John Lincoln / 5 Mins Read
Updated: February 14, 2023
Cross-channel marketing is a vital element of your lead generation strategy. And building an effective cross-channel strategy relies on the foundation of your marketing operations.
Engagement takes more than a knock on a door. A Gartner Research study says campaigns that integrate at least four digital channels outperform single- or dual-channel campaigns by 300%. At the same time, 46% of marketers say the video is their most successful content. The cross-channel video makes your content strategy even more tenacious. Here's how to use it to your advantage.
The Quality of Your Video Is Everything
Today, consumers seem to be leaning more toward casual videos that show an authentic vibe, rather than entirely professional clips that feel artificial. But there's a fine line between "authentic" and "lazy," so just be sure to assess your audience to see what kind of content they regularly consume.
Even if you're going for an authentic vibe, you want your video quality to be on point. Fortunately for video marketers, today's smartphones are at a premium level. We're talking 4K on the go, and video editing software in the form of an app. It's easy enough to bring your moving vision to life, even with a low budget.
Hit All Your Favorite Channels, & Tailor Your Video to Each
You can make one seriously awesome video, but if you fail to optimize it for each sharing platform individually, your content won't spread like seeds in the wind the way you hoped. And because each social platform wants to keep users on their site (duh, right?), they give preferences to native uploads, so you'll want to upload your video to each site separately.
Here are some steps you can take to deliver your video across channels, seamlessly and efficiently.
Start with your YouTube channel. Once you create your video, optimize it for the ultimate video-sharing platform, and use this as a home base for your content. You can use this video to embed in any long-form blog posts you may create in the future, too.
For accessibility and SEO, have your video script transcribed into the comments of the video? If you don't want to include the entirety of your monologue, you can make it more concise by summarizing the main points of the video. Whatever you choose, a transcription is a great way to be inclusive while also maximizing your video's SEO capabilities.
92% of marketers use Facebook for advertising. With such a large proportion, you can see why we recommend making Facebook your video's next stop.
Upload it fresh to Facebook, but make sure to upload it to your video library. This allows you to direct it to your business page's feed and Facebook Watch. Consider adding it to your Facebook story, as well.
Even though a mere 10% of Facebook users have adopted the story feature in their scrolling routine since the website released the feature in 2016, Facebook has about 2.6 billion active monthly users, so that's still a ton of people.
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, making mobility between the two platforms more seamless than before. This is great for businesses taking on cross-channel video marketing. You can actually repost your video using the same size specs, which makes your job easier.
One note: You're better off uploading your IGTV videos on your desktop. That way, videos can be up to an hour long instead of the 15 minutes that mobile allows.
Use the caption space to link back to any long-form blog post, landing page, or other forms of content that you may want to promote. Just keep in mind that you want them to be relevant to the story you're trying to tell, not just sales-y.
Because of Instagram's multifaceted feature network, you can cross-promote your cross-channel video in multiple places throughout a single platform. No wonder Instagram users spend an average of 53 minutes a day on the site — it's designed to keep them on!
Share your IGTV content to your feed during the posting process. Users will be able to see a minute-long snippet before clicking through to the full video. Once you're done, add it to your story (you don't want to miss out on the 500 million accounts scrolling Instagram stories every day).
Consider sharing bite-sized video clips in your story to engage viewers without making them press another spot on the screen, then offering a shared post or swipe-up link to access the full video.
A lot of businesses find success on LinkedIn, especially B2B companies or brands catering to professionals in a particular industry. Don't forget the native upload here, as well. LinkedIn favors posters that keep users within the site.
Videos can be a maximum of 10 minutes long, but you may want to keep it even shorter. You can repurpose your YouTube content, so long as it's relevant within the professional networking sphere.
Make use of popular LinkedIn hashtags and private groups, when necessary. Tag any businesses or experts who collaborated in the process, as that will let your video show up on their entire network's feed.
Twitter isn't messing around. Here, your videos only have a minute to show their stuff, so you'll want to choose the most enticing parts of the scene.
The cool thing about Twitter, however, is that you can post a series of tweets to tell a longer story (AKA, a Twitter thread). In fact, evidence suggests that threads perform better than tweets with a link. Either way, just be sure to include relevant hashtags and tag collaborators for maximum engagement — and contribute to the conversation when you receive replies.
We've got one last stop on the cross-channel video train, and it's your subscriber's inbox.
Consider giving your newsletter readers a quick (actually quick) synopsis of your video before linking to the video itself. This is an excellent way to beef up your email content while simultaneously driving leads in the direction you want them to go.
Long-form blogs and videos go together like PB&J.
A complementary long-form blog helps bring traffic to a video in the form of SEO. It also serves as a way to add context and legitimacy to your brand (there's something about an in-depth piece of content that tells a story of its own). You can embed your video within the content and link back to your blog post on social media from time to time.
As for infographics and other custom visuals, they can serve as images for social media platforms or cover photos for your video's thumbnail. They're easy to digest and reel in engagement from the get-go (probably because people retain 80% of visual information after a few hours, as opposed to only 25% of written text).
Long story short, multi-channel marketing should also mean multimedia marketing.
Once your cross-channel video has hit the web, consider repurposing your video dialogue for your brand's podcast. If you don't have a podcast, that's fine, but it is a great channel to add to your media network. This helps you spread the same messaging even further — or perhaps tweak it to cater to current events — ultimately broadening your campaign's reach.
We all love the idea of organic virality, but the truth is a lot more calculated. Your video will go a lot farther across channels if you invest in paid ads and targeted outreach. Consider the following options for promotion:
Not only does cross-channel video boost engagement, but it also allows you to deliver nuanced content for buyers in every part of the sales funnel. From short snippets on social media that promote brand awareness to long-form explainers on YouTube that close the gap, you're hitting every mark.
It's effective, it's efficient, and it's fuel to your fire — knowing how to use cross-channel video to drive more leads than you can handle is a skill any digital marketer should embody.
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John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018 & 2019 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and winner of the coveted Search Engine Land "Search Marketer of the Year" award.
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