The PESO model, which Dietrich developed, is a strategy that touts the integration of paid, earned, shared, and owned media to deliver integrated marketing programs, extend reach, and establish brands as leaders within their industry.
However, PESO isn’t a plug-and-play communication solution. How communicators rely on PESO to build credibility and brand awareness through influencer marketing differs from how they would deploy it to educate and nurture prospects, for example.
Paid and shared media get prospects’ attention, but print ads and social posts don’t generally convince them to pull out their wallets. Earned media that establishes credibility and owned media such as case studies that showcase value play a bigger role in converting prospects into paying customers.
Influencer marketing campaigns often begin with sharing an influencer’s content to get on his or her radar and eventually include providing exclusive access to owned media, such as proprietary statistics and industry analyses. Paid and earned media can be used in influencer marketing, but by and large, they are results of that relationship.
Tailoring and customizing PESO campaigns to audiences and goals is essential to success. Here are a few tips for integrating PESO into your influencer marketing campaigns.
Find the right recipe
With influencer marketing, you have to decide what types of owned content will appeal to particular influencers while keeping in mind your endgame.
When building an influencer marketing campaign, first consider what you hope to achieve and proceed accordingly. The next step is to identify the influencers best suited to help you achieve your goals.
How and who you engage for a product launch, for example, will differ from the engagement targets and tactics related to a cause marketing campaign. Also, contemplate what types of content will appeal to the influencer while considering how they will use it.
An influencer’s tweet will drive brand awareness, but what if you really want a full-fledged article about a particular issue that you could use as bottom-of-the-funnel collateral? If that’s the case, ensure they have all the owned media, images, statistics, charts, video, and access to experts they need.
To truly find the best mix for your brand and audience, you have to carefully measure and experiment with different proportions of each content type. Once a campaign is underway, track the collective and individual impact of paid, earned, shared, and owned media.
More than likely you will find that the success of certain pieces of content is tied to other paid, earned, shared and owned media.
You may use the same tactics to send different messages, or different tactics to send the same message. Maybe you use unique tactics and unique messages. The individual goals of particular campaigns and the audience you’re targeting will dictate where to focus investments.
Putting PESO to work
Colgate used unique tactics and messaging to drive awareness of a black charcoal toothbrush it launched for the Indian market.
With details scarce beyond the hashtag #WhatTheBlack and a promise of an iPad to the biggest sharers, Colgate sent select influencers a black egg with chocolate inside, a black newspaper with fictional front page stories and a URL to whattheblack.com on the inside pages, and a black coffee cup and tissue paper over three days.
Like toothbrushes, the items were traditionally white products used in the morning. They evoked curiosity among the influencers and a groundswell started as people took to social to guess the promotion’s mastermind.
At the same time, Colgate anonymously ran a blogging contest where people created a wish list of five black things they wanted.
Though a promotion for the same product, Colgate targeted the social and blogging influencers separately using earned, shared, and owned media. They likely also used paid social ads to extend the reach of the campaign.
With awareness established, Colgate has now shifted its focus to buyers. A visit to whattheblack.com shows the owned media you would expect for a website selling toothbrushes.
Calculating success
With Colgate, what we don’t see is the behind-the-scenes work that went into evaluating the success of the campaign. Use expectations and previous campaigns to provide benchmarks of the metrics important to your influencer marketing campaign, likely including the number of people talking about your brand and the sentiment of their conversations.
With content creation an industry standard and competition for influencer attention increasing, implementing an integrated paid, owned, earned, and shared content strategy makes sense. The key, though, is to treat each influencer campaign uniquely.
Mark Thabit is the CMO of Cision.
