Content syndication will turn your best content into a powerful lead generation tool.
Your content can be used to educate, engage, and qualify leads before they even visit your website for the first time.
If you’re looking to grow your lead pipeline by leveraging your content, this article is for you.
We’re going to look at what B2B content syndication is, why you should be running content syndication campaigns, and show you how you can be successful.
Ready?
Let’s get into it.
What is Content Syndication?
Let’s start by defining what content syndication is.
Content syndication is the process of distributing your content in a range of ways to reach your target audience.
B2B marketers use it so their content has a bigger impact on lead generation. It can be a vital part of prospecting and engaging with leads, and provide them with huge value.
In many ways, it’s a combination of content marketing and sales prospecting.
Popular methods of B2B content syndication include telemarketing, cold email, cross-posting content on LinkedIn, and running PPC ads.
My content already generates traffic, why should I bother with content syndication?
So, you already have amazing content and get consistent traffic.
Most marketing teams rely on their buyer persona searching for a relevant query, then visiting their article. From there, they've set up an email capture to qualify the reader, and the lead gets nurtured in an ongoing email campaign.
This type of strategy does work.
But, it also means you’re waiting, hoping that your ideal customer is going to search for your article at the right time, then be happy to give you their contact details.
You’re also hoping that your article is ranking in Position #1 on Google when your prospects are searching.
Even if you rank in position #2, you’ll be seeing a 20% lower clickthrough rate (CTR) than the top result gets.
You can also send your latest content to your existing email subscribers to get more eyes on it. This can work well for nurturing, but you’re not going to be finding new leads by only talking to your existing list.
That’s where content syndication comes in.
Boost the ROI of your content
As we mentioned, content syndication combines content marketing tactics (creating great content that provides a ton of value for your ideal customer) and combines that with a more proactive approach including tactics like telemarketing and cold email.
You can start matching your best content with the most relevant prospects for your business who are in the market for your solutions.
Content syndication will boost the return on investment (ROI) of your content by using it to funnel leads into your pipeline.
What are the Most Popular Methods of B2B Content Syndication?
There are two main methods to get eyes on your content. You can go with inbound methods or outbound methods.
Let’s take a look at what those entail.
Inbound Content Syndication: Popular Tactics
Co-Marketing
Co-marketing is when two companies cooperate on a project for mutual benefit.
You'll need to identify companies selling to similar customers to you to find a relevant co-marketing partner.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you need to work with your competitors. A rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t co-market with companies competing for the same keywords as you in organic search.
Here are some popular ways of co-marketing:
• Co-authoring a whitepaper that both companies share with their audience.
• Co-hosting a webinar on relevant pain points your customers have.
• Hosting an event that your ideal customers will want to attend
Social Media
You should be promoting your content throughout your company accounts, but you should also be trying to secure shares from other popular accounts with relevant audiences.
This goes hand-in-hand with co-marketing as your partner company will likely be sharing your content on their social media channels (and you’ll be doing the same).
Guest Blogging
There are a host of benefits to guest blogging. You’ll see SEO benefits from new backlinks, and your content will be put in front of relevant audiences.
Make sure the sites you guest post on are read by people similar to your ideal customer. Otherwise, you're wasting your time.
PPC Promotion
PPC is the fastest way to drive relevant traffic to your content. Popular platforms to run paid campaigns with B2B content include Facebook and LinkedIn.
On both LinkedIn and Facebook, you can narrowly target your ideal audience and determine how much you want to spend. It’s a great way to test if your content resonates with your audience before investing more time and money into promoting it.
Outbound Content Syndication: Popular tactics
Telemarketing
One very effective method of B2B content syndication is by calling relevant prospects and offering your content to them.
There’s a high barrier to entry with this method. You will need to have a large set of B2B data with accurate contact data. And, your team will need to be confident on the phone if you expect anyone to engage with your team.
At Internal Results one of our most effective tactics includes asking qualifying questions to prospects to gauge how ready they are to buy, and how warm of a lead they are.
Cold Email
Already know who your ideal customer is and just need to get your content in front of them?
If you're sure they're interested, then you can use cold emails to distribute your content.
After a phone call, an email is the most direct way to contact your prospects. If you don’t have the contact information you need for a cold email campaign, Internal Results can help you source it.
Pro tip: Combine your outbound efforts with Intent Data
Using Intent Data is the best way to identify warm leads.
Intent data can help you uncover who is looking at your website, and what content they’re looking at.
Our intent data can identify prospects researching topics relevant to your company, enabling you to reach out.
If you can see a prospect spent time on your pricing page, then it would be an ideal time to reach out with a whitepaper that reinforces the benefits of your solution.
What are the benefits of B2B Content Syndication?
It is a powerful strategy, but often underutilized.
Salesbox asked over 700+ demand generation marketers why they use content syndication. You can view their slide deck here. We'll use this research to guide our section on the most popular benefits.
