As per Semrush’s content marketing statistics for 2023, 69% of businesses plan to increase their content marketing budgets.
This is a general trend that suggests businesses’ significant focus on content marketing within the business community. And as a huge part of a business’s content marketing strategy is content syndication.
In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into the essentials of a content syndication strategy that will ensure your content reaches its full potential and fuels your marketing goals. So, buckle up and join us as we explore the world of content syndication, learning how to unleash your awesome content to new audiences and conquer the digital landscape.
Here’s what you can expect from this blog,
- What is Content Syndication?
- What is a Content Syndication Strategy?
- Why does your business need a Content Syndication Strategy?
- How do you get started with developing a Content Syndication Strategy?
- Best Practices in the Industry
- Bonus Point
What is Content Syndication
Imagine that you’ve poured your all, resources, time and budget into creating a fantastic piece of content. The content is informative, engaging and full-on packed with valuable insights.
But there’s a problem — your content is reaching only a fraction of the potential audience that it deserves. Content Syndication is the factor that corrects it. It gives your content the wings to soar across the web and reach new audiences. Along with that, it helps you generate leads and boost brand awareness via your content. But it’s not as simple as hitting “publish” on a few random platforms. Like everything else in business, content syndication needs a strategy.
To close it up, content syndication is the practice that gives wings to your content and helps it reach a wider audience that will eventually generate leads and boost your brand awareness. It’s like hitting publish on multiple platforms but with a smart strategy.
What is Content Syndication Strategy?
In a business, nothing goes well without a plan. Similarly, content syndication without a strategy, might end up generating an audience from irrelevant places. Without a strategy, you’re simply hoping that your content reaches the audience you want. But if you go that way, you’ll waste your precious time and resources, and your content will hardly attract any audience it deserves.
A well-defined strategy, on the other hand, guides you to your audience. Slowly, but surely, it helps you achieve your targeted content goals. Whether it’s generating leads, building brand awareness or driving traffic to your website; a well-defined content syndication strategy guides you into making targeted efforts. It works in such a way that you save time, and resources all the while reaching the right audience for your business.
Why does your business need a Content Syndication Strategy?
Just constructing a strategy is not enough for your content to give you results. It needs to be executed effectively. And, when that happens here’s a list of results you might see.
- You’ll see a hike in your audience reach generated beyond your website and social media pages. When this happens, you’ll reach new demographics and potential customers in places and industries you wouldn’t have connected with otherwise.
- Your brand will be recognized among that sea of business in the same industry. And that will situate you as a thought leader among all of them.
- Your increased brand awareness will directly attract MQLs and SQLs. These are the qualified leads who are actively seeking information and solutions relevant to your content and your business.
- With the effective execution of a content syndication strategy, you’ll earn valuable backlinks to your website. These backlinks have the power to boost your organic search ranking and drive even more traffic to your website.
- With such an increase, your content will spark conversations and foster a community that revolves around your services. This will increase your content engagement in terms of content sharing in the relevant communities, groups and individuals.
How do you get started with developing a Content Syndication Strategy?
As we discussed earlier, a content syndication strategy is a roadmap that will lead you towards your business goals; be it brand awareness, lead generation or increasing website traffic.
Keeping that in mind, there are five things you need to work on to create a well-defined content syndication strategy.
- Your Goals: Defining the goal sounds simple. It could be increasing your brand awareness, expanding your audience, lead generation, developing brand credibility, increasing website traffic, or even a combination of a few of them. But it’s not as simple. Mostly because your goal defines your content and the platforms that your content needs to be on. For instance, a B2B SaaS company that wants to generate leads would be more beneficial by syndicating content on LinkedIn and guest blogging on relevant websites, rather than Facebook or Instagram.
- Define your audience: Now, defining the audience is a little tricky. Because you just don’t need to define their ages and industries. You need to understand their demographics, interests, online buying behaviour, etc. The more deeply you understand your audience the more relevant and valuable content you’ll create. What would be the point of your content if it’s not even relevant to your target audience?
- Choose channel: As discussed above, your content syndication platforms matter. A lot. You can’t simply syndicate your content in every possible channel imaginable. So to define your channels you need to research where your target audience interacts the most and align them with your goals. That’s where you need to focus your attention on.
- Repurpose your content: This is very important. If you simply publish the same content everywhere, you’ll simply translate “copy and paste”. So, before you publish your content, you must edit that as per the particular target group you’re focusing on, and as per the platform you’re publishing the content on. For instance, for platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn, you can consider creating infographics, videos or even audio versions of your blogs.
Track and analyse results: For any strategy that you implement, tracking and analysing the performance and result is very crucial. So, once your content has been on their specific platforms for a while, it’s crucial that you track and analyse its performance. That data can later be used to refine your strategy even more and optimize your efforts even more.
Best Practices in the Industry
When you want to grow, the best thing you can do is learn from the pros. So, here are some tips from the B2B businesses that were successful in their content syndication strategy.
- Build relationships with the industry: In this case, what you can do is connect with influencers and publishers by collaborating on a guest blog or doing cross-promotions with them. You could leverage your existing networks to host a webinar or event to reach a wider audience.
- Optimise your content for search engines: For SEO, you need to conduct your keyword research and create meta titles and meta descriptions that are accurate and actually clickable.
- Don’t ever forget to engage and adapt: This is most important because you can’t convince your audience of 2023 if you’re writing the content for the 2020 audience. Remember, B2B buying behaviour is constantly evolving and with that, you must engage and evolve with your audience.
Bonus: Here’s a list of potential channels that you can consider.
Industry publications and websites
In this case, you need to publish your content on established websites that fall within your niche. This way, you’ll be exposed to the audience of those websites. For instance, you can submit guest posts or articles to relevant online publications, industry magazines or news outlets.
Social media groups and communities
Social media groups and communities are a great platform to directly engage with the targeted audience and lead to brand loyalty. In this case, you can share content in LinkedIn groups, Facebook communities or niche-specific forums. But the catch here is that you need to tailor your content as per the platform you choose to share from. Plus, you’ll need to be careful while publishing so as not to disrespect the particular community guidelines.
Q&A platforms
Q&A platforms are yet another effective way to directly engage with your audience. Platforms such as Quora and Reddit are some of the most used ones. Similar to social media groups, you need to research the platform’s culture and guidelines to provide accurate and helpful information to your audience. And in this case, you’ll need to avoid using overly promotional content.
Email marketing
Anyone who says email marketing is going flat is wrong. Because in this case, you can directly leverage your existing email list to promote your content and directly drive traffic to your website. Here, you can include a snippet of your content in the email newsletter. You can also include subscriber-only offers to make it more relevant. Also, don’t forget to personalise the email as per the interests of your subscribers.
*Stay tuned for more details on Content Syndication Platforms in our upcoming blogs.