Why Content Syndication is the Lead-Gen Opportunity you are Missing Out on

Content syndication is a powerful brand-growth strategy central to your content-based marketing. The appeal of content to b2b buyers has not diminished and the types of content that appeal to B2B audiences are only widening. As a result, syndication has become bigger and more impactful. The power of syndication lies in the fact that the strategy is not limited in its application. It can be applied across the sales funnel, at every stage, to create demand and generate high-quality leads and conversions.

Not utilizing syndication yet? You may be missing valuable sales, marketing, revenue, and competitive growth opportunities:

  • Nearly 50% of marketers plan to increase their spending on their B2B content marketing strategy in the current year, according to a Statista report.
  • More than 50% of marketers in the same Statista report cited thought-leadership content as a prime focus of investment.
  • 74% of companies found content marketing to be an effective strategy for increasing leads. Syndication of content is the most effective technique for lead generation, according to 30% B2B professionals.
  • Content-based marketing has delivered on key marketing goals such as brand awareness, brand credibility, and creating well-informed audiences, for B2B businesses. (Content Marketing Institute Via Finances Online)

If your B2B business is not taking advantage of the cost-effective content syndication strategy, it is time to up your game.

The Idea Powering Content Syndication

In content syndication, you publish your brand-owned content on external publishing platforms. This content could be a video, an infographic, case study, whitepaper, or other forms that connect with your audiences.

Syndication creates a win-win situation for brands and publishers. For brands, online visibility, brand awareness, and reach expand when publishers take their high-value content to a wider and relevant audience. Publishers are happy to offer fresh and relevant content for their reader segment.

Having the Same Content Elsewhere: The Duplication Myth Shattered

Syndicating content involves republishing the same content at multiple relevant places. But it does not amount to content duplication. Nor will syndication bring down your SEO efficacy.

Firstly, a reader can easily identify a syndicated piece due to the formal acknowledgement accompanying the content. The original source is cited, mentioning, “This [article/ whitepaper/ case study…] appeared in [original location name with link]. Republished here with permission.”

Syndication does not affect your ranking on Google. This is because of the use of the canonical tag, which specifies duplication or similarity between content.

Syndication Platforms Explained

When you syndicate content, it is distributed through a syndication partner. This partner propagates the content on its partner networks, and noted websites using specialized widgets, or other relevant platforms.

As a content syndication specialist, FinalFunnel’s strategies are driven by data. With us, you will take your content assets right to your ICPs (Ideal Content Profiles) instead of an irrelevant mass audience. Our publishing network is our own and not partner-controlled, which means we are well-positioned to route your assets in the best way for maximum reach and impact.

Why View Content Syndication as a Key Lead Generation Strategy

Paired with real-time b2b buyer data, syndication can amplify your reach to a targeted audience. The primary benefit of syndication is that it gets you access to a niche relevant to your business.

The process is organic – b2b prospects discover you, understand your solutions and engage with you. This process builds brand awareness, establishes credibility, creates brand demand, and generates quality leads. Syndicating on reputed networks establishes credibility faster.

How Syndication Brings in Qualified Leads

Syndicating content with data-led strategies brings in powerful brand results, including targeted leads. From the choice of content at every phase of your b2b purchase cycle to the choice of the syndication platform, every decision needs to be buyer-centric. Without buyer data such as intent data, syndication is relegated to being a glorified content distribution strategy with no impact.

The best b2b demand generation services pay meticulous attention to the following:

  • Syndication Goals - While b2b lead generation is the primary goal, marketers expect syndication to increase website traffic, enhance brand credibility, and strengthen buyer engagement.
  • Choice of Publisher – The more relevant a publisher’s readership is to your industry, the more extensive the benefits. The reach, domain authority, and credibility of the publisher are other vital parameters to consider.

  • Choice of your Content Asset – The content you choose must impart value to the buyer by addressing a challenge or pain point they may be facing. Whitepapers, case studies, e-books, and webinars are some examples of valuable content to engage b2b buyers.

    It is important to vary your content at different stages of a buyer’s purchase cycle for heightened engagement. Offering gated content helps segregate prospects with a genuine interest in your solutions. Use the prospect contacts resulting from the process to enrich your database for targeted nurturing.