Let’s look at some of the key benefits the marketers found and discuss them in detail.
1. Directly Reach Your Target Audience
As we mentioned already, one of the challenges with content marketing is content distribution. Often, you're left hoping that your prospects see your content at the right time.
B2B content syndication removes the guesswork.
Intent data enables you to identify warm leads in the market for your solution.2
Then, you can reach out with a call or cold email to engage with prospects, show them relevant content, and ask qualifying questions.
Asking qualifying questions during your outreach will help you determine lead quality, and plan future contact.
At Internal Results we specialize in generating warm leads via telemarketing and cold email, using your best assets. Get in touch to see how we can help with your B2B content syndication.
2. Lead Generation
B2B content syndication turns your content into a lead generation machine.
With inbound methods, you can leverage 3rd party platforms to can tap into relevant audiences.
The outbound methods are often regarded as being even more powerful than the inbound methods, but they are more difficult (as any sales team knows, cold calling and cold emailing can be complicated!).
Outbound content syndication lets you connect directly with warm leads, using your best content to drive the conversation. You can qualify and build a good relationship with leads from the get-go.
3. Prospect Qualification
How would you like to qualify leads before your sales team even reaches out?
With outbound B2B content syndication tactics, you can.
With cold email and telemarketing, you can qualify prospects with questions and check if they’re a sales qualified lead (SQL).
Want to outsource your cold email and telemarketing content syndication? Internal Results can help.
4. Brand Awareness
Content syndication can generate massive brand awareness.
Securing guest posts on authoritative sites, or having your article featured in a leading industry newsletter will help you tap into new audiences.
Even if audiences don’t convert immediately, your brand name is now known to them. Your marketing efforts will resonate more with them in the future.
Your telemarketing campaigns will connect you with qualified prospects, where you can offer valuable content.
Even if those prospects don’t convert immediately, you’ll be on their radar and can nurture them towards a sale later.
5. Credibility
Authoritative guest posts, new backlinks, social media mentions, co-hosting interesting webinars, and conversations with prospects over email or phone calls will grow your credibility.
Content syndication is a great way to build credibility in your target market. It takes effort, but if your customers are more confident in choosing you over a competitor it's worth it.
6. Backlinks
Guest posting on relevant and authoritative websites is a key component of many B2B marketing strategies.
Most sites let you link back to your website from guest posts or your author byline. This results in backlinks that will provide site-wide SEO benefits and grow your traffic.
It can be time-consuming to secure guest post placements if you do it in-house. Using a content syndication service can help you speed this process up.
7. Traffic
A side effect of any good B2B strategy will be a growth in traffic to your website.
However, traffic is often a vanity metric and you should still focus on the number of leads your campaign is generating above everything else. But, we definitely won’t complain about more traffic!
What types of content work best?
According to the Salesbox research, here are the most popular types of content used in B2B content syndication strategies, as well as how many marketers say they’re using each type of content.
• 85% of marketers use whitepapers
• 60% of campaigns include webcasts
• 50% of campaigns include creating infographics
• 35% of campaigns include writing articles
These content types can all be used in B2B content syndication. But, what matters most is the quality and tactics you use to distribute them to your target prospects.
Tracking the success of your Efforts
As with every other part of your marketing, you’ll need to track the success of your campaigns.
There are several key metrics you can look at.
Most businesses will have different goals, so we’ll look at a few of the most popular ways to measure success.
1. Return On Investment (ROI)
The most fundamental metric you’ll want to track is the ROI of your content syndication campaign.
The key here is that you need to decide on the metrics of success. For many B2B companies, this will be the revenue your campaign generated versus the cost per lead.
If revenue isn’t the main goal of your campaign then you need to interpret this differently. For example, you may run a campaign based on generating downloads of your new whitepaper. Therefore, you could judge success by the number of downloads.
You should determine what success means before starting the campaign, and then you can measure ROI.
2. Lead Volume
The more leads you generate, the better.
Attributing conversions to content that isn’t hosted on your website, can be tricky and you don't want to be frantically setting up ways to measure your campaign after it's begun.
However, if you set up the appropriate tracking necessary and track conversions, measuring your content syndication should be a breeze.
3. Lead Quality
Generating hundreds of new leads is pointless if they’re a bad fit for your company.
You need to make sure the quality of leads matches your criteria for an SQL.
If your campaign is a success then you should see an influx of qualified leads, eager to jump on a call with you.
The most effective way to ensure lead quality is high is to focus on outbound methods. Telemarketing and cold email let you control who you reach out to, and you can pre-qualify prospects using B2B data on technographic details, firmographic information, and more.
Lead quality is worth regularly reviewing. If your content syndication campaign is bringing in the wrong leads, then you may need to change tactics.
4. Traffic
Traffic growth to your website should be an inevitable result of work done in your B2B content syndication.
