Last week, we discussed the uncomfortable truth facing modern marketers and communicators.
Clicks, shares, and impressions? They’re not what they used to be. Search engines have become answer engines. Social platforms prioritize algorithms over your audience. Content gets sliced, summarized, and shared in private channels you can’t measure. Trust lives with people, not brands.
Welcome to the era of zero-click, zero-share, and zero-visit. It’s not super sunny on this side of marketing and communications, and things constantly change. But there is good news!
You don’t need to burn down your strategy or chase every new shiny tactic to survive in this era. You don’t need a new acronym or a rebranded framework.
You need to adapt the PESO Model® to reflect how attention, credibility, and trust now operate.
Because when PESO is used the way it was meant to be used—as an integrated operating system—it helps you build traction, not just traffic. It helps you create signals of trust that cut through the noise. And it ensures your ideas travel further, even when your links don’t.
Today, we’ll move from mindset to action. We’ll discuss how each PESO media type functions in a zero-click, zero-share world—and what to do about it, how to structure your strategy for discovery, trust, and measurable traction, what to track when attribution is murky, and best practices to execute confidently, even when you don’t control the feed.
This isn’t about starting over. It’s about aligning your strategy with how attention and trust work now.
Modern PESO, Rewired for Discovery and Trust
If implemented according to the 2025 framework, the PESO Model will continue to work even though the environment has completely changed.
Each media type still plays a critical role, but it now operates within a landscape where attention is fragmented, algorithms control distribution, and trust is harder to earn.
To build traction in a zero-click, zero-share world, we need to evolve how we use paid, earned, shared, and owned media so they reinforce one another while delivering value at every touchpoint.
Paid Media Grows Reach
Let’s start with paid media.
This isn’t just about buying reach—it’s about buying qualified attention in places where your audience is already consuming content.
Paid placements should extend the reach of your strongest owned, shared, and earned content rather than compensate for weak messaging. This means amplifying high-performing articles, SME posts, highly engaged social posts, and customer testimonials, using targeted campaigns focusing on meaningful actions like video completions or real engagement.
Paid media can also be your entry point into trust-based ecosystems, particularly through influencer or SME partnerships that lend credibility while reaching niche audiences.
If paid is the only place someone encounters your brand, it needs to deliver standalone value, offering an experience, not just exposure.
Earned Media Builds Credibility
Earned media has evolved from chasing one-time placements to creating persistent signals of trust across multiple surfaces.
While a major media hit still matters, it’s no longer enough.
Credibility today extends to citations in AI-generated summaries, mentions in niche newsletters, contributed content in trade publications, and appearances on podcasts your audience trusts.
The goal is to transform earned media into reusable assets that can be turned into micro-content for social platforms or highlighted in your newsletter. Building relationships with journalists, creators, and SMEs who already hold your audience’s attention can help you stay visible repeatedly, not just once.
In a zero-click world, earned media’s true value lies in its ability to be seen, shared, and referenced long after publication.
Shared Media Deepens Trust
Shared media has shifted from broadcasting to working with the algorithms that now control distribution. Follower counts no longer guarantee visibility; what matters is whether your content is engaging enough for the platform to prioritize it—and whether it’s designed for quiet, private sharing in DMs, Slack or Teams channels, or screenshots.
Success here comes from creating platform-native content that is complete and valuable in-feed: vertical videos, educational carousels, insightful clips, and frameworks people want to save for later.
Instead of chasing public likes and comments, focus on designing for resonance—content that people feel compelled to bookmark, save, or forward privately, even if you can’t measure it directly.
Owned Media Establishes Authority
Owned media, meanwhile, needs to deliver enough utility to justify a visit in a world where AI might summarize your content before anyone clicks through.
Your website can no longer just be a hub of information; it needs to function as a product, providing tools, assessments, interactive content, and valuable resources to draw people in repeatedly.
Email remains your most valuable owned asset, but it must offer segmentation and personalization that deepen engagement rather than merely adding to inbox clutter. Consider which pieces of content should remain gated and which should be accessible for AI indexing, ensuring your voice is captured and referenced when summaries are generated.
How Valuable is Your Content?
The question to ask across all these media types is simple: is this content valuable enough that someone would seek it out, save it, or share it—even if they found it in an AI snippet, a private conversation, or a podcast recap?
Modernizing PESO for today’s landscape means using paid to amplify your strongest signals, using earned to build ongoing credibility, creating shared content designed for algorithmic and private sharing, and developing owned assets that act as tools your audience wants to use and revisit.
When you align your PESO strategy with how discovery and trust work now, you build a system that works for you while you sleep, even when clicks and shares aren’t visible. It’s how you stay present, memorable, and credible in a fragmented world.
