Crossmedia marketing is a powerful tool for both traditional businesses and online brands. Read on to learn why this is such a crucial tool and how you can make the very most of it in your own marketing.
Cross-media marketing
Cross-media marketing is marketing that is handled across multiple types of media or with multiple types of media. Perhaps the easiest way to envisage this is to think of an example that many of us may have encountered: cross media marketing as it is used by Hollywood.
Have you ever seen a film advertised that claims that it has extra bonus content available for those that are interested? Consider when the (now pretty old) film Matrix Reloaded came out. This film released alongside a game and a series of animated shorts called The Animatrix. While these weren’t essential viewing, they could fill in gaps in the plot and thereby flesh out the story. And at the same time, they would also serve as marketing for the film because people who played them or watched the cartoons would be engaging with the brand.
We see similar things today for films that offer secrets online, or even via AR codes. And it’s not just Holywood that does this: many different companies will use cross-media marketing to promote their products and services in print, on the web, on video, on TV and more.
The objectives are as such:
- Give users access to exclusive content they can’t find anywhere else
- Allow an element of interaction – through an app for instance
- Make the user feel more engaged and therefore more loyal to the brand
- Give the user more ways to interact with the brand that will suit them
- Use multiple devices
Crossmedia for Internet Marketers
You don’t need the budget of Hollywood to benefit from cross media marketing. Fortunately, it is possible to perform crossmedia marketing in other ways – for instance, simply by sharing more different kinds of media on your site and by having a strong presence on different social media sites and other forms of media across the web.
Here are just atwoexamples of different types of content you can use on your site:
Videos
While you may only use YouTube as a way to look for amusing cat videos, it is actually much more than that and can in fact be used as a search engine to look up facts and just be generally entertained for a while. I discovered this recently when I started watching YouTube while I washed up the dishes to make that job a little less boring. At first I started with TED talks, but soon I was following all kinds of channels on a range of my favourite interests. Now if I want to learn about a new mobile phone that's out for instance, I'll generally choose to watch a video review rather than read one. It's quicker, it's more engaging and it allows me to do other things.
And there are millions of people out there doing the very same thing. Create a video for one of your articles and you will be able to reach people who perhaps aren't sitting down to read, and you'll be able to add a whole new dimension to that article. Better yet, you'll be able to easily bring in lots of visitors from YouTube who otherwise might not have found your site. This can help you engage more with your audience too and in fact, adding a YouTube channel is one of the most effective ways to elevate your brand on the web.
Games and Quizzes
If you're a webmaster or SEO and you can't program then that's something you should learn right away. Programming is an incredibly powerful tool if you work online, and especially if you use it to create more interactive media for your site.
While someone might visit your site, read an article or two and then leave after ten minutes, a video game has the potential to draw them in and keep them on your site for hours. Games aren't appropriate for every kind of site unfortunately, but almost any site can benefit from a quiz or questionnaire. If you have a fitness site then this could be a quiz on 'What Kind of Gym is Right for You', or if you own an SEO site it could be a questionnaire to help you identify your website's 'resilience'. You could even provide tools such as currency converters, BMI calculators or interest calculators. Any of these will help to provide your users with tailored information, they will keep them on your pages for longer, and they will attract attention when someone isn't in the mood to read yet another article (personality questionnaires are particularly popular: we love learning about ourselves).
