As a content marketer, you should know a variety of marketing strategies to promote the products or services of your company. The more strategies you know, the easier it is for you to raise brand awareness, get more exposure, and eventually generate more leads.
Content syndication is a strategy that can help you achieve all these goals. We’ll talk more about content syndication in this post and tell you why you should consider employing it as a part of an effective content marketing strategy.
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What is content syndication?
Content syndication is the practice of sharing your content on platforms or websites other than yours. Such content can be whitepapers, e-books, research reports, recorded webinars, or podcasts. Syndicating content aims to showcase it to a more relevant audience.
Let’s think about it: the online world is huge, and your website is just a tiny part of it. If you only rely on your website as the sole platform where you publish your content, you’re missing out.
You’re amplifying its reach by strategically sharing your well-crafted content across different platforms. It’s a smart move to make your hard work go even further, reaching new audiences. Content syndication ensures that your valuable content doesn’t just stay on your blog but reaches a wider audience, maximizing its potential impact.
Clear communication about goals and plans with your team is crucial for a top-notch content syndication strategy. Everyone needs to be on the same page to ensure various content formats are ready before deadlines. Using agile project management tools can help keep everything organized.
Using content syndication, you start the journey for your leads from another platform. Then, you engage them with your content when they click to visit your website. From there, they can decide whether to convert and buy from you or just go back and continue exploring. Therefore, you must have a customer journey plan for your syndicated content.
Depending on whether you want to allocate a budget or not, you can decide to adopt a free or paid content syndication strategy. If you want to do it for free, you can reach out to smaller websites or news organizations.
To get your content published on larger sites, you may pay fees to publish sponsored content.
What are the benefits of content syndication?
Let’s look at some reasons why content syndication is beneficial to your content marketing efforts:
1. Reaching a larger audience
As we mentioned, there are many more websites out there other than your own. Republishing your content on some of them would expose your content to a wider audience. This can increase the number of leads you drive, making it possible to have more customers or users.
The key thing to remember is that the content you repurpose for third-party websites or platforms should already give you a good website engagement rate. In other words, you should republish the content you’re already confident about.
2. Establishing an online presence
Having reached more leads, establishing a consistent online presence and a more visible brand would follow naturally. Therefore, if you constantly syndicate your well-performing content, your brand becomes more digitally accessible.
It’s crucial, however, to share your content on websites that are relevant to your brand and niche. Also, their ranking authority should be higher than your website, so you can actually benefit from syndicating content on those websites.
Moreover, you should ensure their audience is similar to your buyer personas. Also, your content should be helpful to the target audience. It should revolve around your brand and the selling points while resonating with and/or nurturing their needs.
3. Improving traffic
One of the main reasons you should consider content syndication for your business is that it can help boost traffic. Exposing your content to the audience of different channels allows you to gain more visitors to your website.
The more traffic you get and the more links you build for your web pages, the higher your ranking on Google and other search engines will be.
4. Educating audience
Every business needs to keep its audience engaged with its brand. One way to do this is by syndicating content that educates them or adds some sort of value to them. It could also be that your content suddenly makes them realize a need they didn’t know they had.
Doing so allows you to entice audiences on third-party websites. As a result, they want to know more, so they take a step towards your website. That’s how you get cold leads to enter the top of your funnel.
5. Wining more leads
To have a more efficient lead generation strategy, you need to connect with as many audiences similar to your target audience as possible. The more you tap into an audience that resonates with your brand, the higher the chance of winning relevant leads.
You already spend time and effort creating the content of your web pages, and by checking their analytics, you can figure out if they are performing well. Then why not share it with more audience and win more leads?
6. Increasing brand authority
Republishing your content on other websites can improve your search engine performance as you’re building relevant backlinks. Getting more backlinks would result in better performance and ranking on search engines.
On top of that, your website becomes an authority, and your audience will recognize you as a thought leadership brand. That’s one more way to differentiate yourself from other brands in today’s competitive market.
How to do content syndication?
You have various choices when it comes to using the content syndication approach:
1. Co-marketing
When brands or organizations partner together to expand their reach, they’re employing a co-marketing strategy. What they promote is a co-branded offer targeted at a common audience. The promotion is through a piece of content, such as an ebook, whitepaper, study, or the like.
The leads generated by co-marketing campaigns can be generous depending on the marketing strategy and budget. The two organizations then share the captured leads between themselves.
A perfect example of co-marketing is the collaboration between Apple and Mastercard.
Apple and Mastercard collaborate to simplify the lives of people. With the introduction of Apple Pay, they changed the way people make payments — shifting from credit cards to using digital wallets and apps on their phones.
People can now use their latest iPhones and securely link their Mastercard to Apple Pay. It’s a partnership that streamlines transactions and puts Mastercard at the forefront of this payment evolution.
2. Social media syndication
Also considered a social media strategy, partnerships between brands to share each other’s content is a common method of content syndication. Social media platforms are popular places where bloggers and influencers actively create content. Therefore, partnering with micro or macro influencers is a great way to increase exposure for your brand.
