Combining One Animation for Multiple Gameobjects?

Hey guys, thanks in advance for the responses.

I've been working on a project, but I've recently gotten a bit stuck with an issue. I'm relatively new to Unity's animation system, but I've been trying to animate a walk cycle for a mechanical eight-legged walking tank of sorts that I modeled in Maya (and textured in Substance Painter). There are eight legs (4 in the middle contain the same meshes and textures, as do 4 on the outside). I created a basic parenting rig for the legs, and I have created two animation clips for the movement of the two different types of legs. I'm quite satisfied with how the legs move right now, but I'm hoping to add that motion to the rest of the legs.

Here's what I'm hoping to do. I want the tank to move like a spider, which will imply each pair of legs moving the same way a bipedal organism would move, but with each smaller walk cycle for each pair starting at different times. That's the end goal. I don't really care how I get there, but I'm hoping to avoid keyframing each individual leg because that will take an insane amount of time and be a bit more prone to error.

So I was wondering whether there is a way to apply keyframes to different objects? Like have the same motions (rotate 90 degrees in the y direction over 2 seconds, translate 50 units right in 2 seconds, etc) but be able to apply the keyframes that one created for a specific object for a different one? And whether there might be an easy way to combine all of that into one larger animation clip? Or if there's an easier way. As previously stated, I'm quite new to this stuff and hoping to learn.

The model is shown below. Again, thanks for all the help. I'm running on fumes atm, so if I said anything stupid or unclear (and I probably did), please let me know.

 

I doubt you'll find a non-scripting approach, but if you want to try scripting then the AnimationUtility class is probably the place to start looking: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AnimationUtility.html