Date
13th November 2023
As a B2B technology marketer, you know better than anyone the importance of digital content in today's fast-paced professional world.
B2B buyers now spend more time researching solutions (45%) than they spend on meeting potential suppliers - just 17% of their time (Gartner).
Therefore, offering answers to their questions and solutions to their problems through valuable content online is a great way to attract new audiences for your products and services.
And to find those relevant audiences, B2B content syndication is a highly effective marketing strategy combining lead generation and demand generation tactics.
B2B content syndication helps you take your audience from the awareness stage, when they're initially researching solutions, towards the decision-making stage, when they're ready to purchase.
In fact, the buyer's journey model can help you enhance your content syndication lead gen to generate high-quality leads.
What Are B2B Content Syndication Services?
B2B content syndication involves publishing your educational and unique content – such as eBooks, white papers, videos, case studies, and research reports – via an external supplier or website.
Ideally, the website(s) you host your content on will be a trusted content syndication platform where B2B professionals can download your gated content in exchange for their business contact details. Take a look at Headley Media's portfolio of content library websites as an example.
In its simplest form, content syndication for B2B follows this process:
- One piece of your content is hosted on a relevant and reputable content syndication platform.
- Your content is then promoted to your target audience. For example this might be via email promotions and a dedicated landing page.
- Your content is downloaded by potential prospects that match your target audience criteria.
- Readers are then subject to a data validation process to confirm their contact details, relevance, and quality.
- If readers pass the data validation process and qualify as a lead, your new prospects will then be delivered to you on a daily or weekly basis, depending on your needs.
The above example is how we'd run a Single Touch campaign here at Headley Media. Take a look at our other lead generation services for more examples of B2B content syndication in action.
There are lots of ways to enhance these basic B2B lead generation campaigns so that your leads, when they are handed over to you, are warm and aware of your brand - rather than cold and unlikely to convert.
Additional B2B lead gen enhancements range from exposing prospects to more than one piece of your content (so that they become more familiar with the brand) to profiling your new prospect's business for a more accurate picture of their needs.
Common B2B Content Syndication Services and How They Work
Now that we've explored what B2B content syndication is let's look at some of the most popular B2B content syndication services designed to help you reach new and relevant technology audiences.
Single Touch and Double Touch Lead Generation Campaigns
Single Touch lead generation is the classic scenario we described earlier: your prospects are exposed to one piece of your content before being delivered as leads on a cost-per-lead (CPL) basis.
Double Touch starts the same as Single Touch lead generation, but each prospect sees two pieces of content, which makes them a little more familiar with the brand.
A good content syndication supplier will authenticate the leads before they're delivered to you to check all the contact information is accurate and up-to-date.
Single Touch and Double Touch lead gen campaigns are great for marketing and sales teams with plenty of time and scope to nurture their leads.
Nurture Track and BANT Lead Generation Campaigns
Working with a lead generation company that will nurture your leads for you is one of the best ways to ensure a good ROI on your B2B content marketing strategy.
For example, with a Nurture Track campaign at Headley Media, your leads are exposed to at least two pieces of your content before they are delivered to you. Your leads are also asked to fill out at least two forms with their information, and they must explicitly consent to hear from your business twice, too. This approach guarantees that your leads are aware of your brand and expect to hear more from you, making them more engaged and more likely to convert.
BANT lead generation campaigns are also a great way to find out more about your leads before they are delivered to you. For example, at Headley Media, we offer SoftBANT, or 'half BANT' lead generation campaigns, to our clients. SoftBANT lead generation campaigns follow the same pattern as our other lead generation services; however, they are enhanced by finding out more about the lead.
BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe. BANT lead generation involves assessing each lead against the BANT criteria to determine how likely they are to convert (and when), allowing you to prioritize your leads.
It's essential to work with a lead generation company that provides total transparency into their B2B content syndication and lead generation processes so you know you'll receive high-quality leads.
Account-Based Marketing
There's nothing like the personal touch. Running your B2B content syndication campaigns with Account-Based Marketing is one of the industry's most popular B2B lead generation strategies, and for a good reason: it focuses on each prospect as an individual.
In lead generation, that means tailoring your campaigns to each business on your target account list (TAL), which involves finding out their needs and exposing them to the content they'll find most useful.
A good B2B lead generation company should be able to help you build and expand your TAL, including finding relevant 'lookalike audiences' that you can target.
Intent Targeting and Audience Intelligence
Good B2B lead generation companies can help you utilize intent data to target leads at the right time.
At Headley Media, for example, we track our readers' intent while they use our content libraries. We tag each piece of content listed on our website with topic keywords, so as a reader reads different pieces of content, we assign these keywords to their profile so that we can analyze their interests.
We then cross-reference our 1st party data with data from 3rd parties for accurate intent targeting.
Content syndication B2B campaigns can also be enhanced with audience intelligence strategies.
Audience intelligence enhancements often involve putting more questions on your content's gated form, allowing you to smartly work out which leads are likely to convert by asking about their business – from the size of their business to whether they're using a certain kind of software.
Audience intelligence strategies also encompass install base targeting, which allows you to focus on prospects already using specific brands.
Finding the Right B2B Content Syndication Services
The B2B content syndication services that are right for you will depend on a few factors.
Your budget is obviously a key consideration, but also your organizational structure, the way your sales team works, and how much time you have in your business to nurture your leads.
A good B2B content syndication company should be able to offer a range of services, advise you on which ones will work best for you, and work with you to get the best out of them.
They should also have a solid portfolio of brands to attract readers: valuable content hubs that genuine professionals use and trust. At Headley Media, for example, we have over 250 content libraries across 60 countries in the IT, Cybersecurity, HR, marketing, finance, and electronics sectors.
Our content syndication websites are uncluttered, easy to use, ad-free, and valued by our readers.
However, you need to be wary of shady players in the lead generation industry. For example, some content syndication companies will outsource your leads to 3rd parties without you knowing, resulting in poor-quality leads that haven't been authenticated.
The best way to determine if B2B content syndication vendors are trustworthy is to check their reader journey. They should be able to show you exactly how their process works from the leads' perspective, and that includes showing you the content libraries you'll be published on, the type of form your leads will fill out, and which 3rd parties will be used to cross-reference their data.
We'd also suggest you find a B2B lead generation company that can commit to a full digital trail for each lead. This gives you full transparency of the process and a complete picture of who your lead is: no ambiguity, no second-guessing. We've also put together a handy Quality Lead Generation Checklist to use when researching B2B content syndication companies.