Statistics show that 50% of Millennials trust product recommendations from influencers. Also, HubSpot’s Consumer Trends Report shows the percentage of each generation who bought a product based on an influencer’s recommendation in the past three months among social media users:
NordVPN, the virtual private network, employs influencer marketing, with a significant 85.3% of its social traffic originating from YouTube.
Mayuko Inoue is a tech creator known for focusing on empathy and compassion who showcases her life routines on YouTube. In some of her videos, NordVPN is seamlessly integrated, highlighting the importance of online security within Mayuko’s tech-oriented routine.
3. Press releases
Press releases are a great way to make your brand more authoritative. 68% of businesses report raised brand/product visibility after publishing the press release.
A press release is a news-style article with links to your product or service landing pages that informs your audience and industry about important news about your company. You can share this article on your website’s news section, social channels, and emails. But you can also share it on online media channels.
The news can be about your latest product launch, new features or technologies, awards, new partnerships, events, the social responsibility your company is taking, sustainability contributions, or any other news worth sharing with the industry.
Here’s an example of how Samsung is publishing press releases. They do it on their Newsroom blog:
4. Guest blogging
Guest blogging means that you share helpful blog posts on blogs of similar websites to yours. It’s a bit different from most ways of content syndication in the sense that the content should be unique. Unique content is content that isn’t live anywhere else online. It should be exclusive to a particular site or blog.
Now here’s the thing about guest blogging. When guest blogging, you shouldn’t just focus on what’s best for you. You should also consider how the collaboration will benefit the other party.
You should thoroughly research the brand and blog of the company you want to guest blog with. Follow their guidelines and write in their brand voice. In other words, prioritize contributing to their blog over promoting your brand.
Here’s an example of guest blogging in which the brand has sponsored a post to get a backlink and clicks to their homepage:
(Image Source: Half Baked Harvest)
In addition, you should read the guest blogging guidelines of each business carefully. That’s how you can write unique content exclusively for them. To put it simply, you should write as though you’re a writer for that company. Otherwise, the consistency of their blog will be negatively affected.
While some websites publish your guest blogs for free, others may ask for content on your blog in return. Moreover, if the ranking of the host website is high, they may charge an amount for publishing your content. The average cost of publishing a paid guest post is $77.80.
After all, when your guest blog is online, you can enjoy two benefits. Firstly, the traffic to your website, as you’ve inserted your website links in the content. Secondly, a backlink to your website. Both the traffic and the backlink can help you get a better ranking on search engines.
Content syndication best practices
After learning the different methods of content syndication, you should employ the approach you think works best for your marketing strategies. Here, we’ll discuss some best practices to keep in mind:
1. Repurpose your content
The first thing you need to do for content syndication is you should repurpose your content for each syndication approach you choose.
If your blog post is performing well and you want to ask a social media influencer to reshare it, you should repurpose it for that social media. The tone, content, or sometimes even the message should adapt based on your sales and marketing funnel.
2. Prioritize quality
The matter of quality vs. quantity is always a never-ending discussion between managers and content marketers. Since managers see the bigger picture and want immediate growth from any marketing activity, it’s possible that quantity becomes more important than quality at times. But that shouldn’t be the case.
You should control your content syndication activities and prioritize their quality over quantity. Achieving your marketing goals can be pleasant and make you feel accomplished. However, you should bear in mind that the more doesn’t always mean the better. You should plan for your content syndication and keep an eye on how you use your resources and/or budget.
For instance, if you are doing guest blogging, you should know that 60% of bloggers write one to five guest posts per month.
3. Create gated content
If you get a chance to get more reach for your content, you should make sure that it can capture leads. Think of inserting links to a relevant landing page where they can fill in a form and leave their contact information.
That’s how you can build a relationship with them, for instance, by sending them monthly newsletters. Doing so can, at some point, persuade them to convert and buy from you or subscribe to your service. And that’s how creating actionable content can influence your overall content syndication efforts.
4. Choose partners
Not every business can be your partner. You need to find those with a similar or identical target audience. Otherwise, there’s no point in collaboration.
The reason is that even if your content can engage their audience, at the end of the day, they don’t feel the need to become your customers. So, they’ll eventually leave that page or ignore the social media post.
Once you find those relevant businesses that can be your potential partners, you should check their rankings, authority, and also their reputation. Depending on your needs and budget, you can narrow your list of potential businesses. Having done that, you’re ready to reach out to them and pitch your proposal.
5. Keep track of leads
Establishing a follow-up strategy on leads is an important step in content syndication. You should be able to manage all the prospects your syndicated content generates.
Think of a scenario where you get your prospects to take the steps you want on your website. Define a journey for the leads and answer every possible question they may have at any stage of the journey.
For instance, your website should have a complete FAQ section for the after-purchase stage. That can be really helpful when they want to do some troubleshooting. But, it can vary depending on what your business is selling or offering. The main thing is that you shouldn’t leave them hanging throughout their journey, not even after a conversion.
Conclusion
Content syndication can give your content and brand significant exposure. If you want to reach a broader audience, this strategy may be more cost-efficient and time-saving for your overall digital marketing efforts.
It takes more time and budget to grow your own audience base, but with content syndication, you can expose your content to a larger audience faster. Why wait?
