There are so many different social media channels available to a marketer today for reaching out to and connecting with the audience they want to reach. You may have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media profiles, but how do you coordinate across them to create a plan that will make everything come together?

Why having different social media channels is valuable

The first thing to understand about social media marketing is that different channels are going to reach different audiences and that these audiences are going to interact with your content in distinctly different ways. What works for LinkedIn is going to be very different from what works for Instagram, for example. This is a good thing, because different customers are going to be more comfortable looking at video, reading an article, browsing through pictures, or listening to your podcast, and we're all about reaching as many people as we can with our marketing message.

At the same time, if you're marketing for a small business you don't necessarily have the resources to churn out three or four separate streams of content. Feeding the endless demand for new content on one channel is hard enough, but keeping up with all of the different ways that customers have available to interact with a brand can start to feel overwhelming. The good news is that you don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel every time you sit down to make a content plan, you just need to be inventive about how you adapt your content for each channel.

Repurposing content across channels

Let's say you've written a really great blog post about a topic that's a direct hit for your target audience. You know your piece has the potential to bring in a lot of promising traffic, and you need to figure out how to get the word out across all of the different channels that your brand is active on. How do you leverage the great work you've already done, without committing to creating a mountain of new stuff just to promote what you already have?

The first step is to look at how you simply use the content in your post in a way that will work for each individual channel. Use your article as an outline for a video, which you can put up on Facebook or Instagram. Pull quotes from the post, and turn them into graphics that draw more engagement on Twitter and Pinterest. Break out individual sections as the outline for slightly longer posts on the topic on LinkedIn.

No matter what you do, make sure you build a plan that makes sense. Spend time thinking about what customers you're trying to reach, and where they're most likely to hang out. Look at your analytics to see if what you're doing is actually working. It's tough to manage multiple marketing channels, but if you get creative you can reach new customers who need to hear the message you're putting out there.

This article originally ran on Inc.