| PR Newswire 
Paid, Earned, Search and Social. Every marketing and PR team knows that if you want visibility, you have to promote your owned media through some mix of these four channels. However, are you missing a major opportunity by not connecting these programs together or connecting only one or two of them? Synchronizing the promotion of your content across all channels can lift both your overall traffic and your leads, something we learned when shortening our own sales cycle by 30%. I know what you're thinking: “Great idea, but we could never execute this. Each of these areas are controlled by different groups and we don't always work together.” You don't have to dive all in at once. If you coordinate the multichannel promotion of a single white paper, case study or piece of content, you can use the data points from your test to prove this approach’s value to the rest of your team. Now that I have your interest, let's talk about how to get started. Step 1: Understand the differences between each channel type. Paid Media includes any digital media you pay for, such as PPC, retargeted ads, paid social, and display ads. When contributing to a coordinated marketing program, I try to hit as many paid areas as possible based on budget. If you are limited in regards to which paid media to use, I typically prefer retargeting and paid social. Retargeting enables you to stay in front of prospects even if they don't take action the first time, while paid social can be a great way to target leads by title and type. Earned Media has dramatically changed over the past few years. While traditional media pickup is still very important, journalists, trade reporters, bloggers and other influencers can provide invaluable visibility for your message when they share it with their social media channels, even if they don’t formally cover it. Organic Search is basically all non-paid efforts to improve your natural search results. It takes into account how you write your content, the relevance of your content to the subject you’re targeting, and how your overall website is set up in relation to current SEO best practices. Organic Social includes all of your sharing across your organization’s channels, as well as how shareable you make your owned content. Be sure that all of your content is written in a way that maximizes your audience’s social sharing. 
Step 2: Find content to cross-promote. When deciding which piece of content you’re going to test your cross-promotion on, there are three things to consider. Look at the content you are already running in each of the promotion channels: What content performs well for you? What content is interesting and addresses a key point of concern for your audience? What content already has some promotional overlap? Step 3: Determine which KPIs to measure. Look at the key performance indicators that are important to your leadership and bottom line. Although every organization prioritizes points of measurement differently, I can tell you that some of the KPIs I focus on include: - Overall traffic lift in the marketing program
- Click through rates
- Conversion rates
- A decrease in cost per lead on paid channels
- Significant lifts in a particular channel
Of course, the most telling KPI will be the number of leads that turn into actual opportunities because at the end of the day you want to prove ROI. When defining these KPIs, remember that success is not going to happen overnight. You need to establish a baseline, keep your timeline fluid and set checkpoints to track along the way. Step 4: Coordinate your efforts. Now it’s time for your department’s stakeholders to determine how they’re going to implement the actual cross-promotion. As a digital marketer, my first step is to look at paid and organic channels and align keywords and key subjects to make sure we get the biggest bang in search engine results. Much of the work you do on search can also be applied to your earned media and press release strategy. How you write your press releases and target your media pitches and content syndication can add more relevant links to your search results and lead to a lift in content discoverability. Media pickup and influencer mentions on social and traditional media also send strong signals about your content's quality and your brand's authority on the topic. Teamwork is essential to ensure you coordinate the timing of each channel’s promotion and maintain message consistency across channels. Step 5: Track, attribute and analyze. With all of the hard work that goes into cross-channel programs, you want to make sure that it can all be tracked back to your KPIs. All of our content and promotion teams work very closely with the department’s marketing operations team to determine where lifts in visibility and leads are coming from. Although it can be difficult to measure with full precision the effectiveness of a brand's efforts, our recent article Attribution Modeling's Pivotal Role in Your Marketing Mix details five ways to do it with a reasonable amount of accuracy. When you take the time to put all of the pieces together, you can make quite a difference in the overall performance of your marketing programs. Download Maximize the Reach of Your Message with a Multichannel Plan to learn more about matching the medium to the message. The use cases and best practices detailed in this white paper will help you identify and leverage the right channels to reach your audiences and objectives.  Author Micah Leibowitz is Director of Digital + Event Marketing for PR Newswire, leading the paid digital strategy and working to find the best balance between cost and quality. Follow him on Twitter at @mbldesign
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