Your brand has launched a new campaign to announce your new product, sent out a press release and posted on social media. The goal is to gain visibility and brand mentions. A few thousand likes and a couple of shares. Perhaps one or two publications mentioned your brand and things looked promising, you thought. Then the attention waned.
You are not alone in facing this challenge. Your website team creates a dedicated web page, the marketing/PR team runs events and chases coverage, the social media team is producing and posting content, and the performance marketing team runs ads. Marketing activity is happening, but the outcome is a lot of effort with little momentum.
Digital PR can help you connect the work and bring everything together. With the PESO framework, you can start to create one useful story, a clear place to send people, find the right people to share it with and a means to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. It brings together Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media so your marketing team does not have to start from scratch every time you launch something new.
Digital PR is more than just press releases with embedded hyperlinks. It encompasses the work of getting your brand talked about, searchable and trusted online.
I define Digital PR as the practice of earning coverage, brand mentions, links, and visibility across digital channels to build reputation, authority and demand for your brand.
The work may include, but is not limited to, media coverage, expert commentary, a data report, customer success stories, SEO-optimised content, and partnerships with creators. The goal is not to be everywhere and speak to everyone.
What you want is to be where your audience is and show up credibly when they are doing a search related to your brand.
That means helping people answer three questions:
Take the opening of a new restaurant in Singapore. A typical announcement may look like a press release that might get picked up by a few journalists. But a stronger approach would be a chef-led story about local ingredients and heritage, a well-photographed page on the restaurant’s website to support the story, targeted (not mass) outreach to food and lifestyle writers, short videos for social media, and paid promotion to boost best-performing content.
On top of media coverage, the restaurant can earn a feature in Eatbook, strong reviews in various lifestyle blogs, and backlinks from local food critics and influencers. The outcome is something more durable: search visibility, referral traffic, and social proof that compounds over time. Together, they make the brand more discoverable and more credible.
That distinction matters here because IMDA has been actively pushing digital adoption among SMEs. As more Singapore businesses move discovery and buying online, the brands that earn trust across digital channels are the ones that get found and chosen.
PESO stands for Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media. This is a framework for planning purposes, and is by no means a rulebook.
You do not need to activate all four channels. Start with the channels that fit your audience, your resources and the story you want to tell.
Paid media is anything you pay to place. For instance, boosted posts, LinkedIn ads or a paid influencer partnership.
It is useful for reaching your defined audience and stretching the longevity of your content that already works
Earned media is coverage you cannot buy, such as editorial coverage in The Business Times, a backlink from an industry blog, or a journalist quoting your data.
Earned media is the hardest quadrant to control, which is precisely why it carries the most trust.
It is most effective for building credibility through other people’s voices.
Owned media is everything you control: your blog, your email newsletter, newsroom, case studies and resource hubs like a gated report landing page.
This gives people a clear place to learn more about your brand, product or service, and take action.
If you want the mechanics of turning owned assets into search visibility, this guide on how to build a content marketing strategy that boosts your SEO walks through it step by step.
That flywheel is exactly the kind of marketing capability building that Enterprise Singapore’s Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) can co-fund, so smaller firms are not limited by budget. Run PESO as one connected system, and each quadrant makes the others work harder.
Digital PR campaigns fail when there is no clear story.
It is understandable that “we have a new feature”, “we have a new logo”, or “we won an award!” may matter to you and your business, but customers and journalists do not care as much about any of these.
Before choosing a PESO channel, ask yourself honestly: what is a useful, timely or interesting idea?
It could be:
The best stories are usually useful, specific and interesting.
Media outreach is more effective when you stop treating journalists as a distribution list.
Make the story easy to use. A good pitch saves them time. It gives them a relevant angle (that is of interest to their readers), a credible source that they can validate, and enough evidence and data for them to decide if the story is worth covering.
First, you need to know who your target audience is, and where and how they consume information.
Then look for journalists, editors, podcasts, creators and industry voices that your audience follows. For example, a consumer brand may reach out to lifestyle, food, retail or culture writers; a B2B SaaS company may look at trade publications or YouTubers covering the topic.
