One way that many companies grow and diversify is to acquire or launch new brands. If you’re already running a successful company that delivers news content in Houston, what’s stopping you from doing the same in Austin?
Of course, essentially adding a second business to the one you’re already focused on comes with its own set of challenges. While the benefits can be tremendous, it’s also easy to overextend.
Let’s talk about successful multi-brand strategy and, specifically, how running newsletters can help with each market you’re in.
A multi-brand strategy means that a single company has a portfolio of products that are run under different brand names.
For example, you’ve probably heard that Disney owns Lucasfilm and Pixar. Although they are all under the Disney umbrella, each still operates under its own brand name.
Another example is PepsiCo, which also owns brands such as Frito-Lay, Cheetos, Gatorade, Lipton, Quaker Oats, Aquafina, Rockstar Energy Drink, and tons more.
Some companies may also operate under the same brand name, but expand to new markets. This technically isn’t multi-brand, but practically, it can function as such.
Think about a real estate agent who serves Anaheim and then decides to expand to Long Beach. He likely would keep separate lists of leads, one for each city.
Here are a few reasons companies run multiple brands, along with the challenges they can bring.
The most obvious benefit is scaling your business. For example, let’s say you run a very successful newsletter about sports in Oregon, but perhaps your list growth is slowing, and you appear to be reaching a ceiling.
An obvious way to grow would be to launch a newsletter about Washington sports. You already know how to run a successful newsletter, although you’d likely need to hire a writer more familiar their sports scene.
Or, think about a large bank that systematically purchases smaller, local banks across the country. The people at the large bank already have the know-how to run banks, and they can keep the same buildings and employees at those newly acquired locations.
With their resources, they might be able to grow those smaller banks or eventually fold them into one main brand.
If one brand out of many fails, it’s not as catastrophic as it would be to a company with a single brand.
Newfold Digital is a tremendous example of this. One of their most well-known brands is Bluehost, the massive web hosting company.
Well, they also own HostGator—another large web hosting company. Overall, they own more than a dozen hosting and domain registration companies.
If something were to happen to Bluehost (such as a a reputation hit), many of their customers would actually transfer their hosting to other companies owned by Newfold Digital.
Companies with multiple brands (especially in similar niches) can lean on the expertise, people, and even money of the other brands in the portfolio.
For example, the creators of Letterhead built a tool to help manage local newsletters they owned around the country. Once they had the tool built, it became easier to add more newsletters to their portfolio. That tool is what became Letterhead.
Or, consider a brand that only needs a designer for 10 hours per week. That designer could be shared across multiple brands, which would increase employee efficiency.
Brands in niches that complement each other can easily cross-promote. For example, a partnership where Stouffer’s makes a lasagna with a DiGiorno crust on the outside would be fairly simple to accomplish because Nestle owns both brands.
From a newsletter perspective, let’s say you had a fitness newsletter and a nutrition newsletter. You could have those brands effectively run ads for each other to grow both lists.
Going back to the example of a big bank acquiring a small bank, one advantage to this is all the accounts that the small banks have. Not only does the big bank directly profit from more customers, but they also have access to more customer data in different regions. That data is extraordinarily valuable to marketing departments.
In other words, they can instantly have data about a brand-new market instead of trying to build it out over time.
A sense of pride often drives brand managers that operate under the same company. They want to perform better than the other brands in the portfolio and get recognized for their achievements.
In addition, multi-brand companies can incentivize their different brands with contests. It’s an easy way to create friendly (or not-so-friendly!) competition.
Here’s how you can use newsletters to engage your audiences without severely increasing your workload.
Perhaps the biggest challenge with running a newsletter for multiple brands is your time. Adding a new brand or market means maintaining another audience and producing more content.
To combat this, you can repurpose much of the content you use elsewhere inside your newsletter. Or, you can create your newsletter first, and then share that content on your blog or YouTube channel.
In some cases, you can even share some of the same content across newsletters.
Let’s say that you run a newsletter about the music scene Memphis, but also another one about music in Chicago.
While you should certainly have market-specific content, there’s still a ton of opportunity to reuse content in both newsletters.
For example, if there’s a new up-and-coming artist on the national scene, you can write a newsletter about that person and send it to both markets (just with different newsletter branding).
Marketers may worry about duplicating content across websites, but that’s not a worry with newsletters.
Another benefit of newsletters in multiple markets is that you can provide highly relevant information for each market.
Let’s say that you work for the Red Cross and you’re trying to organize local blood drives. A newsletter that keeps people apprised in each market about when and where they can donate or help run a blood drive is highly effective.
This is very common among media companies that put newsletters at the forefront of what they do.
For example, consider 1440. It’s one of the largest newsletters in the world, with millions of subscribers. They decided to launch a second newsletter, so they’re promoting it inside their original newsletter:
Of course, this doesn’t work in every business model. If you’re running location-specific newsletters, you want to keep your lists separate.
But for companies like Forbes, you can promote all your newsletters together and try to get the same subscriber to join several of your lists:
One of the best things newsletters do is position you as an industry expert. Many people don’t go back to websites to check out new blog posts, but they will read emails in their inbox from people they trust.
However, this can be incredibly time-consuming. If you’re running ten newsletters on different topics, you don’t have the time to write all that content from scratch.
That’s the key though—don’t write everything from scratch. You can repurpose content (as described above), but another feature of most newsletters is content aggregation.
You find and share links to relevant news stories. You just provide a sentence or two to summarize the article you’re linking to.
There are tools out there that can help you find relevant content, such as Letterhead’s newsletter creator, which can pull in content from across the web. Then, your newsletter is as fast as writing a short description for each one and sending it out.
Rather than 4+ hours of curating or writing content from scratch, you can assemble a newsletter in 20 minutes.
Things can start to get complicated here. If you purchase a single ESP account and try to use tags to keep audiences separate, things get messy quickly. Plus, your data will be mixed together, making it hard to make brand-specific decisions.
On the other hand, setting up several ESPs also results in inefficiencies. Logging into each one isn’t ideal, and it’s much harder to share template across a brand or measure overall success.
That’s where Letterhead comes in. It’s designed specifically for multi-brand companies that want to send newsletters to different audiences. You can keep your audiences separate yet still see combined or separated data. You can quickly put together newsletters for many audiences with our content-assisting AI.
Schedule a chat with us, and we’ll show you how Letterhead can quickly scale your newsletters.