mean by touchpoint
A touchpoint is a specific interaction or point of contact that a customer has with your brand, product, or service.
It’s a moment of engagement where a customer interacts with your brand in some way. Touchpoints can be both online and offline, and they play a crucial role in shaping the customer’s perception and experience with your brand.
Examples of touchpoints include visiting a website, receiving an email, calling customer support, seeing an ad, or interacting with your brand’s social media post.
If you’re unsure of the touchpoints your customers have with your brand, then undertaking human centred customer research will give you those answers. Understanding the touchpoints a potential customer has with your brand is crucial when exploring customer journey mapping.
So, let’s jump in and look at all the different touchpoints offered by the PESO model.
If you want to skip ahead, these are the areas we’ll be exploring
Paid media
Paid media refers to any advertising your organisation pays for. This includes traditional formats like television, radio, and print, as well as online advertising such as display ads, social media marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), and pay-per-click (PPC). Paying for influencers or bloggers to promote your product also falls into this category.
Common paid media touchpoints include search engine advertising (Google Ads, Bing Ads), social media advertising across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, display and video advertising, native and sponsored content, influencer collaborations, affiliate marketing, retargeting campaigns, and paid email and podcast placements.
Advantages of paid media
Speed to market
One of the biggest advantages of paid media is its ability to reach a large audience quickly. Once your campaign is set up, you can launch and be exposed to millions of potential customers in seconds.
Targeting
Paid media can also be very targeted, allowing you to deliver your message to the right audience at the right time.
With the right budget, you can use paid media to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviours, which can increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Scalability
The scalability of paid media is also a huge advantage. What this means, is that when you have an advertising campaign that’s working well, you can scale it up to perform even better.
Let’s say you’re running an advertising campaign through Facebook and spending $100 per week. For every $100 you’re spending, you’re getting back $10,000 in sales. That’s a pretty good result. So, theoretically, if you increase your ad spend to $200, you should then get back $20,000. Not bad.
Reliability
Paid media is also quite reliable. If you have an ad campaign that worked well last Christmas, it’s probably going to work well this Christmas as well.
Disadvantages of paid media
Cost
One of the main problems with paid media is that it can be expensive. For small organisations with limited budgets, paid media may not be a viable option.
Intrusive and annoying
Paid media can also be intrusive, and ads that interrupt potential customers’ browsing experience may turn consumers off.
Trust
Trust is also a factor, in that many people will not click on ads, simply because they are ads. I count myself in this category.
Temporary
Advertising is also ephemeral, which means it’s only around for as long as the ad is running. If you create a Facebook ad campaign that runs for 7 days, then on the 8th day, there will be no sign of that ad campaign anywhere.
As we’ll see soon, many other media forms can live on long after the initial campaign or launch.
Earned media
Earned media refers to any type of media exposure that your business earns through public relations efforts. This can include media coverage in newspapers, magazines, and online publications, as well as social media mentions and reviews.
Earned media can also be unsponsored influencer recommendations. As an example, Scott Pape (The Barefoot Investor) will often recommend certain banking and superannuation brands without receiving payment from them.
Earned media is awesome to have and really hard to get.
It is also related heavily to Off-Page SEO.
Common earned media touchpoints include news articles and features, user reviews and testimonials, organic social mentions, influencer endorsements, viral content, guest appearances on podcasts or webinars, award recognition, and reposts or reshares of your content.
Advantages of earned media
Trust and authority
One of the main strengths of earned media is that it is often viewed as more trustworthy than paid media.
Consumers can tend to trust the opinions of journalists and other third-party sources than they are to trust advertising.
A well placed review or editorial piece can be significantly more powerful than any ad campaign.
Cost
Earned media can also be very cost-effective, as businesses do not need to pay for media coverage.
Long term views
Reviews, testimonials, and editorial content don’t disappear like ads do.
Referencing earned media can help with SEO, as well as social media strategy. As an example, Meeum were recently featured on the Creative Australia. That article links back to the Meeum site, which helps our off-page SEO. We also remind our social media audience about the piece, which helps our social media strategy, as well as reinforcing our brand as leaders in the field.
We also receive positive reviews and testimonials on Facebook and Google.
Not only do we then republish those on our testimonials page, we also repurpose that content to show on our social media.
One good testimonial can be used countless times by your business to show your value to new potential customers.
Disadvantages of earned media
Unpredictable
One of the main weaknesses of earned media is that it can be unpredictable. Businesses cannot control the message that is being communicated through earned media, and negative coverage can be damaging to your reputation.
Scalability
Earned media can be hard to scale. Just because a few people have left you some good reviews, does not mean more people will.
Expensive
While the actual media coverage is free, it can be expensive to hire PR firms to spruik for you to get that free coverage. It’s not easy to be featured in big publications, and quite often, it takes working with a good PR agency to help the process along.
Measurement
Earned media can also be difficult to measure, as it is often based on qualitative factors such as sentiment and tone.
Shared media
Shared media refers to any type of media that is shared between individuals on social media. This can include social media posts, videos, memes, and other types of content.
Common shared media touchpoints include shares and reposts across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, user-generated content and UGC campaigns, collaborative content and customer challenges, social sharing on forums and online communities, and embeddable content on third-party sites.