  • Get your Asset to the Buyer – Promoting your asset on different platforms is a traditional way of increasing your content’s reach. But this method is slow and not an effective utilization of your resources. You are targeting a large audience, though relevant, while missing those accounts that really need your solutions.

    FinalFunnel uses the power of data-driven ABM to ensure that content syndication makes the maximum impact on strong-intent audiences. With only the best-intent audience in your spectrum, sales leads are faster and conversion cycles shorter.

  • Generate Qualified Leads – As your content reaches the right audience, awareness and engagement are timely and hence sharper. This process gives you data and insights into buyers seeking your solutions, infusing new leads into your pipeline.

    The key challenge at this stage is to clean the b2b buyer data and make it usable. Data exchanged by prospects or delivered by general syndication partners are mostly raw and unusable in their existing formats. Cleansing data provides accurate lead information, which facilitates high-precision lead scoring and nurturing.

    At FinalFunnel, we apply data enrichment and modernization techniques to clean, standardize, and normalize data for further use. Intelligent data mapping enables you to gauge buyer intent accurately while our proprietary deduplication tools mitigate fraud.

    The result is well-aggregated data that makes lead scoring, prioritization, and nurturing, simpler and more effective.

Why the Focus on High-Value Content

Content marketing for the B2B landscape is different from its B2C counterpart as the former has a broader content perimeter. While blogs and videos are significant, the type of content varies according to the b2b buyer’s position in the sales funnel. Adhering to the content needs of your buyer at each stage helps you personalize your engagement and establish connections quickly.

But how important is content for a B2B buyer?

A b2b buyer’s journey is complex as the above Gartner illustrations depict. There are numerous minor yet significant sub-activities that a buyer has to accomplish before making a purchase. A focus on high-value content is key to shortening this journey and enabling buyers to make decisions faster at every stage.

Why does content play a crucial role? The apt content can influence a buyer’s purchase decision as these statistics show:

  • Over half of the b2b buyers (62%) interact with 3 to 7 content pieces prior to communicating with a brand’s sales team
  • 11% of b2b buyers consume over 7 content pieces regularly
  • 28% of b2b buyers consume an average of less than 3 content pieces

Overall, the consumption of content among b2b buyers is significant. Customizing content according to the buyer’s position in the purchase journey is key to your content syndication success.

Understanding the B2B Buyer’s Content Needs

An in-depth insight into your buyers’ pain points is critical to convey that you are well aware of their needs. When syndication is based on this understanding, it increases your credibility and helps establish trust early.

A b2b buyer’s journey starts with problem identification where the buyer gets an understanding of its current needs. This is followed by a “solution finding” stage, which is an opportunity for you to make buyers aware of your products/ services. This is the discovery stage or the To-of-Funnel (ToFu) stage in your sales funnel. You can get your brand on the buyer’s choice spectrum with a well-developed syndication strategy.

In the “requirements creation” stage, buyers focus on developing a well-defined document of organizational needs and constraints. This is a buyer’s solution-consideration stage where you have the opportunity to position your brand. Customized engagement at this stage drives MoFu (Middle-of-Funnel) leads.

The supplier-selection stage in a b2b buyer’s lifecycle presents conversion opportunities. This is the decision-making stage that delivers Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu) leads to your sales funnel.

But how do you decide on the content that creates the right impact on your buyers at every stage? The information below can serve as a guide on choosing the right type of content for every stage of a b2b buyer’s lifecycle:

  • Discovery – Infographics, e-books, and whitepapers In a survey by Demand Gen Report on content preferences of b2b buyers, 62% of respondents said that they find infographics “most valuable” in the early stage of the buying process.
  • Consideration – Case studies, webinars, product overviews, and landing pages Webinars take the cake as the “most valuable” content for buyers in the mid-stage of their purchase. Whitepapers rank second on the list.
  • Conversion – Podcasts, case studies, whitepapers, landing pages, webinars, and customer testimonials Podcasts lead the pack as the most preferred buyer content. Whitepapers and webinars are the next best.

What Makes for a Winning B2B Content for Content Syndication?

