If you're in business today, then you're also a content publisher. That means you have to face a big issue for publishers: the proliferation of outlets and audiences for your content.
Where once you could simply put content on your web pages, these days, you're likely to be publishing on multiple social media channels as well as creating downloadable materials.
Multi-channel publishing definitely has challenges.
Your content has to work equally well for short status updates on Twitter or Facebook and for longer articles and whitepapers. And then there's the matter of your readers.
It's a multi-screen world, where people may see your content on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC or even a smart television.
How can you get to grips with this to master multi-channel publishing?
1. Locate Your Audience (and Their Devices)
For a start, before assuming that you have to publish everywhere, it's wise to establish where your audience is. That means using analytics to find out what devices people use to access your content and which of your many online outposts are most effective in bringing them to you. This isn't just "nice to have"; it's an essential step in helping you deliver content to audiences in the places and in the ways that make most sense.
2. Use a CMS
The other issue is managing the content and differentiating among the types needed for different outlets. Here, one of your best options is to use a content management system (CMS). As an article on
Folio Mag points out, a CMS is built to track content, making it the ideal tool for managing the content repository which will be at the heart of your multi-channel publishing efforts. As we have seen before, your CMS can handle
web content,
social media updates,
app content and more.
There are two key aspects of making the CMS work in this way.
3. Segment Your Content
First, you need to set it up so it is easy to identify headlines, article bodies, images, captions and other parts that make up the final output. While we're not going to get too technical, behind-the-scenes your content management system (CMS) will have a way of tagging content so that only the elements that need to be published for a particular content piece go live.
4. Create Great Templates
Second, it's essential to create content templates that pull the appropriate pieces together. You've probably seen something similar at work in your blogging software. Depending on where you are on the site, you might see a title and a short excerpt, a title and a longer excerpt and tags or the whole post. A CMS will do something similar on a much larger scale.
At the start, this will be a work in progress, but eventually with a couple of clicks you wil be able to create an in-depth article, a short blog post, a social media update and a press release from the same basic information. That's when you will have mastered multi-channel publishing.
