By Dorothy York, President and CEO of North American Precis Syndicate (NAPS)
Implementing a strategy for multichannel communication starts with following a path through the decision making process for choosing, and connecting, with influencers, quickly and intelligently.
To maximize the return on your investment in paid, earned, shared and owned media, for the messages management care about most, you need to identify the goals of your program, and the influencers who can help you to reach your target audience.
Here are a few steps to take for the best goal oriented outcomes:
1- Listen for trending topics. You can tune in to the millions of conversations happening online and in traditional media to get insights about your audience and your brand. With the right online tools, you can listen to millions of daily news stories across online, broadcast and social channels, tens of thousands of hours daily of broadcast, more than 10,000 print publications and millions of online news websites, blogs and forums. You can gain valuable insights, aggregate trending and emerging topics, discover influencers, and learn about brand or competitive information. You can get a better understanding of your brand impact by finding out what people are saying about it.
2- Target and build relationships with key influencers. You can harness a wealth of data and predictive analytics to tailor content delivery by audience and channel. Influencers can help drive the conversation in your markets, so you can target the right audience. There are millions of media contacts, outlets and editorial opportunities to choose from. There are hundreds of thousands of digital influencers which could potentially be discussing your most important trending topics and helping you to generate leads or inquiries.
3- Create an earned media and content strategy. You can attract influencers and industry experts to your brand with compelling content that showcases the value of your brand. You can amplify the results of your programs, utilizing an integrated content calendar. You can establish your spokesperson as an expert with a high-impact, compelling message to show thought leadership, with your helpful market research.
4- Engage your audiences across all channels. You can maximize the impact of your content with multichannel promotion, easily, with a trusted distribution system. You can trigger market demand through a network of tens of thousands of media points. You can boost the visibility of your content with thousands of websites, millions of social followers, and thousands of broadcast media channels.
5- Analyze performance and attribute impact. You can access the right analytics for you to continuously optimize strategy. Management will be most impressed if you can demonstrate the financial impact of your program and how your efforts have helped to achieve the goals of your organization. Customizable charts and graphs help to illustrate the social, digital and traditional media success. You can focus on the stories that have the most impact on your brand and reputation, to continue and increase efforts in those areas in the future.