What Is Content Syndication in B2B Marketing?
One of our main jobs as marketers is to reach larger audiences. And content syndication in B2B marketing can be a powerful strategy. From social media sites to distribution and promotion overall, we want to get our content in front of as many eyes as possible. And that’s where syndication comes in.
But what is content syndication, and how can you use it to help your business thrive? In this article, we’ll be answering these questions by looking at how content syndication works and how you can leverage this strategy.
- What Is Content Syndication in B2B Marketing?
- B2B Content Syndication Formats
- Planning a Content Syndication Strategy in B2B Marketing
- How Do You Know When B2B Content Syndication is Successful?
What Is Content Syndication in B2B Marketing?
Image via UnboundB2B
Syndicating your B2B content is all about growing the number of leads that come into your business by publishing your content in more places. If you only publish content on your home blog, then there’s a single site where customers can find you. Publish content across ten different platforms, and you have a much larger base where customers can find your content.
Any content that you republish on other sites counts as syndicated content. That content can snowball, helping to bring in more leads and boost your online presence. For example, you might post an infographic on a new website. Another content marketing team could then create an article based on your infographic, leading to even more visibility across the internet.
Considering that more visibility can result in more leads, content syndication can work wonders for B2B businesses. Typically, an external website will republish your content exactly as it is. At the beginning of the article, they’ll reference your site and explain that the content is not original to them. This is where content syndication differs from guest posts, as a site is copying your content over to their pages.
This may seem a little counterproductive at first. But, when marketing in the B2B sphere, you’re up against some steep competition. With so many competitors out there there, it can be challenging to reach your target audience. Content syndication in B2B marketing helps you divide and conquer. You’re increasing the number of spaces where customers can find you. This can help drive traffic, improve visibility, and foster new leads.
While you could repost content on other sites like LinkedIn, Medium, or Quora, you can also partner with other businesses. The content you share doesn’t only have to be blog articles. In fact, you could use anything your business produces, from infographics to webinars.
Read more: What Is Content Syndication?
B2B Content Syndication Formats
Your content syndication efforts can take different formats, too, depending on the platforms you’re partnering with. For example, a travel brand might format and syndicate blog articles, infographics, and podcasts to build awareness around its services. With that in mind, here’s a list of the common formats B2B syndication can take:
Podcasts
People in the world of business love listening to podcasts. As a low-effort way to consume information, this form of media has blown up in recent years. According to Statista, around 62% of the US population listens to podcasts. Chances are, some of your target leads do too. Focusing on getting podcasts you’ve created onto different platforms can increase your visibility and help bring in new listeners and leads.
White Papers
White papers covering trending topics can be valuable for your B2B syndication strategy. Industry news or fresh-off-the-press data can make shareable content for audiences. Plus, syndicating white papers is a great way to increase your brand’s visibility. What’s more, sharing statistics from white papers with other news sites is a good way to earn backlinks. Once a bigger site picks up your content, other content creators will see it and link back to your site.
Infographics
Much like white papers, infographics for syndication can share new information. In an easy-to-read and understandable format, infographics can spread around the internet like wildfire. This is a great B2B content syndication format if you’re looking to build backlinks. Most of the time, infographics will only have a small watermark for your business. So, if you’re looking for brand recognition, this might not be the format for you.
EBooks
Any industry or business insight often does well in the B2B space. If you’re knowledgeable about a topic and can present information well, then eBooks are a great option for your company. Any older eBooks that you know perform well are potential points for syndication. Other businesses are normally very happy to accept eBooks as they act as lead magnets for the website.
Articles
Blog articles can be a low-effort format for content syndication in B2B marketing that go almost anywhere. Every site under the sun will have a blog. If you reach out, they could be willing to take your content on. Just be sure that the articles you’re syndicating have already been on your site for a while. You don’t want to send something off before Google has a chance to index your pages. Remember, content syndication can hurt your site’s SEO if done wrong. It’s always best to send older, established content over for syndication. Equally, organize canonical tags with the site you’re partnering with.
