Make Your Content Count by Adapting it for Each Platform

Author: Kimberly Hardcastle-Geddes       

marketing

Sharing content in more than one way is important to effectively market. Intrepid Travel gives many of its trips a Journal page, but also shared photo highlighting the trip on Instagram and other social platforms.

From teasing new product launches that will happen at an upcoming event to featuring session content beyond the show, content marketing can lead to improved SEO, heightened brand recognition, and a serious case of FOMO among prospects. Here, Kate Calderazzo, account director at mdg, shares how she ensures each piece of content reaches its maximum potential.

marketing

Kate Calderazzo

Root your campaign strategy in data by researching where your audience finds news, what type of content they like to find on each platform, and the tone that gets them engaged — humorous, professional, or conversational. Of course, a successful game plan is one that is flexible enough to adapt on the fly. If your content isn’t hitting outlined key performance indicators (KPIs), don’t be afraid to put it on the back burner and pick it up later. In fact, updating and resharing older content is great for your SEO as it keeps irrelevant content off of your site. Plus it saves your team the extra legwork of creating something from scratch.

Using a copy-and-paste approach to content dissemination is like repeating the same punch throughout a boxing match. Your content shouldn’t just be shared across multiple platforms, but adapted to fit the platform on which it lives. For example, on intrepidtravel.com, a trip to New Zealand is given a Journal page with a first-hand account of the adventures. That story is then turned into a carousel of photos highlighting the trip on Instagram, and into a slideshow video on Facebook. One piece of content, three different ways for the audience to consume the story.

We’ve all heard the cries, “Facebook reach is down!” “Instagram won’t let people see our posts!” It’s our job as event marketers to serve the right content at the right time to get noticed in the face of these limitations. This means creating a content calendar that is purposeful and promotes your content multiple times. A good rule of thumb is to push out one piece
of content over the course of two or three weeks, testing various days and times to give people the best chance to engage with it.

Be consistent and your audience can start to rely on you to serve them this information. For example, World Pet Association sends out a monthly newsletter every third Tuesday via email. This email is then followed by social posts and media coverage for the next few weeks to drive home the newsletter’s topic. The audience has come to expect that they will receive the same message — but in different ways across different channels — throughout the month.

Automation in Action

Let marketing automation alleviate some of the burden of content-marketing distribution. A Power Digital Marketing blog post recommends using tools like Buffer, Social Oomph, and TweetOldPost. Plus, these platforms still let you create customized messages for each post so you avoid the copy-and-paste pitfall.

Even with automation tools, it’s still a lot of work to continually push out your content, which is why Content Marketing Institute recommends that you make it easy for others to share your content for you. By adding quick-share buttons to LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and email, you’ve empowered your audience to become micro-influencers for your brand.

Kimberly Hardcastle-Geddes is president at mdg, a full-service marketing and public relations firm specializing in B2B events. Kate Calderazzo is an account director at mdg, specializing in project management, data, and analytics.

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