Growing Impact with PESO

Maximize Your Marketing Impact: A Practical Guide to Building Growth with the PESO Framework

Building a high-performing marketing ecosystem means coordinating all your marketing efforts—like ads and social media—so they work together. Success comes from how well you manage and combine your investments.

A powerful framework for this is the PESO model (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned). Many companies approach PESO in alphabetical order—buying ads first to get attention. However, for a growing business, I advocate for a contrarian sequence: O-S-E-P.

By following this sequence, you put control and scalability at the heart of your marketing strategy. Instead of wasting resources on campaigns your business isn’t ready to handle, you support every new lead with a system designed for growth. Start by auditing your current assets—your website, CRM, and essential tools—so you’re equipped to capture valuable customer data from the beginning. Laying this groundwork transforms every future investment into a building block for lasting success.

Owned Media: Your Foundation of Control

Owned media encompasses every channel you control directly, for example, your website, blog, and email list. In a digital ecosystem, this is your “Command Centre”.

• The Strategy: For a company with 10 to 50 employees, developing “Owned” channels is no longer just about having a website; it’s about eliminating information silos and reclaiming control from external bottlenecks.

• Agile Infrastructure: Audit your Content Management System (CMS) (e.g., WordPress or Squarespace) to ensure your internal marketing team can update landing pages and pivot strategies instantly without over-relying on agencies and third-party support.  

• A Single Source of Truth: Your website forms must integrate directly with a Unified CRM (such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive). This integration ensures that customer data flows automatically across departments, preventing the "manual data entry" that leads to errors and employee disengagement.  

• Scalable Knowledge Assets: Move beyond basic descriptions to create role-based help centres and educational email sequences. These systems enable you to maintain consistent service quality across all sales channels, even as your team expands and formal structures emerge.  

• The Power of Control: By first fully configuring these internal channels, you ensure you own your data and your agility. This tactic builds a reliable digital ecosystem to support your first middle managers and protect your profit margins as you prepare for the acceleration of Shared and Paid media.

Shared Media: Building Community and Trust

Shared media is engagement on platforms like LinkedIn or review sites. Once your Owned foundation is stable, your Shared efforts rely on the trust you’ve already built.

• The Strategy: Don’t wait until your website is perfect to start networking. Attend events and build influence simultaneously while continuing to develop and configure your CRM to capture the leads generated by these interactions.

The Tools:

• Social Media & Networking: Building relationships, by helping others first, creates a robust support network and boosts your brand’s reputation. For example, I started a group called the B2B Cohort to connect with experts I work with and trust. These regular meetings help me learn from others, share my own experiences, and build lasting partnerships. If you’re a founder, you can join industry groups on LinkedIn or Slack, or invite a few peers or clients to a regular online meetup. Even a simple monthly video call to share advice and referrals can make a big difference—what matters most is consistency and support.

• Review Management: By integrating customer feedback loops into your CRM, you can automatically collect reviews, testimonials, and comments at key points in the customer journey. This integration makes it easy to highlight positive experiences, address concerns promptly, and share customer success stories across your marketing channels. As a result, your team can consistently reinforce trust and credibility with both prospects and existing clients.

Earned Media: The Right to Be Heard

Earned media is publicity you gain through organic means, such as media coverage, positive reviews, or being cited as an industry expert.

• The Strategy: You cannot buy authority; you earn it when your Owned and Shared channels become valuable resources for others.

The Tools:

• Social Listening & Analytics (Google Analytics, Looker Studio): By tracking which of your insights, articles, or posts are being shared or referenced by others, you can pinpoint the key topics and ideas that resonate with your audience. These “moments of truth” reveal what your audience finds valuable, help you understand your brand’s influence, and show where your expertise is making the strongest impact. This information can guide future content and strengthen your reputation as a thought leader.

• Data-Driven Insights: When you analyze data from your internal CRM and reporting tools, you can spot important patterns and trends in your industry—such as changes in customer behaviour, emerging needs, or shifts in the market. By turning these insights into original research reports or whitepapers, you provide valuable information that others in your field want to reference and share. This not only earns you organic backlinks from reputable sites but also increases your chances of being featured in news articles and industry publications, further boosting your brand’s credibility and online visibility.

Paid Media: Accelerating a Proven System

Paid media is distribution you pay for, like Google Ads or sponsored social posts. In the O-S-E-P model, Paid is not a “quick fix” for low leads—it is the turbocharger for a machine that is already working. 

• The Strategy: Invest in Paid Media after your internal systems, like your CRM and CMS, are working smoothly. If you run ads to a confusing website or a weak sales process, you are just paying to disappoint potential customers. That said, it’s fine to start using Paid Media while you continue to improve your other channels—take it step by step. For example, begin with small test campaigns focused on a single product or audience segment, set clear goals and budgets, and use these early results to refine your messaging and targeting before scaling up. This gradual approach helps founders avoid overcommitting resources too early and learn quickly from real data. Remember, your advertising will be much more effective if you first strengthen your Owned, Shared, and Earned channels.

The Tools:

• Ad Targeting & Retargeting: Leverage AI-powered advertising platforms to analyze your existing customer data—such as demographics, purchase behaviour, and engagement patterns—already stored in your CRM. These tools can identify audiences with characteristics similar to your best customers, enabling you to target new leads who are more likely to be interested in your products or services. By focusing your ad spend on these “lookalike” audiences, you can improve campaign effectiveness and increase your chances of acquiring high-quality customers.

• RICE Prioritization: Apply the RICE technique—an approach that scores projects based on Reach (how many people will be affected), Impact (the potential effect on your goals), Confidence (how sure you are about your estimates), and Effort (the time and resources required). By evaluating each paid campaign against these criteria, you can prioritize initiatives most likely to deliver significant results and real profitability, rather than spreading your resources too thin or chasing low-impact opportunities.

The Bottom Line

Digital Maturity is not about doing everything at once; it is about doing things in the right order. By following the O-S-E-P sequence, you build a resilient, customer-centric ecosystem that maximizes your ROI and ultimately increases your business's valuation. To measure your progress and ensure your marketing investments are making an impact, track key metrics at every stage. Business leaders should pay attention to metrics like conversion rate (how many visitors become leads or customers), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC—the average cost to acquire a new customer), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV—the total revenue expected from a customer over their relationship with your business), and Net Promoter Score (NPS—a measure of how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others). Each of these metrics gives valuable insight into the effectiveness and long-term impact of your marketing efforts. Regularly monitoring these numbers will help you identify where your marketing ecosystem is strong and where there is room to optimize for better results.

Are you ready to leave behind patchwork fixes and take meaningful steps to grow your business? Let’s work together to design a customer journey that drives real results—starting today.