Videos
Image via DemandGen
Audiences around the world are in love with short-form video content. Ten years ago, you’d struggle to find a creative team investing their budgets in videos. But in 2022, video is the top content format that buyers engage with. With a video, you can get a lot of information across in a short amount of time. Especially for consumers that aren’t in the mood to read, video content hits the spot. So this strategy can be a game-changer when developing a plan for syndicating your B2B content.
Across these formats, you’ll be able to find company content to send off for syndication. For B2B syndication, white papers, videos, and infographics are some of the most effective. Of course, you can never go wrong with blog articles, but they’re not as high-impact as these strategies.
Planning a Content Syndication Strategy in B2B Marketing
Creating an effective syndication strategy for B2B content takes planning. As with all content marketing efforts, diving in without the data and planning to back you can lead to a waste of resources. Luckily, much of the content syndication strategy comes back to effective content marketing tactics. Which, as marketers, is right up our alley. When creating your content syndication plan, use these steps to start the process:
1. Know Your Audience
Content syndication is about putting your high-quality content in front of new audiences. If done correctly, the audience you select is going to enjoy and relate to your content. That enjoyment factor isn’t guaranteed. To nail B2B content syndication, we need to know who our audience is made up of and what they enjoy.
As a B2B company, there is a solution that you’re providing to clients. Who buys that client, what’s your ideal customer persona, and where do you find them on the internet? Questions like these allow you to get to the core of producing useful content. Especially after Google’s Helpful Content Update, we need to create content that our audience is going to enjoy.
Identifying your target audience for content syndication doesn’t necessarily mean your current buyers. In fact, you’ll most likely be targeting a slightly different user group. Maybe your B2B solution is fantastic for mid-sized companies, but you want to break into that enterprise level.
2. Align Content
Great content syndication starts with great content production. Remember, you’re sending off pre-written content samples; this isn’t a guest posting opportunity. With that in mind, you need to make sure that you’re producing content that people want to read.
The best way to do this, beyond knowing your audience, is by hitting the SEO books. Nowadays, we have an endless array of tools to help us. You could even turn to the CopyPress competitor content analysis tool. Our free system will help you identify low-hanging fruit to outclass your competitors’ content strategies.
Understanding what content you should create will lead to great content down the line. By aligning your content with your audience, you’re able to create useful and high-impact resources. These will go over much better with any syndication partners that you work with. Whatever content works best with your audience and industry should be where you begin.
3. Syndicate Where It Counts
At this point in the game, you know the benefits of syndicating content on sites with higher domain authority. That said, just because a site is ranking well, doesn’t mean that it’s a good fit for your content. A good B2B content syndication strategy will include working with the correct partners for you. Before asking for a partnership, do some research on the users that browse through that website. If you’re a SaaS business that sells meeting software, a site that targets cryptocurrency topics isn’t going to do you any favors.
Remember, when you syndicate content, you’re no longer directly accommodating your own audience. You’re accommodating the new site’s audience, too. The typical customer on that site matters, which means you should find one that’s similar enough to your business. If they’re too far away, their customers won’t be interested in what you have to say.
Image via Semrush Content Marketing Report
One of the reasons that content syndication is so effective is that it’s still a fairly undervalued tactic. According to SemRush, only 15% of B2B brands are turning toward syndication. Compared to blog content creation—which almost every site focuses on—there’s tons of opportunity for B2B brands here.
But that means you’ll need to syndicate where it counts and find the content hubs that align with your brand’s goals. When looking for content syndication partners, search for those that work directly in your industry. No matter how amazing your content is, it won’t go over well if it’s not relevant to the target audience. Similarly, make sure you’re syndicating the right content types. For example, if a website is known for long-form industry reviews, your 500-word listicle isn’t going to fly. Match your content to the provider, and make sure you’ve done your research beforehand.
