Multi-channel marketing or cross-channel marketing rests on the premise that there are only so many hours in a week you can dedicate to your digital marketing efforts. If you’re a solo entrepreneur or your business consists of a small team, you have to make every effort count, and that means repurposing your content across multiple channels, without merely duplicating it. Each type of marketing channel is specialized. Your blog is mainly for text. Pinterest is for interesting visual images. Youtube is for videos. Slideshare is for online presentations. Here are five immediate ways you can implement multi-channel marketing for your business:
In 5-minutes: Summarize blog points into Tweets.
Even if you’re not doing ‘list’ posts (“Top 5 Ways You Can…”, “Six Changes You Can Make Now…”), you can break down key points in your blog posts into one or two line tips and use them as Twitter posts (tweets), with room to add valuable #hashtags. It’s great to automatically share the link to your posts on Twitter, but if you schedule 6 tweets, one per day, out of a single post, that’s 1/5 of the month with custom content just for growing and feeding your Twitter audience with your expertise, insights, and analysis. For us, it takes about 5-minutes to schedule a week of good tweets.
In 2-minutes: Make HELPFUL graphics for your posts.
Using stock images to illustrate your posts (or even better – interesting photos you take yourself) adds vivaciousness and life to each blog post. Those can become featured images that show up in your blog feed. But if you do a bit of extra work, by framing that graphic, and adding a title and short, key points, you’ve created a mini-infographic that makes a better illustration that encourages people to actually read. When the post is socially shared, a thumbnail of that graphic encourages more clicks. It takes us about 2-minutes to convert a stock image into a much more useful illustration.
In 30-seconds: Make Pinterest ‘pins’ from your graphics.
If you’ve set up your Pinterest for Business account, and created a few boards, you can then add a “pin it” button to your browser that lets you to pin your blog posts in moments. The image pinned will be the ‘helpful graphic’ you created, and those begin fleshing out your Pinterest boards very nicely. You can have boards for specific topics, or otherwise arrange your boards strategically to best feature your company’s value and create the most interest for potential followers. It takes us less than 30-seconds to pin.
In 30-minutes: Make Youtube Videos from your posts.
You’ve gone to the trouble of doing a blog post. In an era where more people watch videos than read (Google-owned Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine, and by far the largest social network), why not convert that content into another medium? With an effective strategy, this can easily double your output and vastly extend your reach, without much more effort. Videos can be added to your LinkedIn company page, your Google Plus company page, and your Facebook company page. Likewise, you can pin them to Pinterest directly from Youtube. It takes us roughly 30-minutes, with a prepared template, to generate a video from one of our own posts, and add voice over.
In 30 minutes: Combine your posts into Slideshares.
Everyone is a publisher now. And there are number of high traffic venues to publish presentations, ebooks, ‘lenses’, videos, white papers, and longer social posts, created by combining several of your posts that deal with different aspects of a single, overall topic area. Instead of relying on just your own web site for content marketing, feed web sites that specialize in large audiences, with the power of your insights, leadership, and inspirational take on your market. It’s not hard to create a ‘deck’ out of your content that adds even more value, precisely because it’s comprehensive when combined. We do this with our own content in about 30-minutes.
All media is social media. Sometimes we start with a blog post, sometimes with a video. The idea is to get maximum value out of every marketing effort by extending it into other media types and venues. It took us about 10-minutes to create this blog post, a couple more for the graphic, and we’re already off to the races. You can do much more than this, if you can invest the time and involvement. If cross-channel marketing sounds dauntingly complicated, technical, or overly time consuming, that’s part of what a digital marketing coach is for. We help craft a sustainable digital marketing plan, flesh out the digital strategy, and guide you in implementing it and becoming better over time. Get the help, and you’ll never go back to an inefficient process of experimenting from scratch with social media. It’s that simple.
