We’ve Been Doing “Multi-Modal Marketing” Since 2006. We Just Called It Content Marketing.

The practice isn’t new, but the terminology is generating excitement as if it were.

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There’s a term gaining momentum in marketing circles: “multi-modal marketing.” And I keep reading these pieces thinking: this is content marketing. This is what content marketers have been doing for over two decades.

I don’t think the people championing multi-modal marketing are wrong about the practice. Adapting content across formats is genuinely effective. What I find worth examining is whether the new terminology represents a meaningful evolution in strategy, or whether it’s a relabeling of established principles.

What “multi-modal marketing” describes

The prevailing definition: multi-modal marketing is the practice of taking a core piece of content and adapting it across multiple formats and sensory channels (text, video, audio, images, interactive elements) to reach audiences in the ways they prefer to consume information.

This is, functionally, what content marketing practitioners have called “content repurposing” or “atomization” for years. The strategic principle is identical: create one substantive asset, then distribute it across the formats and channels where your audience spends time.

This practice predates the term by decades

The timeline here is worth laying out, because it illustrates just how established this workflow is.

In January 1996, Bill Gates published his “Content is King" essay; arguably the earliest articulation of content as a strategic asset on the internet. By 2001, Joe Pulizzi was using the term “content marketing” to describe the discipline of creating valuable content to attract and retain audiences.

When HubSpot launched in 2006, their entire inbound marketing methodology was built on what we’d now call “multi-modal” principles: write a blog series, compile it into a gated ebook, promote it via email nurture sequences, discuss it in a webinar, and distribute excerpts across social channels. The blog posts, ebooks, and beginner guides were the sales pipeline. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah didn’t call it multi-modal marketing; they called it inbound marketing. But the underlying mechanic was identical: one core idea, multiple formats, distributed across channels.

In 2007, Pulizzi founded the Content Marketing Institute, which spent the next decade publishing extensively on content repurposing and atomization.

When I started my career at a travel agency in 2010, we were already doing this without a specialized term for it. We wrote blog posts that were featured in an email newsletter. Sections of those posts were repurposed on other web pages or syndicated to partner sites. The same content was reformatted into Word documents for sales enablement. We paired written content with photography for social channels. It was simply good content marketing.

For at least two decades, practitioners have understood that you take a piece of content and transform it into the different ways people might want to see, hear, experience, or interact with it. A whitepaper becomes a webinar becomes a blog series becomes an infographic becomes a conference talk. Gary Vaynerchuk built an entire framework around this with his “content pyramid” model. The strategy is well-documented, well-practiced, and until recently didn’t require its own separate terminology.

Why the new terminology is emerging now

If the practice isn’t new, it’s worth understanding why it’s being reframed. I see three contributing factors:

AI has dramatically lowered the production barrier

Tools like GPT-4o, Gemini, ElevenLabs, and a growing ecosystem of video and audio AI tools have made format transformation remarkably efficient. What once required a team of specialists and weeks of production (turning a blog post into a video script, a podcast outline, a social carousel, and an infographic) can now happen in hours. The production has become more accessible, even if the strategy hasn’t fundamentally changed.

The term borrows credibility from AI terminology

“Multimodal” is an AI term. It refers to models that process multiple input types (text, images, audio) simultaneously. By borrowing this terminology, marketers signal alignment with cutting-edge technology. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before: “growth hacking” reframed customer acquisition, “demand generation” reframed lead marketing, and now “multi-modal marketing” reframes content repurposing with an AI-adjacent vocabulary.

The channel landscape has genuinely expanded

Short-form video platforms (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) didn’t exist a decade ago. Podcasting has matured into a mainstream medium. Interactive content tools are more accessible than ever. Google Lens processes billions of visual queries monthly. The number of formats and surfaces where content can live has multiplied, which makes the repurposing workflow more valuable and more complex than it was in 2010.

What has changed

Several things have shifted meaningfully:

Production velocity: AI-assisted workflows compress what was a multi-week, multi-person effort into something a single practitioner can accomplish in a day. That’s a legitimate transformation in operational efficiency.

Search is multimodal: Google, Bing, and answer engines now process and surface text, images, video, and audio. Optimizing for discoverability means your content needs to exist across these modalities; not just for audience preference, but for algorithmic visibility. Google’s relationship with social and forum content has also shifted dramatically. After an on-again, off-again relationship with Twitter’s firehose (first in 2009, renewed in 2015), Google began aggressively surfacing Reddit and forum content in 2024. Reddit’s SEO visibility on Google grew 1,328% between July 2023 and April 2024, according to Sistrix. By May 2026, Google updated AI Overviews to explicitly pull “Expert Advice” from Reddit threads and web forums. The search engine is now actively rewarding content that lives across platforms and formats.

Audience fragmentation: People are distributed across more platforms with more varied format preferences than at any previous point. The average person now uses 6.8 different social networks per month, according to Sprout Social. With over 5.2 billion social media users globally, the imperative to meet audiences where they have intensified. Your content can’t live in one place and expect to reach the people who need it.