Related: Syndicating Content: Building a Better Content Strategy
How Do You Know When B2B Content Syndication Is Successful?
As with all content marketing, success can be slow progress. This is especially the case with content syndication, where metrics are a little harder to come by. On your own website, tracking increases in traffic or backlinks is easy. The same isn’t always true for the content you syndicate to other sites. Sometimes you’ll have no real idea how it’s doing in terms of numbers.
This lack of tracking makes many marketers believe content syndication is impossible to measure in terms of effectiveness. But this is definitely not the case. That said, you do have to get creative. There are three metrics your team can collect to measure the success of your syndication strategy:
Lead Volume
At the end of the day, the vast majority of marketing strategies in the B2B world aim to bring in new leads. Without leads, a business isn’t bringing in any capital to keep its marketing campaigns going. With this in mind, lead generation and volume are important metrics to follow when tracing the success of a B2B content syndication campaign.
Think about it. A B2B company will constantly monitor the number of leads that are coming in. If there is a sudden increase in the monthly quantity of leads that your company receives directly after you begin to syndicate content, then this is a sure sign that the strategy is working for you.
Beyond this, you’ll most likely directly talk to your leads. While this might not happen in the marketing department, you can still access data from these conversations. By asking leads how they heard about your business, you’ll be able to trace the origin of these new clients. Most of the time, they’ll be able to chart their journey with you.
Asking leads where they come from can be a good way of seeing the impact your B2B content syndication has on your business. A few questions will stop you from assuming your syndicated content is more valuable than it actually is. You don’t want to attribute new traffic to external factors when really you’ve just had a lead magnet blow up. Don’t count out your other content marketing streams just because you engage with a new strategy. Content syndication is effective, but it’s not everything.
Lead Quality
Even when a new client directly contacts your business, that doesn’t mean they’ll convert. Inquiries that lead nowhere are more common in B2B companies, as clients shop around for solutions before committing. Equally, just because someone does business with you, doesn’t mean they’ll convert into a client with a high lifetime value.
Some leads, especially over time, are worth more than others. This is what we know as the quality of leads: a balance of their time to conversion and how much that conversion is worth. Content syndication has the effect of boosting your brand visibility. With this increase, you’ll often have more leads coming in.
Alongside a boost in B2B lead generation, the quality of leads may also grow. As you seem like more of an established B2B company, you’re able to bring in high-quality leads with ease. If you note an influx of high-quality leads or ones that are ready to convert, then your content syndication could be having a positive impact. Once again, it may seem simple, but talking to your customers is key here. Asking how they heard about you can go a long way. You can even include this on your contact page, incorporating this into the customer outreach process.
Increased Traffic
The most standard marker of great content syndication is an increase in traffic to your page. Luckily, anything directly connected to your site is easy to trace. By monitoring your traffic, you can see where it’s coming in from. If you suddenly start to get more traffic that comes through links, instead of organically through search pages, then it’s likely that your syndicated content is making its mark.
Reviewing where your spike in traffic is coming from will reveal the actual impact of your syndication strategy. If your traffic hasn’t really changed, then you might want to rethink the sites that you’re partnered with. This is also why it’s so important to have a syndication strategy in place. If you’re doing things without planning them out, it can be difficult to know where your results are coming from. A recent study by Content Marketing Institute revealed only 40% of B2B marketing teams have a documented strategy. If you fall in the remaining 60%, it’s time to make a change.
CopyPress Knows Content Syndication for B2B Marketing
Content syndication in B2B marketing can be a great way of breaking into your industry. By expanding your influence online and increasing your visibility, you can get noticed by customers. Increasing the total number of leads, their quality, and the overall traffic to your pages, content syndication is a great idea for any business.
If you’re looking for a way to boost your content marketing strategy, team up with CopyPress. Schedule a strategy call and share your business goals with our experts. We’ll help you craft a plan that includes content syndication and promotion to drive traffic, improve rankings, and achieve results.
Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress
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