PESO as a Discovery-to-Trust Flywheel
The old marketing funnel assumed that people moved neatly from awareness to interest to decision to action, with clear, trackable steps in between.
In a zero-click, zero-share world, that funnel has collapsed. People discover you in fragments, encounter your ideas out of context, and often make decisions long before you know they’re paying attention.
That’s why messaging across your PESO Model framework is about consistency. You don’t want your customers and prospects to find a different message from the social team, which is different from what they read in the news and still different from what they see on your site.
To adapt, we need to replace the linear funnel with a discovery-to-trust flywheel—a system that builds momentum by creating signals across channels, reinforcing expertise, creating consistent messaging, and making your brand recognizable even when you’re not in the room.
This flywheel starts with sparking attention. In a world where your audience encounters your ideas through AI summaries, algorithm-fed snippets, or a saved LinkedIn post, you need to design for those first points of contact.
This might be a snippet from a podcast, a quote in a newsletter, a customer testimonial amplified through paid media, or an infographic shared on social. The goal is to create content that captures attention where people already are, even if they don’t click through immediately.
Signal Credibility Repeatedly
Next, you need to signal credibility repeatedly. One earned placement or a single piece of content is no longer enough. Trust is built through consistent exposure to your voice across multiple channels—whether that’s your SME being quoted in an industry newsletter, your team joining a relevant LinkedIn conversation, or your brand being mentioned on a podcast your audience respects.
This repeated visibility helps your audience connect the dots between your expertise and your name, building recognition and trust over time.
Once attention and credibility are established, you can guide people to owned content that delivers differentiated value.
This is where your assessments, interactive tools, in-depth guides, and resources come into play. These assets should be so useful that even if someone encountered your brand in a snippet, they are compelled to seek out your site, subscribe to your emails, or share your tools internally with their teams.
Create Opportunities for Engagement and Community
Finally, you deepen the relationship by creating opportunities for engagement and community. This could be a live Q&A, a workshop, a private Slack channel, or an ongoing email series that feels personal and relevant.
Community is where trust solidifies, turning quiet consumers of your ideas into active advocates and customers.
Each PESO channel feeds into the next, building momentum and reinforcing your brand in a noisy, fragmented environment.
Your job is to ensure that wherever your audience encounters your ideas, they recognize your voice, find immediate value, and remember you when it’s time to act.
Measurement in a Murky World
In a perfect world, every piece of content would have a clean, trackable path from discovery to action.
You’d know exactly which blog post drove that enterprise lead, which podcast mention influenced a new client, and which LinkedIn post convinced someone to sign up for your newsletter.
It’s the expectation that most executives have, but it isn’t how the world works. Unfortunately. It sure would be nice if it did. Alas.
In a zero-click, zero-share world, measurement has become murky.
People consume your content in private channels, find you in AI-generated summaries, or remember you from a podcast clip they can’t quite place.
Attribution breaks.
Referral paths disappear.
And yet, your influence is still working—quietly, steadily, and often invisibly.
Shift Your Focus to Traction
So, how do you measure success when traditional metrics fall short?
First, shift your focus from traffic to traction.
Traffic is important, but it’s not the only indicator of effectiveness in a world where content circulates without clicks. Instead, look for signals that show your content is resonating, even if it’s not always measurable in your analytics dashboard.
For example, engagement quality has become a more meaningful indicator than surface-level metrics like impressions or likes.
Saves, shares, replies, video completions, and even the depth of comments tell you more about resonance than raw reach ever could. If people bookmark your content, forward your newsletter, or stay until the end of your videos, you’re building traction that algorithms and analytics can’t fully capture.
Monitor Trust Indicators
Next, monitor trust indicators. Mentions from credible voices, unsolicited citations in newsletters or podcasts, and consistent references in community conversations signal that your ideas are circulating—and sticking.
If your SME is quoted in an industry newsletter or your framework is referenced on a relevant podcast, that’s a win.
Track these moments, even if they don’t drive immediate traffic.
Community health is another critical measure. Participation in your webinars, the number of repeat attendees in your live sessions, and engagement in your Slack or Discord communities are all signs of durable interest.
People prefer private, small-group interactions today so the health of your community often says more about brand trust than a spike in web traffic.
You can also track return signals: branded search volume increases, repeat site visits, higher direct traffic, and newsletter open streaks. These are all indicators that your audience remembers and actively seeks you out.
When someone types your name into Google after seeing you quoted in a LinkedIn post or hearing your SME on a podcast, that’s evidence that your presence strategy is working.
Of course, some tactics can help you regain clarity where possible.