Even if you only use telemarketing, you can expect prospects to be interested enough to head over to learn more on your website after the call.
If you’re running a campaign involving guest posting, social media promotion, or PPC, then there should also be a steady flow of traffic from those.
5. Brand Lift
Tracking brand lift can be hard. There is no single metric or way to track it, as it varies for every company.
Brand lift covers all of the main metrics you care about. If your brand lift increases, other metrics you care about should increase too.
For example, if you’re being talked about positively in the media, then you could expect your landing page conversion rate to increase, resulting in more qualified leads.
Getting Started: Outsourcing Your B2B Content Syndication Efforts
Yes, the benefits of B2B content syndication can be as good as they sound.
But, training your team to become experts in content syndication takes time.
You may already have an in-house content marketer to produce content, but, content syndication as a whole requires a whole new skillset.
You’ll need a team to identify prospects using intent data, cold call, email, and filter qualified leads from unqualified leads.
Working with a B2B content syndication partner such as Internal Results will make the process more efficient.
You can avoid the time and money spent on training your team, or hiring an in-house team (before you even have any results) to handle it, and rely on experts in content syndication to handle it for you and deliver warm leads to your business.
Challenges to Successful Content Syndication Campaigns
You’re right. Content syndication is not that easy. There are a host of challenges to overcome if you haven’t done it before.
In Salesbox's report, which we referenced earlier, 750+ marketers identified the most common challenges.
We’re going to discuss some of those challenges to help you overcome them.
1. Having enough resources to execute it well
It takes time, energy, and a strong team to pull off a content syndication campaign.
Many companies simply don’t have the in-house resources to dedicate to it.
The skills required are varied. From cold calling to blog writing to hosting a webinar, it’s unlikely that one person will be able to execute on everything to the highest level.
2. Content Personalization
You need to show the right content to prospects at the right time.
But you already know that’s not a simple task.
If you already have a list of prospects you could email them all with your content.
However, they may not be interested or have the time to read it at the moment.
Using intent data is one of the most impactful ways to solve this problem.
With Internal Results you can discover prospects currently researching topics relevant to your solution. Then, you can reach out in real-time over the phone or via email with your relevant content to help them on their buying journey.
Using intent data is the ideal way to ensure your content is always as personalized as possible.
3. Measuring Effectiveness
Your marketing department should live and breathe data.
Tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns sounds easy, but even experienced teams can get caught out.
As you’ll be running a variety of tactics at once, conversion attribution can get complicated.
This is a key benefit of working with an external partner such as Internal Results. We syndicate your best resources and content to your ideal prospects, then deliver your list of qualified leads generated through those efforts, saving you the hassle of figuring out where they came from.
4. Sending Behaviour Based Content
Behavioral marketing is powerful if know how to do it.
Most teams don't have a reliable method to reach out to prospects when they're actively researching new solutions. Often, good timing is blind luck.
Intent data can help you personalize outreach and send relevant content to prospects, matching where they are in the buying cycle.
When it comes to lead nurturing, you can define triggers based on actions that your prospects take. Then, your team can follow up with the right message at the right time.
For example, if a lead opened your two previous emails but didn’t respond, it could be time to get on the phone with them.
Behavior-based content will help your sales team use their time more productively, only talking to leads at the best times.
If you’re distributing content on social media, you can take advantage of Messenger bots to send content based on conversational triggers.
5. Prioritizing the right syndication methods
With content syndication, there’s always going to be the issue of bandwidth. You’ll struggle to do everything at once.
We recommend prioritizing the channels with the highest impact.
For many B2B businesses, that’s outbound syndication methods such as telemarketing and cold emailing.
Why do these have the highest impact?
Well, you’re able to identify and focus on prospects you can already qualify as leads based on job titles, company size, technographic data, and more.
As we mentioned, you can use intent data to supercharge your outreach and contact prospects when they're in the market for your solution.
6. Targeting your ideal customers
If you’re doing any type of B2B content syndication, inbound or outbound, you need to guarantee your targeting is accurate.
For inbound methods, this means you need to carefully select the blogs you’re guest posting on or the company you’re co-marketing with.
For outbound methods, you'll need to carefully review your list of prospects and ensure they match your ideal customer profile. If not, your team will be wasting time on the phone with unqualified prospects, which is a bad use of everyone's time.
If your targeting is bad you might still get find good leads here and there, but you won't be able to scale your campaigns or guarantee results.
Recap - Using B2B Content Syndication to Drive Sales
B2B content syndication is a powerful way to use your content to qualify, engage, and nurture prospects, turning them into warm leads.
There are a host of ways to syndicate your content.
We’d recommend focusing on the outbound methods if you want to have more control over your audience, but the inbound methods also have a range of benefits.
Your content will become a highly effective machine that generates SQLs and sales for your company.
