• Paid Media – Brand pays to leverage a channel
• Owned Media – Channel a brand controls
• Earned Media – When customers become the channel

We have found that Paid-Earned-Owned is simply a categorization tool that helps with content integration and can add value through repurposing valuable content. It is not all black and white, there are some grey areas, but here is an example of how PEO plays out in a relevant B2B example:

Trade Show Promotion

In the early stages of marketing plan development, PEO can help prioritize recommended tactics based on available budgets and goals. It allows for a holistic view, unifying various disciplines. It can also help identify gaps in a plan. If you have a lot of great owned content (website, whitepapers, YouTube video channel) but have not allocated resources to generating paid or earned media you may not get maximum results.

PEO can also provide a framework for analytics measurement. If you have done the upfront work and categorized tactics into Paid, Earned or Owned, it will be a natural setup for tracking individual metrics. It can easily identify areas for optimization. In the trade show example above, you may learn that your owned e-newsletter promotion was quite successful at generating inquiries prior to the show, and that it is a tactic that can be repeated at future events. You may also learn that paying a third party to send a direct mail piece did little in generating booth appointments, but it drove Facebook fans.

B2B Marketing can benefit from using the Paid-Earned-Owned framework to help simplify and structure a complex planning process.

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Stacy Whisel is the Vice President of Strategic Media Programs at Godfrey. Godfrey provides B2B Branding, Digital Marketing and Unified Communications.