How To Elevate Your Marketing Efforts With a Perfect Content Syndication Plan?

Content syndication has become a key strategy for driving business growth in the digital age. B2B companies use this to achieve different goals, including reaching a wider audience.

Content syndication involves distributing marketing content by republishing it on different sites. As a matter of fact, the cardinal rule in content marketing is the 80/20 rule. This means where businesses should invest 20% of their time in content creation and 80% in content promotion.

For B2B companies, syndicated content facilitates link building, drives organic traffic to the company website and boosts brand awareness. Companies can utilize different approaches in content syndication – they can:

• Republish original content as a whole
• Make edits to shorten original content or
• Post small excerpts of original content on third-party sites

When syndicating content, credit is given to original articles. As companies across the world recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, B2B spending in digital channels is on the rise. Since the pandemic halted in-person events, marketers are increasingly reallocating a portion of their event budgets to content syndication to bridge the loss suffered.

But syndicating content alone does not guarantee B2B marketers positive results. If you’re creating marketing content, you need to develop a content syndication plan to ensure that it reaches the right audience.

In this article, we explore how a perfect content syndication plan can elevate B2B marketing efforts and boost return on investment.

While B2B marketers use content syndication to reach wider audiences, their syndication efforts can only deliver desired results when they have a content syndication plan. Below are five ways that content syndication plans elevate marketing efforts for B2B companies:

Before you start syndicating your content, you need to be clear on the audience that you want to reach.

The best thing about creating a content syndication plan is that it provides B2B marketers the opportunity to think about audiences that fit their ideal customer profiles and demonstrate purchase intent by conducting active research using keywords or phrases that are related to their services or products.

When developing content syndication plans, B2B marketers have to narrow their focus to audiences that experience the pain points their offerings seek to alleviate. Ideally, these should be audiences that find value in their solutions because they understand the problems that those solutions solve.

By identifying the right target audience, a content syndication plan elevates marketing efforts by turning these audiences into internal advocates that support a company’s offerings throughout the B2B purchase decision making process.

Some B2B marketers become too lax when they’re picking content for syndication. Doing this has a negative impact on their marketing efforts because there is a high chance the content will not resonate with the target audience.

Developing a content syndication plan enables B2B marketers to carefully select syndication content based on their audience’s buyer’s journey. This means that before syndicating any content assets, the marketers ensure they are well aligned with the targeted personas and where they are on the sales funnel.

In most instances, B2B marketers use content syndication as a top-of-funnel strategy to make relevant personas aware of their brand, the problems their target accounts may be having and the solution their companies are offering. B2B companies that want to achieve this with their content syndication efforts should ensure that the content assets they syndicate:

• Educate their audiences on the challenges they currently face
• Provide advice on the steps they can take to improve their current situation
• Introduce their brand as a way of solving those problems

If you wish to syndicate content for middle-of-funnel targets, the focus should be to differentiate your offerings from those that your competitors offer. The content assets that you syndicate for these targets should:

• Inform them of the different solutions that your company offers to solve their problems
• Highlight aspects of those solutions that make them the best choice

Syndicating content that your target audience finds valuable and useful increases your chances of realizing the results you desire from your marketing efforts. A content syndication plan requires B2B marketers to align their content with the needs that their target audiences have. Doing this elevates their marketing efforts and guarantees better results.

Some B2B marketers become too lax when they’re picking content for syndication. Doing this has a negative impact on their marketing efforts because there is a high chance the content will not resonate with the target audience.

Once they have clarified their target audience and identified the content that suits their needs depending on where they are on the buyer’s journey, B2B marketers have to identify the right syndication partners to work with.

The content syndication partner you choose will determine how well you achieve your marketing goal. Remember, not all syndication partners are capable of delivering your content to the audience you want. Having a content syndication plan enables you to choose a syndication partner who fits your needs best. Here are important questions you need to ask yourself before picking a syndication partner:

1. Is the syndication partner relevant to your industry? The first thing you need to consider when choosing syndication partners is their relevance to your industry. A partner who distributes content that is not relevant to your industry will not boost your marketing efforts – their audience is different from yours.
2. Who constitutes their target audience? There needs to be a match between the people who visit a syndication partner’s site and your target audience. Check whether the syndication partner’s audience is similar to your list of prospects. Does your ideal customer profile represent the audience that your potential syndication partner serves? Take a look at the people who visit their sites and where they are in the buyer’s journey. If you find similarities between your target audience and that of your potential partner, proceed to work with them.
3. How do they present syndicated content on their website? If you are like 89% of B2B marketers, the main reason you want to syndicate content is to build brand awareness This makes content presentation a critical factor in selection of syndication partners. Work with syndication partners that make your brand elements apparent whenever they publish your content. As a matter of fact, statistics show that consistency in branding can increase revenue by up to 23%.
4. How does the partner distribute content? The reason why you’re syndicating content is to reach a wider content. Pay attention to the strategies that prospective syndication partners use to distribute content and pick those that have a robust strategy. Consider the content types that receive most engagement as well so you know how to make your content more relevant to their audience.

Having a perfect content syndication ensures that you work with the right partner to syndicate your content. This means you are able to reach your target audience with the right type of content – hence elevating your marketing efforts.

Quality and audience size are the two main factors that fuel revenue growth in content marketing. When you have a perfect content syndication plan, chances of syndicating your content on low level sites are extremely minimal. A plan enables you to focus on higher authority sites that give you access to audiences that are larger than your own.

A content syndication plan enables B2B marketers to settle on syndication partners that have positioned themselves as leaders in their industry. As a matter of fact, most companies view their partnership with high authority sites as an opportunity to boost their brand reputation while growing their own thought leadership and authority.

A content syndication plan makes it easy for marketers to grow their list of syndication partners by using current ones to reach out to new partners who would be willing to publish their content – which is a great way to elevate marketing efforts. By distributing syndicated content through different outlets, businesses widen their reach, customer base and sales revenue.

The other way that a good content syndication plan enables B2B marketers to elevate marketing efforts is by providing a basis for results. Like any other marketing strategy, tracking the outcomes of content syndication is the only way a company can determine whether it is getting returns from its efforts or not. There are several metrics that marketers can use to measure content syndication results. These include:

• Engagement rate: Measures opportunities generated through syndication efforts
• Qualification rate: Measures the number of qualified leads that are generated through content syndication
• Conversion rate: Percentage of qualified leads generated through content syndication that convert across the sales funnel
• Win rate: Percentage of opportunities that convert to become customers

By monitoring results, B2B marketers can identify gaps in their content syndication plans and address them in order to improve their results. This ultimately elevates their marketing efforts and boosts sales and business growth.

As an important part of content marketing, content syndication enables B2B companies to reach a wider audience with their content than they would if they just published such content on their websites or social media platforms. However, to elevate their marketing efforts, businesses need to be intentional with their syndication efforts. That’s where a content syndication plan comes in handy. If you have been syndicating your content without a plan, now you know why it’s time to create one.