For both B2B and healthcare marketers, lead generation must be a multi-channel effort. Smart cross-channel marketing campaigns play to the strengths of each platform and then bring various tactics together to deliver one unified, cohesive message.
Do you want to get smarter about cross-channel optimization? Consider how these two popular marketing tools can be amplified and optimized across marketing channels.
Whitepapers about your company’s area of expertise are a great way to build thought leadership and capture leads. But if you’re simply putting a whitepaper up on your website and waiting for the contacts to roll in, you’re doing your brand a disservice. To amplify your whitepaper’s impact, start with social media. Consider publishing excerpts of your white paper as educational long-format articles on LinkedIn, both via your own feed and through targeted LinkedIn groups, and link to a download of the complete piece at the end of each article. For some brands, Twitter, Facebook and even Pinterest can also be valuable places to share whitepaper content. Explore using insights from your white paper to create an infographic to share on Facebook or Pinterest, or creating Twitter Cards that to drive clicks and downloads of your content on that network.
Your company can further promote whitepaper content on a platform you own: the company blog. On this channel, try expanding on a few points you made in your white paper over the course of a series of posts, and again link back to the downloadable content.
While focusing on your own properties has its benefits, you may find that you need to reach outside of your immediate network to give your whitepaper the exposure it deserves. Consider partnering with a leading media outlet to run a targeted, email-based lead generation campaign, or work with a trade publication in your industry to secure publication for a condensed version of your whitepaper.
Across all of these tactics, ensure your message is consistent. Choose a few compelling thoughts from your whitepaper and then tailor them to work within the rules and limitations of each channel.
With live streaming tools like Periscope and Meerkat surging in popularity, everyone is buzzing about online events. But what if your brand is focused on in-person live events? Can you still tap into the potential of an online audience? You can, but you’ll have to be strategic to ensure content that was meant to be experienced live is appealing in an online context.
Consider creating a “highlights reel” video of your event for use on YouTube and your website. Instead of reposting this content in its original format on all your social channels, create optimized clips of various lengths and formats that take advantage of the strengths of each network.
If you handed out brochures or one-pagers at the event, share these as downloads on your site alongside video content. Introduce them with related blog posts. Adapt “snackable” versions of these materials into graphics for use on Facebook and Twitter and accompany them with short clips of the longer video you posted on YouTube.
On LinkedIn, share a recap of the event with your professional network or start a followup conversation about it in a LinkedIn group you moderate. Use insights gained from conversations you had there to write more about the current state of your industry.
Today, the opportunities for building an audience and sharing your company’s message are nearly endless. The key is to educate yourself about the strengths of each channel you choose and create a strategy that maximizes them.
Photo credit: David Terrar via Flickr Creative Commons
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