The PESO Model© Is Your Marketing Operating System

Most marketing and communications teams are still running on systems that were built for a different era—one where channels were fewer, teams were smaller, and outcomes were fuzzier.

Today, you’re expected to operate with the speed of a newsroom, the precision of a performance marketer, and the storytelling finesse of a journalist—often at the same time. 

But while your competitors are integrating AI and automation into seamless marketing machines, you’re still juggling spreadsheets, disconnected social calendars, clunky email platforms, and media lists that haven’t been updated since the last reorg.

The result?

Fragmented campaigns. Siloed teams. Reactive execution. Endless rework. Parallel tactics. And a creeping sense that no one’s steering the ship.

You don’t have a marketing strategy problem.

You have a marketing operating system problem.

Think of your marketing team like a symphony orchestra—except the musicians can’t see the conductor, everyone’s playing from different sheet music, and half the sections don’t even know what piece they’re performing.

The outcome isn’t just noise—it’s missed opportunities, wasted resources, and frustrated stakeholders.

Enter: the PESO Model©.

The Framework That Ate Marketing Silos

The PESO Model stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media. It was originally developed as a modern framework for public relations, but over the past decade, it’s evolved into something much bigger: a blueprint for truly integrated marketing.

Each quadrant represents a category of media you already use every day—whether you’re buying Google ads, pitching reporters, posting on LinkedIn, or writing your weekly newsletter. 

The magic isn’t in the individual parts. It’s in how they work together.

Most teams treat these channels as parallel tactics: comms handles media coverage, marketing runs paid ads, social does its own thing, and content is somewhere in between. 

But parallel tactics don’t produce momentum—they create more handoffs, more meetings, more lag.

The PESO Model isn’t just a new way to organize your channels—it’s a smarter way to run them. It turns those parallel tactics into a fully integrated program, where each piece of content, campaign, or story flows across the right media at the right time. And because it’s rooted in strategy, not just execution, it gives your work structure, alignment, and repeatability.

At a glance:

• Paid includes everything from boosted and native content to social ads and influencer partnerships to paid editorial. 
• Earned includes media coverage, PR placements, influencer mentions, user reviews, and thought leadership.
• Shared includes social media, employee advocacy, community engagement, user-generated content, and brand evangelism.
• Owned includes your website, blog, newsletter, webinars, email list, loyalty program, white papers—any content you fully control.

When these four quadrants are integrated into a single system, you stop chasing vanity metrics and start building a marketing engine that produces measurable business results.

The Invisible Infrastructure Behind Smart Marketing

Most frameworks help you think about your work differently. The PESO Model helps you run your work differently.

Think of it like an operating system—just like iOS or Windows runs in the background, quietly orchestrating how your apps, tools, and inputs function together. You don’t see it, but you rely on it every time you open an email, upload a file, or switch between platforms.

The PESO Model works the same way. It doesn’t replace your tactics—it makes them work better together. It aligns what you say, where you say it, and how you amplify it across every corner of your media ecosystem.

Instead of managing five calendars, four workflows, and three versions of the truth, the PESO Model gives your team a shared rhythm. It allows content created for one channel to be repurposed across others—owned turns into shared, shared fuels earned, earned gets a boost with paid and so on.

It also transforms your data into insight. Rather than looking at isolated dashboards—web stats over here, media coverage reports over there—you can track how a single message performs across touchpoints, and how that performance maps to outcomes like traffic, leads, trust, or sales.

This is the shift from output to outcome. From fragmented tools to one connected system. From gut-feel marketing to business-aligned communications.

You don’t need a bigger tech stack. You need an operating system that helps the one you already have actually deliver on its promise.

Goodbye Silos. Hello Signal.

Before the PESO Model, most teams default to what my team and I refer to as parallel execution: PR sends out a release, social posts are scheduled in a vacuum, paid ads run on a totally separate strategy, and content marketing lives off in its own lonely corner. 

Everyone’s working hard—but not necessarily working together.

The result? 

Disconnected campaigns. Duplicated efforts. Teams chasing short-term wins instead of compounding results.

The PESO Model changes that. It transforms reactive, ad hoc activity into an orchestrated strategy where each media type amplifies the others.

Let’s say you’re launching a new product. Before PESO, you’d probably:

• Send a news release
• Write a blog post
• Post on social media
• Create some social ads
• Hope someone notices

With PESO as your operating system, the launch becomes a coordinated play:

• Owned forms your foundation. Create a comprehensive product page, detailed blog post, email to your list, and video content—all optimized for search and conversion. This is your source of truth.
• Earned drives credibility. Pitch journalists and influencers with exclusive angles, directing them to your owned assets for further details. Their coverage links to your content, boosting SEO and sending qualified traffic.
• Shared amplifies organically. Your team and community share the news, creating authentic buzz. User-generated content and employee advocacy extend your reach without spending a dime. Every share points back to your owned hub.
• Paid reaches new audiences. Target lookalike audiences based on your email list, retarget blog visitors, and boost high-performing organic posts. Use paid to fill gaps and scale what’s already working.