AI-native formats: Interactive tools, conversational interfaces, and AI-generated summaries represent genuinely new content surfaces that didn’t exist before.

These are meaningful developments. But they represent an evolution in production and distribution, not a new strategic discipline. The foundational question remains unchanged: What does our audience need, and how do we deliver it effectively?

Why the distinction matters

How we categorize practices affects how we resource them, measure them, and build organizational capability around them.

If multi-modal marketing is treated as a new discipline, teams may build it from scratch (hiring new specialists, creating new playbooks, investing in new tooling) without leveraging the decades of content marketing knowledge that already addresses this exact workflow.

If it’s recognized as content marketing with expanded execution capabilities, teams can build on existing foundations. They can apply proven content strategy frameworks (audience research, editorial planning, performance measurement) while adopting new tools and formats incrementally.

The risk of treating established practices as novel is that you lose the institutional knowledge that makes them effective. Content strategy, editorial calendars, audience segmentation, performance measurement; these disciplines took years to mature. They apply directly to multi-modal work.when does multi-modal become diluted?

When does multi-modal become diluted?

If the average person uses 6.8 social platforms per month, and Google is now surfacing Reddit threads and forum posts alongside traditional web pages, could we achieve nearly the same reach by publishing one excellent piece of content in one place and letting the algorithms do the distribution work?

I’m not sure the answer is always “publish everywhere.” There’s a point of diminishing returns, and I think the multi-modal conversation glosses over it.

Consider a well-optimized blog post that ranks on page one of Google for a high-intent keyword will reach people across devices, get cited in AI Overviews, surface in answer engines, and potentially get shared on social platforms organically. One piece, one format, broad reach. The distribution is built into the discoverability.

Now consider the alternative: you take that same blog post and turn it into a podcast episode, a YouTube video, a LinkedIn carousel, an Instagram Reel, an X thread, and a newsletter. Each of those requires production time, platform-specific optimization, and ongoing maintenance. Each one reaches a slightly different audience segment. But how much incremental reach does format #5 or #6 actually deliver? And at what cost to quality?

The dilution problem

When you spread a single idea across seven formats, you face a few risks:

1. Quality degrades at the margins. The blog post might be excellent. The podcast episode might be solid. But by the time you’re creating the Instagram carousel, you’re compressing nuance into a format that can’t hold it. The idea gets flattened. And it’s not just about format constraints; it’s about community norms. Each platform has its own culture, tone, and expectations. As Ann Smarty wrote about Reddit marketing: “Every Subreddit is a unique world that you don’t see until you spend some time inside it.” Reddit users will punish generic, repurposed content with downvotes and bans. TikTok rewards a completely different energy than LinkedIn. You can’t just syndicate the same message across platforms and expect it to land. Each community requires genuine customization, which means the “efficiency” of multi-modal production is partially illusory. Yes, AI makes it easier to produce seven formats. But making each one resonate with its specific audience still requires human judgment, cultural fluency, and time.

2. Maintenance burden compounds. Each format lives on a platform with its own algorithm, its own best practices, and its own content lifecycle. Keeping seven versions of the same idea current and performing is significantly more work than maintaining one.

3. Audience overlap is higher than you think. The person who reads your blog post on Google may also follow you on LinkedIn and subscribe to your newsletter. You’re not always reaching new people with each additional format; sometimes you’re just reaching the same people in a slightly different wrapper.

Where multi-format genuinely earns its keep

That said, there are clear cases where format diversification delivers real incremental value:

• When the format unlocks a new audience entirely. A YouTube video reaches people who would never read a 2,000-word blog post. A podcast reaches commuters who can’t read at all during their consumption window.

• When the platform has its own discovery engine. YouTube search, Spotify podcast recommendations, and TikTok’s algorithm all surface content to people who aren’t looking for you specifically. That’s true new reach.

• When the format adds depth the original couldn’t. A video walkthrough of a complex process communicates differently than written instructions. An interactive calculator delivers value that static text cannot.

The question isn’t “should we be multi-modal?” It’s “which additional formats deliver enough incremental reach or depth to justify the production investment?” That’s a content strategy question, and it’s one that content marketers have been answering for decades.

Product > Marketing

All of this brings me back to the principle of product-led marketing. You need a good product and genuine product-market fit to shine. Not necessarily just good marketing.

SEO, AEO/GEO, and content marketing all converge on this one point. You can repurpose a mediocre message across seven formats and twelve platforms, but if the underlying product doesn’t solve a real problem for a real audience, the distribution won’t save you. Conversely, a product with genuine fit generates its own momentum. Customers talk about it. They search for it by name. They recommend it in Reddit threads and forum posts that Google now surfaces prominently.

Not everything that is permissible is beneficial; make sure that before you say something in multiple modes, you have something worth saying.

*If the idea of product-led marketing resonates, I wrote a deeper dive on how product thinking strengthens SEO strategy. Check out my book review of Product-Led SEO by Eli Schwartz.