Use UTM tracking on resources shared during webinars, downloadable Notion docs, or Slack conversations to monitor how assets circulate.
Implement QR codes for live events, linking to trackable landing pages, to capture offline-to-online interest.
Track branded search volume over time as a proxy for increased awareness driven by your earned and shared media.
Collect Qualitative Insights
Finally, don’t overlook qualitative signals. If a prospect says, “I heard about you on a podcast,” or “Your framework came up in a WhatsApp group I’m in,” capture these anecdotes.
Over time, these qualitative insights help validate the invisible influence your PESO strategy is building.
In a murky measurement landscape, you won’t capture every path your audience takes to find you. But by expanding your definition of success beyond clicks, you’ll begin to see the bigger picture: trust, traction, and durable visibility that compound over time.
Execution Priorities for the Second Half of the Year
We’ve established that in a zero-click, zero-share world, the PESO Model isn’t just relevant—it’s essential. But understanding how the model adapts to today’s environment is only half the battle. Now it’s time to operationalize it so your strategy doesn’t live in a slide deck, but in the daily rhythms of your team.
Start by asking the right questions:
- Is your content designed for how people discover and consume information now, or how you wish they would?
- Are you building assets that deliver immediate, practical value, making them worth saving, sharing, or revisiting?
- Are you empowering your internal subject matter experts and credible voices to show up publicly for your brand?
If the answer to any of these questions is “not yet,” you’re not alone. Many organizations are still operating with structures built for a different era of marketing—a time when visibility was easier to buy, and funnels were easier to track. But this is the year to change that.
In practice, execution in 2025 means designing content for resonance in-feed while giving your audience a clear reason to click through when they’re ready for depth. It also means building assets and frameworks that can live across channels and formats, ensuring your ideas are discoverable in AI-generated summaries, private channels, podcast discussions, and social snippets.
It also means investing in relationships over reach. Instead of chasing vanity metrics, double down on collaborations with credible creators and nurture your internal SMEs to become visible, trusted voices.
Build a rhythm of community interactions—webinars, live Q&As, private discussions—that foster trust and two-way engagement.
Execution in this environment requires structuring your campaigns for syndication and summarization. Don’t be afraid of AI scraping your content; prepare for it by ensuring your POV is clear, quotable, and discoverable. Make your frameworks and key messages repeatable and portable, so they’re carried forward even when your link isn’t.
Finally, modern execution means creating platform-native journeys. Your audience shouldn’t have to leave a platform to get value from you. Deliver insights in a LinkedIn post, a podcast clip, or an in-feed carousel while also creating clear next steps for those ready to engage more deeply.
Think of your PESO execution as building signal strength. Each piece of content, each channel, and each collaboration should reinforce your credibility, your message, and your unique value, even if you can’t see the clicks in real time.
This isn’t about moving faster for the sake of speed. It’s about working smarter, aligning your PESO strategy with the realities of how attention, trust, and discovery actually work now.
When you build this infrastructure with intention, you create a system that works for you while you sleep—helping your ideas travel further, your expertise get recognized, and your brand stay top of mind, even in a world where shares and clicks are hidden from view.
PESO Isn’t a Legacy Model—It’s a Living System
It’s tempting to look at the chaos of today’s marketing landscape—zero-click search, algorithm-controlled feeds, hidden sharing, and fragmented attribution—and think you need to burn everything down and start over.
You don’t. You don’t need a new acronym. You don’t need another shiny framework.
You need a strategy that adapts the PESO Model to how trust, attention, and discovery work now.
PESO has never been about checking boxes across paid, earned, shared, and owned media. It’s about building a system of integrated signals that earn trust, create traction, and keep your brand present, even when you don’t control the feed.
When used correctly, the PESO Model helps you build signal strength in a noisy, fragmented world. It aligns your teams and channels around a clear, scalable framework. It ensures your ideas travel, your voice is remembered, and your brand remains credible, even if your links aren’t clicked and your posts aren’t publicly shared.
In a zero-click, zero-share world, the goal isn’t traffic for its own sake. It’s traction—the kind that shows up when your SME is cited in an industry conversation, when a customer references your producer or service during a pitch call, when your brand name is searched for directly, and when your insights get quietly passed along in a private channel.
Traction creates momentum, even when metrics feel murky. Traction earns trust, even when the path from discovery to action is invisible.
And the PESO Model, evolved for today’s environment, is how you build that traction with intention.
Because at the end of the day, marketing isn’t about the algorithm’s preferences or a platform’s whims. It’s about connecting with people, earning trust, and delivering value in ways that create long-term relationships.
© 2025 Spin Sucks. All rights reserved. The PESO Model is a registered trademark of Spin Sucks.
