Written by: Rashmi
Both research data and anecdotal evidence prove that blogs, news publishers, and other websites that create content hugely benefit from giving a seamless multichannel experience to their consumers. Their sales increase, consumer loyalty boosts, and it also gives them a competitive advantage. But the only problem is that it is tricky to efficiently restructure content and create a flawless multichannel experience at the same time.
The biggest reason why many publishers struggle with creating a better multichannel digital experience is that they do not have an organised system to restructure content. In this article, we are going to share a framework that can help you create your reader’s experience seamlessly and integrated across all channels. Read on.
Before jumping straight to how you can create a multichannel experience, you need to know and categorize the platforms that are used by your target audience. One way to categorize channels is by breaking them down into paid, earned, and owned.
Paid channels:
PPC
Sponsored content
Paid social media ads
Influencers
Earned channels:
Brand mentions
Your social media platforms
Owned channels:
Your website or app
Your blog or content hub
Your email list
Having a restructuring and publishing system in place saves you from brainstorming new ideas every time you publish a piece of content. Down below is a three-step system to create a multichannel digital experience:
If you are already publishing content on multiple channels, you need to look at your publication stats and notice what type of content works and what does not. Once you see a pattern of what is working, you need to convert those pieces of content into templates that you can use later.
However, if you are publishing on a channel for the first time and hence do not have publication stats, you can start by doing an audit of your competitors. The good part is that you have to research content templates only once or twice a month.
A good rule of thumb for repurposing multi-channel content is starting from a channel with long-form content and moving towards short-form content from there. For example, you can start by writing a 1000 to 2000-word long post. From the same blog post, you can create a 60-second long YouTube short video and social media posts.
Every publication channel has its own distinctive characteristics and your content needs to be aligned with them. For example, users on your owned channels generally have more attention span and focus. So, you can publish more text-based content than media-rich content in your email newsletters and blog posts.
Aligning your content to specific channels becomes easier if you use the right tools. For example, a headless CMS can seamlessly integrate with other platforms and help you align content without requiring any effort.
An organized system makes the restructuring and repurposing process many times easier. Along with that, having the right set of publication tools is also necessary for creating a better multichannel digital experience. Outdated tools can create fiction in publishing, re-publishing, and scaling the content.
Quintype can help you if you are planning to distribute customized content across multiple platforms. Our Bold CMS creates an easy content creation workflow with features like live preview across all platforms and API integrations with other products.