Paid, earned, shared and owned content types are often created by distinct teams in marketing organizations, which can result in disjointed communications. By synchronizing messages across channels, digital marketing leaders can differentiate their brand stories and drive efficiency.
Key Findings
- Channel leaders are not united on overarching message goals, making cross-collaborative success difficult to measure.
- Unifying brand messages across channels has proven complicated across siloed teams that do not create content collaboratively.
- Content marketing processes and team structures do not currently meet the need for cross-team content collaboration that aligns with business goals and marketing objectives.
Recommendations
- Develop unified goals that support business objectives across channels to ensure you have organizational alignment and broad scope for managing content.
- Apply the paid, earned, shared and owned media model to ensure best practices for these channels are considered during holistic message development.
- Evaluate and test operating models and governance to drive collaboration across siloed teams to ensure content drives efficiency and scale.
Introduction
An integrated marketing method can anchor a unified approach to content creation and distribution. Different groups who manage paid, earned, shared and owned (PESO) channels with their own objectives and content calendars must collaborate to achieve a unified brand narrative.
Unified messaging will become increasingly important as customers continue to be flooded with content. The ability to unify messages across channels will help brands elicit desired responses and help customers take the next action. A unified messaging approach will also support increased brand recognition and trust and amplify market reach.
Use this research to ensure better messaging alignment, which will increase brand awareness, familiarity, favorability and purchase intent and amplify brand narrative across channels.
Develop Unified Messaging That Aligns With Business Goals
Teams tasked with content creation sometimes don’t pursue the same goals or are not aligned to business impact. The result can be disjointed customer experiences and duplicative efforts. A holistic channel strategy considers all content formats, channels and experts, so you can be sure you have organizational alignment and broad scope for managing content.
The 2023 Gartner Multichannel Marketing Survey finds that 70% of organizations with a holistic channel strategy achieved revenue performance targets versus 49% of those with a siloed channel approach, as Figure 1 shows.1 Modern marketing teams need to view content as an asset and focus efforts on areas where content can most directly influence customers to make decisions across the journey and ultimately impact business.
CMOs reported that almost a third (31%) of marketing teams manage 11 or more channels. It’s unrealistic for even the most robust content team to deliver unique content for each target audience across all these channels.
Instead, marketing teams must orchestrate channels to support omnichannel customer journeys, anticipating the points where they can deliver the most impact. Digital marketing leaders must align the right channel to the right journey touchpoint to deliver a catalytic interaction. This experience changes customers in some way and makes them feel more confident about their choices.
The disjointed nature of siloed teams stems from the concept that each channel is unique and should be customized. While individual channel nuances should be considered, channel strategy should be unified by an overarching objective and core messages that focus on customer needs, not what the brand wants to say.
When siloed groups can’t unite behind a single goal, digital marketing leaders must tie their approach to business goals. These often include increasing sales, attracting new customers, increasing customer lifetime value, or reducing service costs. Content and channels have unique and separate roles to play in these areas.
Apply the PESO Model
Including paid, earned, shared and owned media considerations in a content strategy is an integrated approach to developing and delivering a unified message across all your brand’s marketing channels. The model relies on inputs and outputs from throughout the organization, ensuring that multiple teams are involved in communications planning and strategy.
The PESO approach is similar to an advertising campaign that starts with a “big idea” and extends across channels and mediums. It unites channel specialists and considers each one’s needs to create unified but custom-made channel executions.
Paid media is content with funds allocated for advertising to drive reach such as:
- Advertising (search, social ads, display)
- Sponsorships
Earned media is content that is distributed by a third party without an organization or brand paying for it, such as:
- Traditional and digital news mentions
- Blogger mentions
Shared media is content that brand partners, employee advocates and others share across third-party platforms to amplify the content, such as:
- Social posts
- Content aggregators
Owned media is content that is created, cultivated and maintained directly by an organization within channels they control, such as.
- Websites
Content creation and distribution can be streamlined when content is developed under a core storyline and brand narrative — accounting for channel nuances. Organizations using campaign-based approaches need to include all channels in planning cycles, which may also include weekly or biweekly standups to ensure connection across messaging even as campaigns evolve.
Those using a modular content production approach can assemble various content types across channels that support unique messaging delivery to target audiences. Modular content involves creating structured assets that can be assembled in different combinations across channels to impact target audiences.
Ensuring visibility into assets and continent metadata to identify assets as relevant to those target audiences is essential to success. Figure 2 shows examples of integrating paid, earned, shared and owned media.
Figure 2. Examples of Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned Integration
Using an integrated approach such as the PESO model enables teams to collaborate on how each channel will use:
- Owned and shared media to distribute messages.
- Paid media to amplify the message.
- Earned media for third-party promotion and validation.
The format may differ on some channels, but the core message and content goal will be the same. In this way, the same message can fuel the “owned” channels such as a blog, which can support shared channels on social media and be promoted with paid media to amplify the brand narrative across channels.
Evaluate and Test Operating Models and Governance to Synchronize Content Creation and Distribution
Powerful brand narratives are a byproduct of strategically developing channels and the teams that support them. These messages require early cross-team collaboration, strategic planning and a shared set of objectives and narratives.
You’ll need to establish better working relationships across functions and channels to solve disjointed channel messaging. Evaluate and refine your operating model to break down silos, address inefficiencies, support brand consistency and resolve other common structure-related problems. This could involve:
- Shifting to a more centralized model
- Creating an editorial committee
- Developing an integrated team such as a center of excellence (COE)
This integrated team should comprise leaders from each channel or practice such as brand, content, public relations, website, social, email, product, subject matter experts and events. These teams are often led by those who have insight into the latest company news, a pulse on trending topics in the media and a background in journalism. This expertise helps various user groups frame and adjust stories and messages to make them appealing across channels and audiences.
Teams are often structured in pods to support target customer segments, which helps to ensure that the entire customer journey is aligned to business objectives associated with the holistic channel strategy. When combined with governance models, teams can reinforce federated models with consistent core messages and storylines. This gives channel owners flexibility to adapt the content for unique execution based on best practices.
Taking special care to incorporate paid, earned, shared and owned tactics into your content strategies will best position your organization to deliver to audiences a seamless, engaging and unified message. When messaging is synchronized across channel-specific formats, the audience receives a deeper connection to the brand and strong messaging resonance.