Promo-Palooza: How To Maximize Your Existing Content & Create A Successful Cross-Platform Promotional Plan
If you’ve ever thought about your personal brand, how your job fits into your personal life, or even how to balance your persona across social media, congratulations! You’ve already thought about cross-platform strategies. Whether you’re a brand, a blogger, or a new employee, what you say matters (we know this!). It goes so much further than what you say, to WHERE you say it. One of the first things I recommend freelancers, influencers, students or budding brands do is assess their platforms for cross-promotion opportunities. Why? Because you never know how your next client, your next job, even a new follower will find you!
Posting to multiple channels, profiles, and even voices can be tricky. The solution is simple, and difficult all at once: you’re looking for a unifying factor. By unifying your content under a common thread, you’re able to seamlessly share messaging from one channel to the next. From a brand perspective, cross-platform promotion is especially important as you usher followers, new and not-so-new, into your funnels (more on how you can implement the best of e-commerce funnel systems into your personal brand development later!). This process involves establishing a clear voice and message across different platforms to ensure that no matter how your customer or audience is reaching you, they are getting consistent information.
Listen along with our founder here:
What can cross-platform promotion do for me?
In a perfect world, when you google your name (or business name), you’d get a neat list of web pages, all about you! The internet doesn’t always work itself out in our favor, which is why any good business owner, marketer, or person of interest is invested in their SEO strategy. Applying cross-platform promotion of content that contains your business name, links to your pages, and relevant topics for your work can help Google understand where you’re coming from, and direct more people to your page when they search for those keywords.
Cross-promotion works in many, more obvious, ways: it directs your existing followers to follow you in your other channels. Trying to grow a newsletter list? Gain followers on a new IG page? Maybe announce a new website? Cross-promotion is the fastest way to let everyone know what you’re working on, while recycling resources that you’re already using on those pages (think: repurposing copy text, or resizing a webpage banner to fit your IG grid).
How do I get this done?
First, I recommend targeting your goal. What are you trying to drive to, and what info do you want to present to help your followers get there? Likewise, you want to think about the impression you’re leaving behind with this kind of promotion. How will these posts become a part of your ongoing brand?
Once you have your ideal outcome set up, you can start to think about the path: how are you setting up a trail of breadcrumbs that leads to your ultimate goal? Think through every platform where your users can find you- now think of the different pathways that take them from that starting point to your ultimate goal. It’s a lot like Marketing Candy Land! With your paths, think about how you’re touching base along the way: you’ll want to present your followers with updates, incentives, and exclusive content that helps them get to the next step.
Keep in mind: you can have multiple goals in the mix! Cross-platform promotion is an ongoing strategy that allows your brand to understand the full impact of your profiles, define which are capable of converting, and funnel the rest of your followers into the highest impact page.
Now you have the pathway- time to fill it with content! Add on-brand assets, branded fonts, logos, and storytelling captions to ensure your messaging is consistent across the board. If you’re promoting a business page on your personal, make sure to tell your followers a bit about your background. If you’re promoting a different platform, like LinkedIn to Facebook, ensure your images are sized for each and incentivize the jump (for example, direct your LI followers to Facebook to enter a giveaway or sign up for your upcoming event).
Finally, consistency is key, so you’ll want to set up and execute all of this content at a cadence that makes sense for your goals, as well as your team’s bandwidth. Cadence helps you work with your platform algorithms (like Instagram’s, ever-changing!) as well as establish a flow of site content for SEO.
Conclusion
If you’re producing content for several different platforms, you’re now maximizing the time and effort you put into your assets, posts, and schedule! Cross-platform promotion not only supports your analytics, helping you understand how users are converting, when, and to where. This kind of promotion also ensures a consistent voice across the board, so that no matter where your followers, find you, they’re receiving the same info across the board.