If you think content syndication is just about getting third parties to share your content on their website or platform to reach a larger audience, it’s time to expand your thinking.
That’s because, for the right businesses, content syndication for B2B marketing can be a highly effective tactic for:
- Putting content in front of a more targeted audience
- Generating more leads for a motivated sales team
“Do me a favor, will you?”
In the more traditional definition of content syndication, it is a labor-intensive task for businesses. It requires you to invest a lot of time and energy in:
- Reaching out to different resources ─ such as industry websites, professional organizations, and other subject matter experts (SMEs)
- Convincing them to showcase your content ─ blog posts, white papers, articles, videos, infographics, or any other kind of digital assets
On top of the effort required to create your content in the first place, getting these third parties to agree to publish your content is a huge challenge in itself. Why should they promote your business? What’s in it for them?
Even if your content is featured by a third party, it might be in a very passive way. How, then, can you be sure that your content is actually reaching your target audience?
That is where the more focused, tactical approach to content syndication can be a big advantage.
A focused approach to content syndication for B2B marketing
Here at HELLO Marketing, our approach is to use content syndication as a paid lead generation tactic ─ a method of pushing your content out to an audience that matches your buyer persona criteria, using the media they most often use to consume content. This tactic involves using:
- Extensive databases of people whose interests and behaviors have been identified
- Established networks for hosting or distributing content assets
With a paid content syndication solution, your business can reap the benefits of a structured lead generation process ─ one that will do the following:
- Identify people who fit your buyer persona profiles. This is the first step in any lead generation program and is especially crucial to a B2B content syndication program, where ROI depends on getting good leads.
- Target those who have demonstrated an interest in your subject matter or area of expertise. These are the people who have shown an active interest in products or services like yours and in learning more about it ─ and who, with consistent, targeted nurturing, may prove to be qualified leads.
- Deliver your content to this audience via the channels where they typically access content. It might be a blog series, an e-newsletter or email campaign, downloadable white papers, social media ads ─ whatever routes have a proven track record with your target audience.
- Capture pertinent information from the people who respond to your content. Here, your content syndication solution can collect whatever information is vital to your lead qualifying process. A respondent’s name and role, the company name, industry, location, and size, the specific piece of content they responded to ─ you can specify which data will be most helpful to your team.
- Deliver the information back to your sales team so they can take action. The true measure of success will not be how many leads you get, but how many leads your salespeople can convert. That is what will ultimately give you the best return on a content syndication investment.
5 best practices for paid content syndication
Developing the exact content syndication strategy to use is always a collaborative effort between the business, its marketing team, and a content syndication expert. But at HELLO Marketing, we utilize some best practices we know produce good results:
- Identify who your ideal customer is, including the types of companies and the roles you will be targeting.
- Know what kind of content will matter the most to your target audience.
- Offer content that will meet your target’s needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey ─ awareness, consideration, and decision.
- Have the right sales team in place to leverage the leads captured from your B2B content syndication. (Read more about this in the next section.)
- Commit to a consistent plan for touches, follow-ups, and nurturing as determined by sales and marketing collaboratively, in order to see ROI.
Who is a good fit for paid content syndication?
While paid content syndication delivers leads quickly, it’s important to acknowledge these are warm, top-of-the-funnel leads rather than fully qualified (hot) ones.
That means it will be up to your sales team to follow up with and actively nurture prospects who ─ while they have shown they are interested in your content ─ are probably only in the awareness or consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
It also means the process will take some time and ROI will not be immediate.
Leveraging these warm leads requires hunters rather than farmers: a team of motivated salespeople who are able and willing to pursue leads over the long term and provide the touches necessary to turn a warm lead into a hot one. It also requires:
- A structured sales process that provides the tools your salespeople need to actively work leads
- A marketing team that can support the sales team with additional content, follow-up communications, and other lead-nurturing strategies
Additionally, paid content syndication typically shows the best ROI with high consideration purchases having a somewhat longer sales cycle.
These are products or services that typically require high-touch efforts to begin with, due to complexity, cost, service and installation needs, and other factors that benefit from a more consultative sales approach.
On the other hand, if your sales efforts are more focused on handling inbound calls and taking customer orders for low consideration, high-volume products, the cost per lead for content syndication might not be a good fit.
Is paid content syndication the right tactic for your B2B marketing?
As a paid strategy for boosting lead generation, content syndication for B2B marketing offers a more focused and proactive way to leverage your content. It allows you to access potential customers via a range of different platforms and channels.
And it quickly delivers leads consisting of people who have shown an interest in what you have to offer ─ paving the way for a motivated, top-notch sales team to do what they do best: pursue, qualify, and close!
Is content syndication a good fit for you? Contact HELLO Marketing for a free 20-minute consultation to begin exploring the possibilities. Simply call Lauren at 973.214.5942 or email her at [email protected].