One core message. Four channels. A shared goal. Clear attribution.

This integrated approach creates signal—not just noise. It ensures that your efforts reinforce each other, rather than compete for attention. It also makes measurement easier: when all media types point toward the same objective, it’s far simpler to track what’s working and why.

PESO doesn’t just break down silos. It builds systems so your team can stop reacting and start orchestrating.

Turn Impressions Into Income Statements

Here’s the harsh truth: executives don’t care how many media hits you got this month. Or how many followers your last campaign added. They care about outcomes—leads, revenue, market share, brand trust.

That’s where the PESO Model becomes more than just a media strategy—it becomes a business strategy.

Because it aligns all four quadrants to a shared goal, PESO makes it easier to translate activity into metrics the C-suite cares about. No more squishy reports. No more eye rolls when you talk about engagement. 

With PESO, you can map your efforts directly to business results.

For example:

• A spike in share velocity (how fast and wide your content spreads) can correlate with increased lead quality and conversion.
• Media impressions that drive website traffic and content downloads become a clear path to MQLs.
• Improvements in brand sentiment across shared and earned media can be tied to customer lifetime value and reduced churn.

When you use PESO as your operating system, you move from counting what you did to proving what it delivered.

It also shifts how you are perceived inside the business. You’re no longer the team that “gets us press” or “runs the socials.” 

You become the team that drives visibility, credibility, and growth. A revenue enabler. A strategic partner. A driver of business performance.

This is how you earn that seat at the leadership table—not by shouting louder, but by speaking the language of outcomes.

Whether You’re a Team of 3 or 3,000

One of the most powerful aspects of the PESO Model is its flexibility.

You don’t need a global budget, an enterprise tech stack, or a 20- or 2000-person marketing team to make it work. 

In fact, some of the most scrappy and smartest executions we’ve worked on have come from teams of three people using a whiteboard and a shared Google Doc.

At the same time, we’ve worked with multinational organizations to apply the PESO Model across dozens of markets and departments—using it to align agencies, unify reporting, and create consistency across campaigns. 

It scales because it’s not a tool. It’s a system. And systems adapt.

Start with a single campaign. 

Map it to the four quadrants:

• Where do you have content gaps, and what questions do you need to answer for customers and prospects? 
• Which media outlets and digital sites in your industry accept contributed content, and how can you use that approach to earn links to your content?
• How will you share it while building community?
• How will you amplify all that work with paid?

Even that one exercise can shift your team from tactical to strategic thinking—and reveal opportunities you would’ve missed otherwise.

From there, it grows with you:

• Roll it out across other campaigns
• Train cross-functional teams to use a shared language
• Build PESO into planning templates, reporting dashboards, and even performance reviews

Like any great operating system, PESO becomes more powerful the more you use it. And once your team sees how it turns chaos into clarity—and effort into results—they won’t want to go back.

And here’s the best part: once you start thinking in PESO, everything—from brainstorming to budgeting to reporting—gets easier. It gives you a common language across teams, departments, and even vendors.

You’re not reinventing the wheel. You’re finally helping the wheels turn.

AI Needs an Operating System, Too

AI is everywhere right now. And if you’re anything like me, you’re both excited and a little overwhelmed. On any given day, you might get pitched five new AI tools promising to write your content, optimize your budget, forecast your leads, or automate your entire marketing funnel while you sleep.

But here’s the thing no one tells you: AI is only as smart as the system it supports.

If your underlying strategy is scattered, your AI tools will just make you scattered faster.

This is where the PESO Model becomes a secret weapon. It gives structure to all the inputs AI needs—and context to all the outputs it creates. 

Instead of throwing AI at isolated problems, you use it to enhance a connected system.

Let’s walk through a quick example.

Say you’re using AI-powered social listening to monitor trending topics in your industry. You notice a spike in conversation around a pain point your product solves. 

With the PESO Model in place, here’s what happens next:

• Earned: You pitch a thought leadership article to your trade media contacts, framing your solution around that trend.
• Owned: You publish a blog post diving deeper into the topic, embed a video, and optimize it for search.
• Shared: Your team shares it across channels, your advocates engage with it, and you join the conversation.
• Paid: You boost the post, retarget site visitors, and promote the original media mention to expand credibility.

Now, AI isn’t just giving you a signal. It’s helping you activate that signal across PESO in a structured, strategic way.

That’s the difference between reactive automation—and responsive marketing.

It works on the backend, too. AI can analyze which earned placements are driving traffic, which shared posts are sparking engagement, and which owned assets are converting. But if you’re not using a system like PESO, that data just sits in separate dashboards. You miss the big picture.

With PESO as your operating system, AI becomes a force multiplier—not just another shiny object.

See Your Content Flow Through All Four Channels

Let’s bring this to life with an example.

Say you’re on a marketing team at a B2B software company, and you’re launching a new product feature. You’ve done the hard work—research, development, internal alignment. Now it’s go time.

Here’s what that might look like without PESO:

• You write a blog post or create a video demo.
• Someone on the team posts it to LinkedIn.
• Maybe you send a customer email.
• And if you’re lucky, you pitch to the media, but several weeks later, because we all know no one tells comms anything until it’s go time.

