Introduction
Let’s face it, when you’re in charge of marketing, the buck stops with you. You have to be accountable for generating leads and filling quotas, and there’s pressure from above and from sales and finance—all looking to you to generate high intent MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads).
It can be nerve-wracking when the sales team isn’t provided with quality leads or when marketing is held accountable for leads without an active sales team working on them to convert those for you.
What if we told you we have a solution? Intelligent Content Syndication.
Content distribution is still a priority for B2B marketers. In fact, in 2020, 46% of marketers focused on improving their content distribution channels, mostly around content syndication.
Source: marketing charts
Intelligent Content Syndication (ICS) adds value to customer communities by enhancing product offering through bi-directional content syndication.
Today’s customers consume information in different ways. They may search for something online, look for answers on social media, read an article in a magazine, or watch a video on Youtube. ICS integrates these different access channels into one place where people can receive the right information relevant to their situation.
And that’s how you can generate high-intent marketing qualified leads!
The Customer Is In Charge, But You are in Command
Content syndication creates a low-friction way to share your content between your own and other sites.
Syndicated content is typically served by a third-party provider but can also be served from within the target’s application or service. The advantage of serving syndicated content is that it can be personalized, targeted based on user data, and offer an alternative to the conventional search results. This increases the likelihood of reaching the right prospects at the right time.
Other advantages include:
- Generating new leads
- Delivering high-quality MQLs
- Increased organic traffic
- Lead nurture
The most important factor in order to be successful is content. We are not talking about links here, but actual content, exciting stuff that people will comment on, link to, and even pay for, i.e., generate high intent marketing qualified leads.
If you are serious about content marketing, expert marketers suggest that you pause for a moment to ask yourself how you can apply automation to this process.
You can significantly reduce your workload by ‘automating’ your content syndication system. A well-designed content marketing automation platform is capable of managing most aspects of the content marketing process, including back-end publishing, monitoring, optimization, and more.
Generate Marketing Qualified Leads with Intelligent Content Syndication
Content syndication is largely used to generate marketing qualified leads. Organizations should analyze sales inputs and web analytics on the following to determine which content will best convert prospects before syndicating it.
- Is your existing content marketing approach effective?
- What is the budget analysis?
- Who are the target customers (buyer personas), and what are their goals?
- Are they capable of producing high-quality MQLs?
Depending upon your need, you can choose to syndicate your content on free (Ex: Medium, Quora, LinkedIn) or paid (Ex: Taboola, Zemanta) channels. Either way, you get the maximum return on investment.
According to research from Salesbox, 65% of B2B marketers use content syndication as their core marketing qualified lead generation tactic.
Your infographics and whitepapers are incredibly valuable assets. They help you build credibility, increase traffic to your website, and prove your expertise.
But you can’t expect people to just come across them on their own. Intelligent content syndication lets you promote your content on channels where your top prospects land almost every day.
Let’s look at some ways how content syndication can improve and increase your marketing qualified lead generation:
1. Getting the Content in Front of Prospects.
Marketers may wonder: Is content syndication a fundamental approach to enhance marketing qualified lead generation strategies? These questions will be justified for those who feel they are doing pretty well with their marketing plan.
Does B2B content syndication make sense when there’s already a lot of traffic and conversions?
It does. And pros are diving into content syndication for all the right reasons.
Nowadays, there’s no shortage of quality content that B2B marketers could use for marketing their product or service. However, getting that content in front of the prospects is the real challenge.
By syndicating your content across multiple platforms, you can get it in front of more eyeballs without having to do any additional marketing.
2. Co-Marketing
Co-marketing is a type of cooperation in digital marketing that exists when one company or organization agrees to give publicity to another company or organization in return for a reciprocal arrangement. In co-marketing, the cooperating parties come up with a matching strategy for mutual benefit.
However, it’s important to note that co-marketing is most effective when businesses are not using it with the same target market. Every business owns its niche, so you should never co-market with companies competing for the exact keywords as yours in organic search.
3. Optimizing the Buying Progress Funnel
In a perfect world, there would be a direct correlation between all of the ways you invested in content and the corresponding Marketing Qualified Lead conversions for those investments. However, that is not always realistic.
Marketers and businesses need to understand how individual customers behave and tailor their experience with hyper-personalization. They can identify the customer journey and syndicate content intelligently based on their intent as well as past behavior as they go through this journey.
Other tactics include:
Automatically syndicating your content on a variety of social media channels, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram.
Keeping in touch with syndication networks to get the list of marketing qualified leads generated.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) promotion is amongst the fastest ways to get new readers for your syndicated content.
What is The Best Way to Follow-Up With a Content Syndication MQL?
The quality of your follow ups is important. It’s the difference between getting the sale or missing it. The trick is, how can you follow up your high quality leads?
- Nurture messaging: Nurture messaging is a strategic blend of marketing and sales messaging to nurture and support the leads who have shown interest in your business and products.
- Sales cadence messaging: Sales cadence messaging is the practice of having a relative number of outbound communications with prospects to help drive down conversions and increase opportunities. It almost always occurs via email and phone but can also include social media engagement and other outreach pathways.
Questions to Ask Your B2B Content Syndication Partner
As a marketer, getting your budget approved can be a tough task. So you need to make sure you are being smart about where you are spending your money.
When deciding on content syndication partner, you need to ask the following questions:
1. How familiar are you with your audience? Do you have a direct relationship with them?
- If that’s the case, how do you steal their attention and engage your audience?
- Can you provide me with some samples of the content you use?
2. What is the make-up of their target audience?
- Is your audience mostly end-users or do they comprise management as well?
- What stage of the sales cycle will the targets be at before they visit my website?
3. How do you generate marketing qualified leads?
- Which channels do you use to generate leads?
- How quickly can you get those leads?
4. What is their strategy for promoting your content?
- How will your content be displayed on the syndicated website?
- Will they highlight your brand elements?
5. How will they deliver your leads?
- Can they integrate with your existing Marketing Automation system?
- Will they send the list of MQLs via a .csv file?
Choosing which publishers to work with is one of the most critical decisions in your content syndication strategy. The right publishing partner should be aligned with one or more of these dimensions or considerations, depending on your expected number of your marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
B2B Content Syndication is Your Marketing Qualified Lead Generation Machine
The past decade has shown that if you create good content, you can build a blog that can drive traffic and build authority. Today, there are more ways to spread the content you publish than ever before.
Amongst them, when you syndicate your content, you’re using the power of the internet to get it in front of people who aren’t on your website. Syndication is an important part of your marketing qualified lead generation strategy. Using it properly ensures that people who would otherwise never see your blog posts know about them and convert readers into potential prospects.
Do you have any other suggestions? Tell us in the comment section below.
Gaurav Roy
15 October 2021
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