Not all content or any type of content resonates with b2b buyers. Here are some pointers that can guide your content selection, based on a Demand Gen Report Survey. Content syndication success is higher with content that:

  • Does not come across as a sales copy
  • Has instantly-shareable links
  • Comprises statistics available in an instantly-shareable format
  • Includes easily-consumable insights presented brief and straight
  • Carries research data to back the insights and the content itself
  • Is able to create an impact on your buying board with strong story-telling
  • Delivers insights from industry experts
  • Comes from trusted platforms
  • Is available in a mobile-optimized format

Lead-Gen with Content Syndication: Maximizing the Impact

You can syndicate content in multiple ways:

  • Publish your best-performing content on your proprietary online properties such as websites and social pages. Syndication websites looking for fresh content pick your content for their readers. These publications provide an abstract of your content with a link back to the original location of posting.
  • Leverage the reach of a bigger publication platform to post your content. This platform will take your content to an exclusive readership that may not have discovered you otherwise. Once you establish credibility, you can syndicate the content on other networks to expand your reach. You will be leveraging the brand connect and awareness achieved on the bigger publication to amplify your reach further.

  • Republish your content assets on websites that have a larger readership. These websites enjoy better reach and credibility, which means your content will have an amplified reach.

    This strategy is best if increasing brand awareness alone is your goal. The chances of achieving amplified traffic to your websites or landing pages, and targeted conversions, are less. Audiences will already have consumed your content on the syndicated website. So, they may not visit your website.

  • Use smaller syndication websites that have a sizable reach to your target audience. With such websites, you get to narrow down your reach to the relevant niche. You can link to your website/ landing page as the original content source, which can draw leads.
  • Partner with a demand-gen company that uses content syndication to create demand for your brand at every stage of the sales funnel. The best B2B demand generation solutions use syndication in combination with buyer data. This strategy delivers multiple targeted benefits, including brand awareness, a highly targeted reach, and greater conversions.

Made to work on its own, syndication stagnates. You publish content on external platforms and just wait for your audiences to discover it and engage with you.

Though organic search is a dominant channel for b2b buyers to discover and learn about your products/ services, a massive 96.55% of pages do not receive any traffic from Google. Syndication works extremely well, but only with high-value content that is made discoverable.

There are many elements that go into the making of a winning syndication strategy for b2b lead generation. Some core elements include:

  • Generation of strong ICPs. This is a key step to making your content discoverable by targeted audiences.
  • Customization of content to suit your buyers’ needs. According to a Demand Gen Report survey, buyers like their content to be organized by pain point, topic, vertical/ industry, or business role.
  • Placement of clear CTAs or calls-to-action at strategic points in the content to encourage downloads, newsletter subscriptions, or consultation sign-ups.
  • Inclusion of strategic and simple forms for capturing lead details such as contact, firm name, and job role.
  • Building on brand recall by combining content syndication with lead nurturing programs. Offering content assets that meet the buyer’s needs (gathered from intent data) personalizes communications while empowering buyers with authentic information for well-informed decision-making.

With FinalFunnel, you get an experienced syndication and demand generation partner. We narrow your mass audience down to a highly-targeted group while expanding your total addressable market (TAM). We are ably assisted by our specialized demand gen engine, automation, and deep research to deliver on your syndication goals.

We use a powerful combination of ABM, content distribution, and b2b email marketing campaigns to enrich your pipeline with the most valuable leads. As ABM specialists, we deliver 95+% account-based lists.

With us, lead qualification begins early on in the syndication campaign. We vet every account for adherence to your specified set of parameters at every stage. As a result, lead waste is negligible, which saves you time, money, and resources. Our data enrichment process delivers MQLs and SQLs, enabling better lead handoffs, enhanced sales-marketing collaboration, and effective closures.

In Conclusion

Content syndication is a powerful lead-gen strategy that can bring in high-value accounts and significant leads when implemented mindfully. This strategy is based on a targeted approach, but refining your campaigns with intent data is key to witnessing results. With the right syndication partner, you get to travel your buyers’ journey along with them, addressing their needs at every stage of the purchase cycle.

With FinalFunnel, you get a partner with 8+ years of experience in b2b demand generation, digital marketing, and content publishing. With our in-house data store of over 40+ million records, a powerful tech stack, and deep research, we create the best lead-gen campaigns that deliver 100% results. Talk to us to craft your content syndication success!