Advantages of shared media
Potential for virality
One of the main strengths of shared media is that it has the potential to go viral. When content is shared on social media, it can quickly reach a large audience and generate a lot of engagement.
Cost effective
Shared media can also be very cost-effective, as you do not need to pay for the distribution of your content.
High trust
People tend to trust their friends more than they trust the media. If a good mate tells me about a good new bar down the road, then I’m going to trust them more than an ad I see on Facebook.
Challenges of shared media
Lack of control
One of the main weaknesses of shared media is that it can be difficult to control. It can be difficult to predict what will be shared in advance and how it will resonate with your audience.
Editability
When content is shared on social media, it can be altered or taken out of context, which can damage your reputation.
Not scalable
Producing more content doesn’t mean people will share it, even if they’ve shared some of your previous work.
Hard to measure
Shared media can also be difficult to measure, as it is often based on qualitative factors such as engagement and reach.
Owned media
Owned media is everything you fully control: your website, blog, email newsletters, apps, whitepapers, and any platform where you hold the data and the audience relationship directly.
It’s worth pausing here to draw a distinction that often gets blurred. Social media profiles sit in complicated territory. You own your content and your profile, but the platform owns the relationship with your audience and controls how many of them actually see what you post. An algorithm change, a policy update, or an account suspension can cut you off from people you’ve spent years building trust with. We explored this in depth at SXSW Sydney, and it’s one of the most underappreciated risks in digital marketing. For this reason, most practitioners treat social profiles as shared or rented space rather than truly owned, even though you create the content.
The same applies to YouTube and other video platforms. Useful, widely used, but rented.
True owned media touchpoints are your website and blog, your email list, mobile apps you’ve built, downloadable resources like eBooks and whitepapers, and webinars or communities you host on your own platform. If the platform disappeared tomorrow, your email subscribers would still be yours. That’s the test.
The strategic implication is straightforward. Social platforms are valuable for discovery and amplification, but they should funnel people toward your owned channels, not replace them. An audience that lives entirely on rented platforms is fragile. An email list and a well-ranked website are durable assets.
Advantages of owned media
Full control
One of the main strengths of owned media is that you have full control over the content and messaging. This allows you to tailor your message to your audience and ensure that it is consistent with your brand.
Evergreen content
Great content on your website can bring traffic for years after it has been published. So long as it’s relevant, it doesn’t matter how old it is.
This is great for your On-Page SEO.
Cost
Owned media can also be very cost-effective, as you do not need to pay for distribution or advertising.
Challenges of owned media
Difficulty growing an audience
One of the main weaknesses of owned media is that it can be difficult to reach a large audience. Businesses may struggle to attract visitors to their website or social media accounts, and they may not have a large email list to distribute their newsletters to.
Speed to market
Owned media can be very slow to build an audience for.
Potential bias
Owned media can also be seen as biased, as it is created by you. And, of course, you are going to say your business is pretty good.
Using multiple elements from PESO to consider a customer’s journey
Once you’ve analysed the varying touchpoints that potential customers have with your brand, you start to map out a potential customer journey for them.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example:
Joe & Pat start their day by scrolling through Instagram, where they stumble upon an enticing ad for a new restaurant, “Savor Elegance” (Paid). The ad’s vibrant imagery and mouthwatering dishes catches their attention, prompting them to click for more details.
After perusing the restaurant’s website (Owned), Joe & Pat are impressed by the diverse menu and elegant ambiance. To validate their choice, they search for online reviews (Earned) and find numerous positive ratings and comments from food bloggers and critics.
They love their meal so much that Joe and Pat both share posts on Instagram (Shared) expressing their positive experience and tagging the restaurant. Their friends reply with enthusiasm, some of them sharing their own positive experiences at the restaurant.
Joe and Pat’s journey touched all four elements of the PESO model in sequence. A paid ad created the initial discovery. The restaurant’s owned website built their interest and desire. Earned reviews from food bloggers and critics gave them the confidence to book. And shared posts from two happy customers brought new audiences into the top of that same funnel. One meal, four media types, all working together.
The PESO marketing model is a powerful tool that you can use to create effective marketing campaigns. By leveraging the strengths of paid, earned, shared, and owned media, you can reach your target audience and achieve your marketing goals.
However, it is important to remember that each element of the model has its own strengths and weaknesses, and you need to carefully consider which elements will work best for your specific goals and budget.
If you have a great Christmas gift in your catalogue in November, then paid advertising is going to be far more effective for you in the short term than a slow building owned SEO campaign.
On the flipside, if you’re building your business, then taking the time to create good quality content at the beginning is going to help your SEO strategy down the track.
When designing a marketing strategy, you should consider the following:
- Who is the target audience?
- What problem are you solving for them?
- What is the main goal of the campaign?
- What is the budget for the campaign?
- Which elements of the PESO model will be most effective for reaching the target audience and achieving the goals?
By answering these questions and carefully considering the strengths and weaknesses of each element of the PESO model, you can create effective and successful marketing campaigns.
Now a digital veteran, Sam Hemphill initially trained as a drummer and high school teacher and spent 10 years as a touring musician and tour manager.
During that time, he ...