Content syndication is one of the many services available to B2B marketers looking to repurpose their content for stronger lead generation. B2B content syndication is the process of republishing existing content from a company’s website to third-party websites with the goal of reaching new prospects and building a stronger database of high-quality leads.
In fact, repurposing content is the #1 trend this year – way ahead of some emerging tools and tactics like generative AI.
So what are your options?
Companies can leverage B2B content syndication platforms or hire a professional and proven content syndication services firm to accelerate the process and make it more successful. A service firm can also save organizations the time, trouble, and risks of doing it themselves.
There are many high-impact reasons why B2B companies should seriously consider engaging in content syndication marketing, including:
- reaching an entirely new audience of potential prospects,
- generating more leads to fill their sales pipeline, and
- boosting product and service sales.
Why content marketing is important for B2B, and where syndication comes in
Content marketing is crucial for B2B because it helps build trust, establish expertise, and generate leads. By creating valuable and relevant content, businesses can attract and engage their target audience, ultimately driving conversions.
That’s the first step.
Syndicating content across various platforms then maximizes your content’s reach and amplifies its impact.
The biggest key to success in B2B content syndication is choosing the right content syndication service provider. However, finding the best content syndication service can be a bit like the Goldilocks dilemma — finding the one that is “just right” is a hit or miss situation.
For example, some content syndication services delivered overall poor results, while some start strong, but quickly fade. What you need is a B2B content syndication service that performs well consistently.
Often companies choose the wrong service, have a poor experience, and then give up on content syndication. Others are more tenacious.
In fact, Google tried 15 different content syndication services before finding the perfect provider who delivered success right out of the gate and then continued to deliver success over the long term. Instead of experiencing pipeline dips, the company experienced a consistent flow of new prospects quarter-over-quarter.
Learn how Mike generated 4x more pipeline from content syndication
5 key questions to evaluate content syndication services
Choosing the best provider doesn’t have to be a lengthy trial and error process.
To find the best B2B content syndication service firm to bring you the results you need, consider these five questions to ask.
Q1—What is their approach to content syndication?
Content syndication is all about using a systematic approach to lead generation by republishing content on platform(s) that deliver the opportunity to reach a new target audience. You should find out what approach the services firm uses for this process.
One of your first few steps is to decide whether to use paid vs. free content syndication.
What is free content syndication?
Free content syndication involves reaching out to relevant publications and hoping they will mention your content with a backlink to your website. This can be time-consuming and requires effort to build connections with media outlets.
What is paid content syndication?
On the other hand, paid content syndication involves paying a distribution company to syndicate your content on their platform or to various content publishers. This makes it easier to get your content featured in major publications with little effort, but it comes at a cost. Examples of paid B2B content syndication platforms include ViB, PR Newswire and Taboola.
How does content syndication work?
An ideal B2B content syndication approach should include these steps:
- Determine the criteria for targeting prospects to ensure your content is republished only where your ideal customer profile matches exist. The service should be able to segment any given community by geography, title, level, technology, and more.
- You provide your high-value content, such as white papers, reports, videos, and long- and short-form content, for republishing.
- The service provider promotes the content download page with targeted outbound campaigns to your ideal customer profile.
- The leads you receive will only be shared if they match your target criteria, i.e. a pay-per-lead model. This step is critical. Will the provider scrub the downloads to ensure you only get the highest quality leads?
Q2—Who is their ideal reader, i.e. your ideal prospect?
B2B brands are frequently in the position of having excellent content but no established audience to read it.
Syndicating your content to a third-party platform allows you to get more mileage from your content by placing it in front of the types of people you want to attract. It’s important to ensure that the provider’s audience matches your ideal customer profile.
Look for a B2B content syndication service vendor whose audience aligns with your ideal prospect — and who has a working knowledge of how your industry operates, so they can get the results you desire.
For example, if you are a technological company, you should look for a content syndication vendor with a large community of qualified decision makers in IT roles or other types of technical roles.
Q3—What is their fee structure?
Naturally, you’ll want to know if it’s worth investing in paid content syndication. To make this calculation, ask the service providers you’re considering about their fee structure.
Look for a vendor that offers affordable and flexible pricing and a low cost per lead (CPL) fee structure, which means that you only pay for each download if the campaign is successful.
Even better is a pay per lead option so you can start small and scale up as your satisfaction grows with the results.
And if you’re looking to really maximize your full-funnel lead generation success, consider service providers that offer other lead generation services that can be bundled with content syndication.
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Q4—Do they have demonstrable results and success stories?
The content syndication firm you hire should be able to prove their success through a wide variety of real-world results, including customer success stories. Let’s look at some content syndication examples.
Content syndication example 1: Google
As we talked about earlier, we collaborated with our client Google to resolve some challenges they consistently faced with over 10 syndication providers:
- Costly options with low ROI
- “Content fatigue” due to over-saturation
- No consistent or scalable results
With ViB, Mike simply provided his targeting criteria and content asset, for our team to deliver a ViB Syndication program with pretty impressive results!
Content syndication example 2: Abnormal
Recently, we worked with Jon’s team from Abnormal Security as well.
They’re a cloud-based email security solution provider, primiarly targeting C-level executives and other senior job roles — a market that typically isn’t easy to reach.
With ViB Content Syndication, Abnormal is generating a steady 1,000-1,5000 leads per quarter.
These qualified leads result in multiple opportunities worth over $800,000 each month.
In addition, Abnormal saw clear benefits compared to other content syndication services, including
- Higher lead quality and cost-effectiveness, with 50% higher lead to opportunity conversion rates
- Improvement in the quality of job titles and leads from their target audience through
- Consistent positive feedback from Abnormal’s sales teams
✅ Check out their customer stories here:
Q5—Do they provide guaranteed content syndication leads?
Think of this final criteria as the icing on the cake. If the vendor doesn’t offer a guaranteed result, you may want to walk away.
For example, editorial syndication networks use a pricing model similar to paid ads, i.e. a pay-per-click (PPC) model.
Under this model, advertisers pay a fee for each click their content receives when it is displayed on publisher websites within the syndication network. The specific cost per click may vary depending on factors such as the competitiveness of the industry, targeting options, and the overall volume of traffic the advertiser desires.
That’s also why these ad-based syndication networks usually can’t offer a lead volume or quality guarantee.
Especially if you’re in a niche market with hard to reach buyers, it’s important to choose a provider that will commit to delivering the results you need versus providing vanity metrics and volumes of “leads” that don’t match your prospect criteria.
B2B content syndication services that check every box
If you’re producing great content, but content syndication is not yet a part of your marketing mix, you should consider adding it to your strategy.
But instead of dealing with the learning curve and trial and error to achieve success in B2B content syndication, you can hire a professional service firm that already has the know-how and experience to do content syndication right — and help you achieve the results you want.
Remember, when it comes to choosing a content syndication service provider you should expect nothing less than consistently meaningful results.
That’s why ViB Syndication is often the choice of today’s leading companies. They like our systematic approach, demonstrable results, proven prospect profile, fair fee structure, and guaranteed lead generation results.
See more features and specs by grabbing the ViB Syndication datasheet below, or contact us today — and feel free to ask us anything about amplifying your content through our proven B2B content syndication services!
