| Annemaria Nicholson  With today's audiences exhibiting so much crosschannel behavior, promoting your message across a mix of paid, earned, owned and social channels is the only way to reach new audiences, generate leads and drive brand revenue.
Successful multichannel marketing isn’t easy, though. Research and planning, commitment from your entire department and thorough, actionable reporting are all required. In High-Impact PR Planning that Drives ROI & Supports Demand Generation, we look at how to get started with your content promotion plan — from setting goals and identifying the best channels for promotion to determining which pieces of content you want to share. Once you do this legwork, it's time for the fun part: rolling out your strategy across your marketing channels. Follow this checklist to get brand leaders, content marketing and operations teams, and other stakeholders on board for a successful multichannel launch. Pitch your vision in full. The first step is to present your proposed plan to each channel individually. This gives you an opportunity to answer questions, address concerns and note necessary changes and requirements. Outline the program's goals, what will be promoted, how often promotion will occur, and which channels will be involved. Prioritize and schedule your presentations in order of traffic origination. For example, if most of your traffic is driven by your company blog, it's best to make sure that channel owner has full faith in your plan and doesn't see any objections before moving forward. Once you've spoken with your channel leaders, look at the changes they've requested and their reasons for feedback, then accommodate where possible. This is a team effort with lots of moving parts. Understanding them in advance will help you down the road. 
Determine channel and operations requirements. Identify everything that will need to be done behind the scenes for your program to run smoothly. Your channel leaders are the experts on their channels' needs – work with them to find out what promotional copy and multimedia has to be created, who will be handling it, what their deadlines are, and if there are gaps that you can assist with. Furthermore, so that you can accurately measure and attribute success, every channel's promotion must be accounted for in your automation software with its own trackable link and landing page. Coordinate with your marketing operations team to ensure these things are fully implemented in your demand generation program before your promotions occur. Plan your promotion schedule. With the initial feedback, data, and channel requirements in hand, you can begin to determine the publishing sequence of content across channels. You'll need to be flexible here, as you may run into other scheduling factors: product launches, holidays, large news events, previously planned content, etc. Additionally, keep your mix of paid, earned, social and owned channels in mind. For instance, your social media channels will not only be promoting the program's content. It will also be promoting other channels' promotions like press releases, blog posts, webinars, and videos. If you have to double-up with multiple channel promotions on the same day, try to avoid channels that have a lot of audience overlap or take similar approaches in their promotions. The perfect sequence will be the result of testing. You'll likely need to modify your approach over time to find the channel sequence and date range that drives the most success. Reiterate value and set expectations. In order to rally support from all stakeholders and keep everyone on track, it's important to remember what is at stake: working together to exceed your brand's visibility, engagement and revenue goals. To get continued buy-in, you must have a plan in place to show everyone how they are helping meet those goals. Before you launch, let them know how you'll be reporting performance. Additionally, understand that multichannel marketing takes maintenance. As the program moves forward, you'll continue to gather performance data and stakeholder feedback and make adjustments based on what you uncover. From our own multichannel promotions, we've found that coordinating a closely sequenced promotion across multiple channels can achieve an increase in views of more than 97% and 222% increase in content downloads, as compared to content that is not promoted on a multichannel level and/or not coordinated in an organized sequence. If you build a strategy based on solid data and align your promotion across your marketing team, your entire demand generation program will be given the fuel it needs to soar. Now all you have to do is put in the key and start the engine. Download High-Impact PR Planning that Drives Demand Generation to learn more about picking the right content platforms and promotion channels to achieve your business goals. Author Annemaria Nicholson is a solutions & customer lifecycle marketing manager at PR Newswire. In addition to designing integrated marketing programs for PR Newswire and CNW, she's responsible for promoting the companies' content and multimedia distribution, reporting, and e-commerce solutions. You can contact her via LinkedIn. | 
