Today people no longer use a single channel in order to access a brand. Instead, they use multiple channels which may vary from hour to hour and day to day. In order to best engage and connect with your given audience, people have found that creating a cross-channel brand story is most effective. Yet to properly execute this marketing strategy you must input a lot of thought and effort. Simply throwing a brand story out on multiple channels is not enough. There are other things to take into consideration.
Plan Thoroughly
Prior to ever engaging a cross-channel brand story you should take your time to thoroughly research and plan your execution. Look at what is trending amongst your followers. What are they currently interested in, and what is currently going on amongst those in your business niche. What types of stories are doing the best, and which are not doing well at all. Thorough research can help you to come up with a truly successful cross-channel brand story versus one which gets pushed to the side.
Evoke Emotion
First and foremost, your cross-channel brand story must evoke some kind of emotion in your followers. You cannot create a dry, dull story because it will not prompt your followers to explore your brand on other channels. In fact, it may deter them from exploring your brand at all, even on the channel they most engage with you on. Which emotion it evokes should be determined through research. Find out what your followers are most likely to connect to, and use that. It could be any type of strong emotion, even humor.
Make The Content Useful
The content you offer on your cross-channel brand story needs to be useful. You must ensure that it is something your audience needs or wants to know, or else it will never produce engagement. During your research phase you should have come up with ideas on what would most benefit your audience. If you don’t have useful content, no one is going to be engaged or interested… at all.
Make The Story Accessible
You could end up investing countless amounts of time and money on your cross-channel brand story just to have it fail miserably because no one ever knew it existed. This is why it is of the utmost importance to make the story accessible to your audience. Promote it across the various channels, advertise it on the first page of your website or blog, and use any possible means to let your audience knows it exists. No matter which channel they access your story from they should be able to do it with ease- no hoops to jump through.
Be Consistent
One of the number one items which make up a brand story in general is consistency. Your story must be consistent across all channels, or else it isn’t really a cross-channel brand story. While the way it is presented may change based on the main communication type of the various channels, the story should always remain the same.
