Would you like to reach and resonate with the right customer where they research travel options online?

The marketing gods have bestowed upon us the PESO model – Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media – which is designed to master the content platforms that align with your business goals.

Investing in PESO

To make sense of PESO, let’s scramble the acronym and approach it in the order with which you may implement the model.

Owned media

This content originates with you and lives on your own website, blog, newsletter and social media platforms, where you control all your messaging and back links.

Paid media

This works well for new prospects who are ready to make a purchase, because you can conduct very targeted, paid campaigns in search engine advertising, social media and mailer marketing. Draw up a budget and a monthly distribution plan, track the metrics, and determine how to adapt your spending so as to target your audience for best effect.

You can create ads that link to owned or sponsored media, thereby sharing content that is relevant and even personalised to your target group – strike a chord, and it opens the door to online sharing.

Shared media

If your goal is to expand your audience, encourage dialogue and increase trust in your brand, you need to employ platforms that suit networking.

Some of the media you can promote among social media communities include: linked assets and user-generated content on Facebook or Twitter; bite-sized video media on TikTok or Instagram Stories; blogs on LinkedIn; and visuals on Pinterest. Research relevant, popular hashtags and tag your valued trade partners when you publish a post.

If it resonates with your audience, your content will be shared – taking it further and making it even more discoverable.

Earned media

Journalists, bloggers and influencers who are talking or writing about you will validate your expertise on a particular topic.

Create a list of personalities to follow on social media – tracked by the best hashtags – and develop mutually beneficial relationships. You can contribute a guest post, like, share and comment on their content, and then request that they reciprocate. If they think your content would be valuable to their audience, they will mention it and backlink your company in press articles, product or service reviews, and possibly interview you too.

Mixing it up

“All four media strategies work together,” say the experts at Brandpoint. “But it all comes down to creating owned content that is useful to your audience. This content could power a paid media campaign, which could lead to earned media benefits through social sharing and other online conversations.”

The point here, is that you should never expect one piece of content on a single platform to achieve all your marketing goals. For one thing, people learn in different ways. Factor the following into your planning:

  • Identify which of your marketing assets will resonate most with which audience. Try A/B testing with interactive content on Facebook, to see if the tactile learners take the bait;
  • Identify on which platforms (and with which hashtags) people are searching for inspiration. Try telling your best #ecofriendly stories on Instagram;
  • If your existing assets are incompatible with Gen Z customers’ preferred platform, aim to create something platform-appropriate such as native video media on TikTok;
  • Remember that some people are stimulated best by audio media, while others prefer reading – so offer a podcast and/or a blog post on a relevant topic in your newsletter; and
  • If you want to earn links, note that linkable owned media is easy to share, e.g.: ‘Did you know’ photographic infographics about your destination or experience, surveys (Vote for your top three culinary destinations!), and/or ‘How to’ guides that showcase your expertise.

Measuring it

An integrated, measured approach will yield the best, most sustained results. So track regularly:

  • the landing page downloads from your paid media ads;
  • any gains in your email marketing database from calls to action;
  • increases in qualified leads and conversion rates;
  • the number of new followers on your social media pages;
  • likes, shares and comments on your blog and social media pages;
  • unique URLs tagged onto linked assets for specific campaigns;
  • website traffic leading from earned media;
  • email subscriptions and search ranking; and
  • open and click-through rates on emails and blog articles, time spent on-site and your website’s bounce rate.

Whether you wish to educate people, boost your ranking or drive engagement, it pays to get creative with useful content that is amplified on the right platform – this will make the media you have chosen work to best effect for your tourism business.

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