“Teamwork makes the dream work.” “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” These timeworn adages highlight the value of joint efforts in achieving goals, and they’ve been proven time and again across countless tasks, generations, and disciplines. Modern marketing is no exception.
Today’s consumers encounter and interact with brands across multiple touchpoints— from billboards to emails to all their favorite social feeds—so it’s essential to ensure all your platforms are working together in a cohesive strategy to advance your brand. A study by Harvard Business Review found that nearly 75% of retail customers engaged with a brand on multiple channels before making a purchase.
With every engagement, audiences are weighing brand trust, and that brand trust has become a deciding factor in purchasing decisions for the majority of consumers. This means that cross-platform marketing is an essential approach to brand-building and reaching audiences whose attention and engagement are fragmented across multiple touchpoints. The challenge here is creating a unified narrative across all these platforms while adapting content to fit the audience and tone of each one.
What is Cross-Platform Marketing?
Today’s consumers don’t engage with brands in just one place: they move continuously between Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, email, and countless other channels. Creating a cross-platform strategy means telling your singular brand story across multiple channels to present a seamless brand experience for your audience.
In a survey of more than 400 brand management experts, Lucidpress predicted that businesses that consistently maintain their brand enjoy a 10 to 20 percent uptick in revenue. A consistent brand message, tone, and visual identity across all channels creates brand recognition, and consistency over multiple engagements builds trust. Conversely, a disjointed brand presence can lead to confusion and reduce brand credibility when your audience’s experience from one channel to another doesn’t match their expectations.
It’s important to remember, however, that cross-platform doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all. Each social platform, digital channel, or analog touchpoint has its own unique audience behavior, content format, and engagement style. A good strategy requires a strong core message, clear goals for each platform you use, and an understanding of how your audience engages with those platforms. In our work with clients like the American Kennel Club, we’ve found a few keys to building a successful cross-platform marketing or advertising strategy: consistency, differentiation, and resourcefulness.
Keys to Successful Brand Storytelling Across Platforms
Creating Consistency
A customer who sees an ad on Instagram and later visits your brand’s website should feel like they are experiencing the same brand personality and story. Elements like logos, color palettes, brand voice, and storytelling themes can all contribute to a consistent brand experience across platforms.
To help internal teams and external partners maintain alignment throughout your organization, we recommend compiling brand guidelines that outline your key brand elements and how to apply them across specific touchpoints with your audiences.
Tailoring and Targeting
Once you’ve established your core story, messaging themes, and elements of your visual identity, you can begin tailoring your content to the platforms you’ve identified as relevant to your brand strategy (i.e., the platforms where your target audience is most active).
Every platform serves a different purpose, and users engage with content differently based on the platform’s unique characteristics. By focusing on a few platforms and tailoring your content to align with the preferred formats and engagement styles of each one, you’ll reach your audience more effectively—and save yourself a lot of time and money in the process.
- Known for its viral, short-form content. TikTok is fast-paced, entertaining, trend-driven, and essential for reaching Gen Z and millennials.
- Visual storytelling, aspirational content, and influencer collaborations are key here. Focus on high-quality images, short videos, and stories.
- A broad user base generally in older demographics and ideal for sharing articles, videos, and community-building content.
- Geared toward professionals and B2B marketing. Focus on thought leadership, industry insights, and professional development.
- Go-to platform for long-form video content. A vast and diverse audience makes it ideal for storytelling, tutorials, and in-depth brand experiences.
- Still a big driver of engagement for a variety of demographics and suited for personalized messaging, direct calls-to-action, and deep brand engagement.
Reusing Resources
The most successful multi-platform storytelling balances consistency with adaptability. A well-planned content strategy ensures that your brand’s message is reinforced across multiple channels while being optimized for each platform’s strengths, but that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel for every piece of content you create.
A great approach is to create a “hero” piece of content and then adapt it for different platforms. For example, if you have a long-form YouTube video showcasing your brand story, here’s how you could repurpose or tailor it for use across other platforms:
Find out more about how we applied these tips and tailored core messaging into a cross-platform advertising campaign for our friends at the American Kennel Club.
Bringing Your Brand Story Together
Great brand storytelling isn’t confined to a single platform. It should flow seamlessly across multiple channels, engaging audiences wherever they are. By maintaining brand consistency, adapting content for platform behaviors, and implementing cross-channel strategies, brands can create powerful, cohesive narratives that drive engagement and loyalty.
If you’re ready to refine your cross-platform storytelling and drive growth, the experts at Leap are here to help. Our team has firsthand experience creating cross-platform advertising that ensures our clients’ stories remain compelling, consistent, and engaging no matter where consumers encounter their brand. Let’s craft a strategy that makes your brand unforgettable—wherever your audience finds you.
