It’s easy for healthcare startups to overlook an important truth about launching a public relations program: The best foundation for PR is what you develop and publish on your own channels.
Your website, blog, newsletters, email, and marketing materials are in your control. The media that you own establishes your narrative and begins to build brand recognition with key audiences like prospects and industry influencers.
By contrast, securing media coverage, contributed articles, speaking engagements, and podcast appearances – those bread-and-butter elements of a PR program – depends on third parties deciding that your story is worth delivering to their audiences.
As important as PR is for establishing credibility, its impact will probably be limited if you haven’t established a baseline narrative about your company by publishing your own content.
Paid-earned-shared-owned
In the rush to “get our story out there,” or worse, “put out a press release,” digital health companies (no different from other B2B industries) would do well to stop and think about the PESO Model. That’s the communications concept developed by communications veteran Gini Dietrich, author of Spin Sucks.
PESO is a great way to think about building a modern content engine. It’s made up of four parts that work together for a cohesive strategy:
Paid media: Digital ads, native advertising, and anything that requires making a payment to the media outlet or digital platform.
Earned media: PR and media relations intended to secure media coverage, influencer mentions, speaking engagements, podcast appearances and the like.
Shared media: Primarily social media.
Owned media: What you publish in the places you control. In addition to frequently used platforms like your blog and website, it includes things like marketing materials, internal communications, and brand journalism stories.
“Without the cornerstone of owned media, there would be nothing to share across platforms, nothing to underscore a brand’s expertise or thought leadership for journalists and influencers, and no content to amplify through paid media to expand reach,” Dietrich writes.
The right recipe
All four elements in the PESO model have an important role to play in getting results from marketing. Weaving them together in a cohesive, integrated strategy can propel growth by reaching the right prospects at all stages of the buyer journey, not to mention building recognition among other audiences.
Of course, this requires some dollars. It’s not realistic for early-stage companies to activate all four at the same time. Dietrich says it can work to start with a couple of elements and build toward using them all.
There are a lot of ways to think about the approach digital health startups should take.
For starters, look at the shortcomings of each part:
- Paid media can be costly and dismissed as too promotional
- Earned media coverage requires a newsworthy story and a dedicated media relations effort
- Social media channels like LinkedIn constantly change their algorithms
- Owned media takes time to generate results
Where are the greatest risks? A lot of marketing leaders would conclude that spending on paid media before having any sort of public profile would be a costly mistake. The same could be said for jumping to hiring a PR agency to seek media coverage.
Next, consider where you already have a head start, or can get there mostly or entirely on your own. Chances are this is with owned media – a website, blog, resource center, or newsletter.
By starting with this foundation of owned media, it’s much easier to add earned media to the mix.
“When your media coverage links back to your content, and your content builds on those media hits, you create a cycle that grows both visibility and domain authority,” Dietrich writes.
In your mix, if owned media is the weak link, you’re leaving too much to chance.
The best early-stage marketing question to ask is whether your own communications channels are a strong enough foundation for everything else.