Make sure you research what they already cover, i.e., what their beat is. A generic email is easily overlooked. A short tailored message that connects your story to their beat is more likely to get a favourable response.
A useful pitch usually includes:
Keep the email short and skimmable. Journalists receive hundreds of emails daily. Make their job easy by providing what they need to make the easy decision to contact you.
When all goes well and you receive coverage, that is great, but the job is not yet done.
Add that to your newsroom page on your website. Share the article with your colleagues and relevant partners. Turn the story into a post or a customer email or better still, draft a follow-up article on your own blog.
Look at your Google Console and assess if the coverage drove referral visits, search interest or conversions such as sign-ups or enquiries.
While links from credible sources are very helpful, I must add that even an unlinked mention can matter if it puts your brand in front of the right audience and prompts people to search for your brand name later.
Even without many links, this earned activity feeds E-E-A-T and topical authority, since original data and expert quotes signal genuine expertise. That is partly why brands can rank on Google without backlinks when their content is credible and well cited across the web.
Getting coverage is great, but having coverage that helps the right audience get to know us and trust us more is the goal.
Paid media is useful when it supports something that has already shown promise.
Examples of good uses of paid amplification include:
In the case of the new restaurant discussed at the start of this article, after receiving coverage, they can publish a post about the feature on their own social media accounts and boost the post.
It is easy to collect impressive-looking numbers in PR and marketing. Impressions, reach, likes, and media value can look good in a report. They are certainly useful, but they are not the whole story.
Picking the right metric for each channel.
For earned media, track coverage volume, referral traffic from those articles, the backlinks they generate, and your share of voice against competitors. A fintech startup, for example, might count how many tier-one Singapore outlets covered its funding round versus a direct rival.
For shared media, watch engagement and reach on the platforms where your audience lives, whether that is LinkedIn for B2B or Instagram for consumer brands.
For owned media, your metrics shift toward search rankings and conversions, since your blog and landing pages are meant to capture demand.
For paid amplification, cost per result is king: cost per click, cost per lead, or cost per acquisition when you boost a piece of coverage.
Learn to prioritise the right digital marketing metrics that connect PR activity to leads, pipeline, and sales.
For a Singapore B2B company, a simple monthly dashboard using Google Analytics can track which articles or posts brought visitors to the website and to which page, whether branded search increased after a campaign and how many enquiries arose from the campaign.
More often than not, managers obsess over perfect attribution. What you need is sufficient evidence to see the patterns in order to make decisions.
If a particular publication consistently sends relevant visitors to your website, build a relationship with the editor. If a report you have generated creates discussion but visitors to the report do not go beyond that page or convert, improve the content. If a paid campaign brings traffic but no enquiries, you might not be attracting the right audience. Revisit the audience, offer or landing page.
Do not try to do everything at once.
Pick one priority audience, one business objective and one story you can properly support.
An effective digital PR makes your brand easier to find and easier to trust.
Start with a useful and interesting story. Give it a home on your website. Help the right people discover it through earned coverage, shared conversation and targeted paid amplification. Then measure their performance and continuously improve your approach.
This is how a brand moves from one-off publicity to a strong, credible presence that supports real business and brand growth.
When you are ready to build these skills formally, the WSQ Content Marketing Strategy Course is the practical next step. It is designed for teams who want to plan, create, and measure this kind of work in-house with confidence, and it is a sensible way to turn PESO from a framework you admire into a system that works for you.
Article Written By
Lorraine Tan is a digital communications specialist with 18 years of experience in digital marketing, PR, and brand strategy across government, healthcare, consumer goods, and tech start-ups, and she is a passionate trainer at Equinet Academy.
Article Written By
Lorraine Tan is a digital communications specialist with 18 years of experience in digital marketing, PR, and brand strategy across government, healthcare, consumer goods, and tech start-ups, and she is a passionate trainer at Equinet Academy.
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