It’s not that those things are wrong—they’re just disconnected. They’re parallel plays, not a coordinated campaign.

Now let’s flip the script and run that same launch through the PESO Model:

• Owned: You start with a deep-dive blog post that explains the feature’s value. It links to a landing page with a demo video, and you send an email to customers with early access.
• Earned: You craft a pitch that ties the launch to a broader industry trend. You offer exclusive access to a journalist, who publishes a story that links back to your blog post and/or landing page.
• Shared: Your executive team shares the coverage with their networks. Employees re-share the blog and video. Customers chime in with testimonials or questions, creating engagement and organic visibility.
• Paid: You retarget everyone who visited the blog or watched the video. You boost the journalist’s article for social proof. You run ads promoting the landing page to a lookalike audience based on your current customers.

All of this happens from one message. One asset, orchestrated across four quadrants.

And the result? Clear attribution, broader reach, deeper engagement, and better results.

This is the power of PESO in action: instead of doing more, you’re working smarter. You’re not reinventing the wheel—you’re getting every part of the machine to work in sync.

One Piece of Content. Four Times the Results

One of the biggest benefits of running your marketing and comms through the PESO Model? 

Efficiency.

Let’s be honest—content creation is expensive. Whether you’re investing internal hours, paying freelancers, or working with an agency, every blog post, video, byline, or campaign asset represents time and budget. And too often, content gets published once and then disappears into the void.

With PESO, you make every piece of content work harder. Because you’re not creating in silos—you’re creating for a system.

Here’s how that looks in practice:

• A single blog post becomes a LinkedIn carousel, a media pitch, a paid retargeting asset, a customer email, and a podcast topic.
• A data report becomes owned gated content, shared teaser graphics, earned coverage in trade media, and a paid ad campaign with key insights.
• A thought leadership article becomes a webinar. Then a blog. Then, a downloadable checklist. Then, five social posts. Then… you get the idea.

This isn’t just about stretching content for the sake of it. It’s about maximizing the value of what you’ve already created—without duplicating effort or reinventing the wheel every time.

It also gives your budget more breathing room. Instead of funding four disconnected campaigns, you invest in one integrated narrative that performs across multiple channels.

When you build your content once—and then run it through PESO—you create more reach, more consistency, and more return.

Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Profitable

Okay, by now you might be thinking, “This all sounds great in theory… but it also sounds like a lot.”

And you’re not wrong—PESO done well takes planning. 

But the good news is, you don’t have to implement it perfectly out of the gate. In fact, attempting to do so is one of the biggest pitfalls we see.

Here are a few common traps—and how to sidestep them:

Treating the Quadrants as Silos

A lot of teams say they’re “doing PESO,” but in reality, they’re just labeling existing efforts. PR still owns earned, marketing owns paid, social owns shared, someone might or might not own owned, and nobody’s talking to one another.

PESO only works when the quadrants work together. Integration isn’t about ownership—it’s about orchestration.

Over-Indexing on One Quadrant

Paid can feel fast and easy. Earned looks good in a board deck. Shared gets likes. Owned is controllable. 

But, the real power lies in balance, where each quadrant plays a role in amplifying the others. If you’re investing heavily in one area, ask how the others can support it.

Set-It-and-Forget-It

Just because you mapped out a PESO strategy once doesn’t mean it will magically sustain itself. 

Like any system, it needs regular maintenance: what’s working? What needs to be optimized? What can be repurposed?

Starting Too Big

Trying to apply PESO to everything all at once is a recipe for burnout. Start with one campaign. Map it across the quadrants. Test, learn, refine. Then scale.

Trust me, imperfect PESO is better than no PESO at all.

Even a little integration goes a long way toward making your work more effective, more efficient, and more aligned with the business outcomes your execs or clients care about.

So don’t wait until your team has the perfect org chart, the perfect tech stack, or the perfect content calendar.

Start where you are. Work with what you have. And build from there.

It’s Time to Upgrade Your Operating System

The PESO Model isn’t a trend. It’s not a buzzword. And it’s definitely not “just another framework.

It’s the system that powers modern marketing and communications—one that turns disconnected tactics into aligned strategy, vanity metrics into business results, and overwhelmed teams into confident, focused operators.

Whether you’re part of a lean team or leading global campaigns, the PESO Model helps you bring order to the chaos, make smarter decisions, and ultimately connect your efforts to outcomes that matter—such as revenue, trust, loyalty, and growth.

So… where do you start?

Start with a quick audit.

Grab a campaign you’ve recently run—or one you’re planning—and ask:

• Where do you have content gaps, and what questions do you need to answer for customers and prospects?

• Which media outlets or digital sites accept contributed content, and how can you earn backlinks and credibility?

• How will you share it while building community?

• How will you amplify all that work with paid?

That simple exercise reveals your biggest gaps—and your biggest opportunities.

The tools are already on your desk. The strategy is in your hands. It’s time to build a marketing operating system that actually works.

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