Connecting the Pieces of Multichannel Content Marketing

Paid, Earned, Search and Social. Every marketing and PR team knows that if you want visibility, you have to promote your owned media through some mix of these four channels.However, are you missing a major opportunity by not connecting these programs together or connecting only one or two of them?Synchronizing the promotion of your content across all channels can lift both your overall traffic and your leads, something we learned when shortening our own sales cycle by 30%.I know what you’re thinking: “Great idea, but we could never execute this. Each of these areas are controlled by different groups and we don’t always work together.”You don’t have to dive all in at once. If you coordinate the multichannel promotion of a single white paper, case study or piece of content, you can use the data points from your test to prove this approach’s value to the rest of your team.Now that I have your interest, let’s talk about how to get started.Step 1: Understand the differences between each channel type. Paid Media includes any digital media you pay for, such as PPC, retargeted ads, paid social, and display ads. When contributing to a coordinated marketing program, I try to hit as many paid areas as possible based on budget. If you are limited in regards to which paid media to use, I typically prefer retargeting and paid social. Retargeting enables you to stay in front of prospects even if they don’t take action the first time, while paid social can be a great way to target leads by title and type.Earned Media has dramatically changed over the past few years. While traditional media pickup is still very important, journalists, trade reporters, bloggers and other influencers can provide invaluable visibility for your message when they share it with their social media channels, even if they don’t formally cover it.Organic Search is basically all non-paid efforts to improve your natural search results. It takes into account how you write your content, the relevance of your content to the subject you’re targeting, and how your overall website is set up in relation to current SEO best practices.Organic Social includes all of your sharing across your organization’s channels, as well as how shareable you make your owned content. Be sure that all of your content is written in a way that maximizes your audience’s social sharing.

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