TL/DR Summary:
- Measuring the wrong metrics has an expensive effect on your resources and blinds strategic execution.
- Using the PESO Model© helps you understand the true impact of your marketing and communications efforts and allows you to tie them directly to desired business outcomes.
- Integrating media types and measurement can finally help crack the code for multi-touch attribution.
- Using the PESO Model to integrate your measurement multiplies your ROI, accelerating your path to conversion and maximizing the effect of all of your content.
You’ve probably suffered through countless marketing presentations filled with big, impressive-sounding numbers that never seem to translate to bottom-line results.
Media impressions in the millions, if not billions. Social media followers by the thousands. “Viral” content that generates buzz but, as far as anyone can tell, not business.
Hits in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, or the Journal of the American Medical Association seem like big wins on their face, even though no one seems to be able to share the tangible effect on the business due to the story.
Based on what your teams have shared with you, you may have given a few of these presentations yourself to a CEO or CFO. (So have I.)
If you’ve been skeptical, you’re right to be. These vanity metrics have been the marketing world’s equivalent of smoke and mirrors for decades. And vanity has historically not worked out for characters ranging from Narcissus to the Evil Queen in Snow White with her mirror, mirror on the wall, so it’s advisable to be on guard about vanity in the digital world too.
If you’ve relied on these numbers because they’re all your team had to offer, you’re not alone. But there’s a better way now.
The Cost of Marketing Without the Right Measurement
When your teams can’t demonstrate tangible effects on your desired business outcomes, it causes two expensive problems:
Misallocation of Resources: You’re rolling the dice with your marketing budget without clear attribution. Your teams chase metrics that look good in presentations but don’t drive qualified leads, accelerate sales cycles, improve customer acquisition costs, or nudge up your brand reputation.
Strategic Blindness: When you can’t see which activities influence revenue, you can’t make informed decisions about where to invest more resources or what to cut during budget pressures. You’re taking shots in the dark based on instinct, not data—and that’s a tenuous spot for any leader.
The solution isn’t to slash budgets. (Let me be clear about that part!) Instead, you should demand better measurement that ties directly to the business outcomes you care about: revenue growth, market share expansion, customer acquisition efficiency, and competitive positioning. The good news is that there is a framework that provides just that: the PESO Model©.
How You Finally Get Attribution Right
The PESO Model provides the structure your teams need to deliver the accountability you require. Instead of organizing around departments or tactics, it organizes around measurable business outcomes.
With it, you can implement holistic attribution mapping, including multi-touch attribution, that allows your organization to understand which content drives more qualified leads, uncovering pipeline value that would be invisible to siloed measurement. The model also enables marketers to map specific business goals to appropriate channels:
Paid Media becomes measurable through cost per qualified lead, conversion rates by campaign, and return on ad spend—metrics that directly correlate to revenue generation and customer acquisition efficiency.
Earned Media transforms from “we got mentioned in The New York Times” to demonstrable authority building, quality backlinks that improve search rankings, and referral traffic that converts to qualified leads.
Shared Media moves beyond follower counts to engagement quality, which drives website traffic, community advocacy, which reduces customer acquisition costs, and social proof, which shortens sales cycles.
Owned Media shifts from content creation for its own sake to conversion-focused assets that nurture leads through your sales funnel and establish your organization as the authoritative voice in your market.
The Advantage of Integrated Measurement
The real power emerges when these channels work together under unified measurement. This integration reveals cross-channel influence that single-channel metrics miss entirely—like how earned media coverage amplified through paid channels accelerates lead conversion, or how owned content shared socially generates higher-quality leads than either channel alone.
Traditional marketing measurement gives credit to the last touchpoint before conversion, creating a distorted view of what drives results. The PESO framework tracks the complete customer journey.
For example:
- A prospect discovers your company through earned media coverage, engages with your owned content over several weeks, and finally converts through a paid retargeting campaign. Single-channel attribution would only credit the paid ad, potentially leading to over-investment in paid media while undervaluing the earned and owned content that initiated and nurtured the relationship.
- Your owned content generates initial interest, gets amplified through social sharing, attracts earned media attention, and the resulting coverage drives qualified traffic that converts at three times your typical rate. Without integrated measurement, you’d miss this compound effect entirely.
The Multiplier Effect on ROI
When channels work in coordination rather than isolation, the results exceed the sum of their parts. Organizations typically see higher conversion rates from integrated campaigns than single-channel efforts, because prospects encounter consistent, reinforcing messages across multiple touchpoints and channels.
This integration also reveals hidden inefficiencies. You might discover that your sales team’s highest-quality leads consistently have 4-5 touchpoints across different channels before converting, while your marketing budget allocation assumes single-touch attribution.
This insight allows you to optimize spend across the customer journey rather than over-investing in “last-click” channels.
Eliminating Competition, Maximizing Leverage
Without integrated measurement, your marketing teams often compete against each other for budget and credit. Your PR team celebrates earned media mentions. Your paid media team focuses on click-through rates. Your content team measures page views.
But none of them can show how their efforts contribute to pipeline growth, which leaves you hanging when the CEO or CFO asks questions.
The PESO framework aligns these teams around shared business outcomes, transforming internal competition into collaborative amplification. When your PR team secures earned media coverage, your paid team can immediately amplify it to targeted audiences, while your content team creates supporting materials that extend the story’s lifespan and search visibility.
This coordinated approach typically reduces overall customer acquisition costs while improving lead quality—because prospects receive consistent, reinforcing messages rather than conflicting or redundant communications.
What PESO Model Measurement Means for Your Bottom Line
Organizations implementing integrated PESO measurement typically see:
- Improved marketing ROI: Clear attribution reveals which activities drive revenue, allowing better budget allocation
- Faster sales cycles: Coordinated messaging across channels accelerates prospect movement through your funnel
- Reduced customer acquisition costs: Integration eliminates redundant efforts and maximizes each marketing dollar’s impact
- Predictable revenue growth: Understanding which marketing inputs drive business outcomes enables more accurate forecasting
The Accountability You’ve Been Looking For
The PESO Model transforms your work from a cost center with intangible ROI into a predictable revenue driver with clear attribution. Your teams, and you as a leader, can finally answer the age-old question: “What exactly is this doing for our business?”
More importantly, it gives you the data to make informed decisions about marketing investments based on actual business impact rather than marketing department wishful thinking.
When budget pressures mount or growth targets increase, you’ll have the clarity to optimize spend based on proven results rather than gut feelings or industry best practices that may not work for your specific business.
The days of accepting “trust us, this worked” from your teams are over. Demand the accountability that drives real business results.
If you’re ready to stop defending your budget and start proving your effectiveness, the PESO Model is your next move—and we want to hear from you. Send me an email at cbarger@armentdietrich.com or connect with me on LinkedIn, and we’ll talk about how to transform marketing into a revenue engine—with data to prove it.
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