Multichannel publishing: Strategies, best practices and the role of structured content

Highlights

You’ll learn about multichannel publishing strategies, best practices, and the role of structured content.

• Strategies: Adapt content for various platforms to enhance reach
• Best practices: Create a content strategy, use a headless CMS and automate the process
• The role of structured content: It facilitates content reuse and enhances consistency

Opt for a headless CMS to elevate your content strategy with multichannel publishing.

With growing content needs and the adoption of new devices, businesses are turning to multichannel publishing to keep up with their customers. Multi-channel publishing enables businesses to create content once and format it in various formats for use on different platforms.

Yet, surfacing content on multiple channels comes with unique challenges. For one, it is hard to maintain relevance and consistency. Hence, brands need to have content in a structured format, making it easy for humans and computers to read. Structured content is the result of content modeling.

What is content modeling?

Content modeling is the process of defining the structure of your content at a granular level. It provides the guidelines for structured content and ensures you can reuse and adapt content to different platforms. A content model may include reusable blocks like headlines, images, and text blocks. 

Benefits of content modeling in multichannel publishing

Content modeling provides a blueprint that guides content creators and developers in organizing and publishing content. It also offers other benefits, such as:

• Consistency across channels: With a content model, your content is well organized across all platforms. That makes it easy to manage and maintain over time.
• Better scalability: A content model allows you to add new content types or attributes as needed, accommodating growth and changes in your content strategy.
• Efficient content reuse: A content model allows you to enjoy the benefits of dynamic personalization. It breaks content into smaller pieces, making it easy to adapt to reuse.
• Collaboration: Content modeling provides a shared understanding of how content should be structured and presented, promoting collaboration between developers, designers, and content creators.

Key components of effective content models

Effective content models consist of three core components:

• Content types: These are the different content categories, such as articles, product listings, or case studies. Each content type has specific rules and structures tailored to its purpose.
• Attributes: These are the specific details within each content type, like titles, descriptions, images, and metadata. Attributes provide relevant content information and ensure that every piece is complete.
• Relationships: Content relationships express how content types are interconnected. For instance, a blog post may link to a product page. Content relationships support scaling, as you can add new pieces to existing ones to meet new demands.

Structured content for multichannel publishing

A structured content approach decouples content from format. It organizes content into distinct reusable blocks, making it easy to create once and publish everywhere (COPE). It follows a predefined relational content model.

For instance, in a blog article, components like titles, subheadings, bylines, and tags are structured so that each element can be reused and repurposed across various sections of your website. Examples of structured content models include:

• Topic clusters: These organize content around a central theme. They link related pieces of content and thereby improve SEO and user navigation. This model helps you create comprehensive, interconnected content on specific subjects.
• Component-based models: Component-based models break content into reusable parts. These components can include headers, body text, images, and calls to action. You can mix and match these elements for different channels. This also helps you save time.

Case studies

Taxfix

Taxfix experienced disconnected content management and a lagging customer experience with WordPress and Elementor. The system was slow and required enormous manual effort. They needed to streamline content management.

Switching to Contentstack’s headless CMS enabled them to streamline content development and improve customer experience. Contentstack provides prebuilt content models that support multichannel publishing. It improved the speed of Taxfix's content creation and allowed them to orchestrate over 300 content variables quickly. Content updates also went from two weeks to five minutes.

Teuber said. “We can use the same logic, we have all the components, the structure, the headers, it’s all way more scalable. I remember the designers were a little skeptical at the beginning, but now they are huge fans!” 

Read more to see how Taxfix streamlined content management with Contentstack’s headless CMS.

Miami Heat

With the Tridon CMS, Miami Heats incurred high costs and could not scale or customize content. They also found it difficult to deliver content to smart and mobile devices.

Contentstack’s headless CMS provided structured content modeling features that allowed them to personalize content for publishing on various platforms. It allowed them to tailor offers and content to fans, and sales grew by 100%.

Matthew Jafarian, Executive Vice President, said, “The best part was that the new platform is customizable to meet all our content team’s needs, without requiring highly complex development.” 

Read more about how the Miami Heat delivers real-time personalized experiences.

Implementing a multichannel content strategy

Aside from increasing brand visibility, a multichannel content strategy improves customer engagement and drives conversions. Here are the steps to implement one:

• Identify goals: Clarify your objectives as the first step, which enables you to find the right audience and craft the right message.
• Understand your audience: Research the preferences and behaviors of your target audience by analyzing survey responses, analytics, and customer feedback.
• Build a content calendar: Create a schedule for your content creation and distribution. Plan your content themes, content types, and even the publication dates.
• Automate and track the process: Use marketing automation tools to schedule your posts and content delivery. Also, track your KPIs to ensure they align with your goals. 

Tools and software for multichannel publishing

To support your strategy, leverage tools and software designed for multichannel publishing. These tools help manage content distribution across various platforms:

• Headless CMS: A headless CMS like Contentstack separates content storage from presentation and uses APIs to deliver content to multiple platforms. It also provides prebuilt structured content models that support multichannel publishing.
• Buffer: Buffer is a tool for managing multiple social media accounts from one place. It also allows you to schedule posts, analyze metrics and join their support.
• CoSchedule: Coschedule offers a marketing and content calendar that lets you plan, organize, and schedule content and social media campaigns.
• Hootsuite: Hootsuite provides a single dashboard for monitoring and managing social media interaction.

Measuring success in multichannel publishing

To measure success in multichannel publishing, focus on key performance metrics that reveal how well your content resonates across platforms:

• Audience engagement: Track the likes, shares, comments, and interaction rate. This lets you know which content types will likely generate the highest engagement.
• Content reach: Track the number of people who can see your content. That way, you can understand if you need to optimize or improve it for better SEO.
• Conversion rates: Track how many users perform the right action. This makes your content directly connected to business goals.
• User feedback: Obtain ideas from user comments, reviews, and feedback. This information enables you to align your content strategy with your customers' needs.
• Interaction patterns: Find out how people interact with particular content on various media channels. This helps develop better and more suitable content for each of the employed channels.

Multichannel publishing best practices

To master multichannel publishing, you must apply certain best practices to ensure uniform and efficient content distribution across the various platforms.

• Have a consistent content strategy: The message, tone, and brand voice should each be uniform for every platform. This consistency sealed recognition and identity with your audience.
• Choose a headless CMS: A headless CMS supports multichannel delivery. It separates content storage from presentation and uses APIs to deliver content to multiple platforms.
• Automate content distribution: Automation reduces manual effort and ensures content is timely. Use scheduling features to optimize posting times for each channel.

FAQ section

What is multichannel publishing?

Multichannel publishing is creating one piece of content and adapting it for publishing on different channels.

How do content management systems facilitate multichannel publishing?

A headless CMS separates its back end from the front end. So, you can create and optimize content in the back end and surface it to different front-end channels via APIs.

What is an example of a multi-channel content strategy?

You could write a blog post and, after publishing it, create a summary for your email list. You can also then repurpose the same content for your social media or create an infographic out of it.

Learn more

A robust multichannel publishing strategy enables you to reach customers on multiple digital touchpoints. It supports content reuse, saving time and increasing efficiency. 

A headless CMS separates content storage from its presentation, enabling you to deliver content to multiple channels via APIs. Contentstack offers prebuilt content models and a headless CMS for seamless multichannel publishing. Talk to us today to get started.