The Ultimate Guide to Content Syndication Lead Generation

Content syndication for lead generation is one of the most effective and popular growth tactics for generating high-quality B2B leads. 

As a B2B marketer, you know what high-quality marketing content is worth: for lead generation as well as raising both brand awareness and reputation.

Plus, the majority of businesses now recognize the effectiveness of attracting audiences by focusing on providing useful information first. In fact, 87% of B2B marketers are prioritizing sharing useful information over sales and promotional messages, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

You also know the hours, days, and even weeks it can take to produce, publish, and distribute high-quality content. When you combine that time with your marketing budget being stretched in so many different directions, it’s no surprise that the content your department produces needs to work harder for you.  

One of the best ways to get the most out of your content marketing strategy is content syndication. When done right, syndicating your content is a great way to generate high-quality B2B leads, boosting your brand awareness as a key demand generation strategy, too. 

What Is Content Syndication in Marketing?

So, what is content syndication in B2B marketing?

In a nutshell, content syndication is the process of distributing your organization’s content via 3rd party suppliers, platforms, and websites you do not own.

The primary purpose of content syndication within B2B marketing is to produce high-quality leads by distributing your gated content to new channels, generating relevant downloads and, ultimately, new prospects.

Content syndication is particularly useful for technology marketers in the age of growing buying committees. According to Gartner, between 14-23 people are now involved in the average B2B technology purchase, and content syndication is a good way to make sure your brand awareness and lead generation strategies are reaching as many of those people as possible.

In this guide, we’ll be exploring content syndication for B2B lead generation, and how it can feed into your demand generation strategy, too.

When lead generation is your aim for your content syndication campaigns, your objectives will be to serve your content to the most relevant target audiences, via the most relevant channels to generate as many content downloads as possible.

Benefits of Content Syndication

There are several benefits to running content syndication campaigns as part of your lead generation strategy. The benefits include; reaching new audiences, providing value to your target audience, making your content work harder, and feeding into your demand generation strategies - all while generating those all-important, high-quality B2B marketing leads.

Let’s explore some of the benefits of content syndication in more detail.

2. Provide Value For Your Target Audience 

Next up, providing value for your target audience upfront is a great benefit of running content syndication campaigns.

B2B buyers are continually researching solutions and looking for information and education, particularly in technology sectors dealing with systems and software as a service (saas). Therefore, content syndication in B2B marketing is a great way to showcase your brand as a thought leader within the market; helping you build brand awareness and subject expertise with your target audience.

Your content syndication supplier will be able to advise you on the best content to use when running your campaign, which will usually be education-led pieces over sales-led assets. Sharing educational content provides value for your target audience – showcasing your brand as a thought leader in the industry and a trusted source of information.

Using educational content assets for your content syndication campaign will enable you to follow up with your leads using a nurture campaign designed to further educate your prospects before handing them over to your Sales team.

4. Feed Into Your Demand Generation Strategies

Not to be confused with lead generation, B2B demand generation is all about raising your brand awareness and gently drawing prospects into your marketing funnel.  

It’s a longer-term strategy and is usually harder to measure in terms of ROI.

However, content marketing via content syndication providers is a fantastic demand generation strategy for marketers. Why? As your content generates new leads for your business, it also builds awareness and attracts attention from other readers.

Those readers might not necessarily become marketing qualified leads (MQLs) now - but they’ll be aware of you when they’re searching for solutions later.  

According to HubSpot, it’s more important than ever in B2B not to let your brand building and top-of-funnel content slide in hard times: long-term relationship building is key to ensuring your brand survives, and that’s where demand generation comes in. 

Now we’ve discussed some of the benefits of content syndication, let’s explore how to do content syndication using a five-stage process.

How Does Content Syndication Work?

Next up, let's explore how you can syndicate content to enhance your B2B lead generation strategy using a five-stage content syndication approach.

Stage One: Creating Your Content Syndication Objectives

In our experience, the most common reason marketers choose to include content syndication within their B2B marketing strategy is to produce high-quality marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

MQLs generated from a content syndication campaign can be added to your marketing automation platform or CRM, ready for lead nurturing.

In the same way as any other lead generation marketing activities, your goal as a B2B marketer will be to nurture your leads from MQLs to SQLs (sales qualified leads, sometimes also referred to as sales accepted leads or SALs).

Key considerations when creating your content syndication objectives:

• The target audience, or audiences, you need to reach.
• The content assets you have available for your campaign.
• The other resources you have available, for example, your campaign budget and timeline.
• The supplier or agency you have chosen to work with.
• How 'nurtured' do you want your leads to be? For example, do you want them to have engaged and downloaded one piece of your content, at which point you can take over and nurture them within your CRM (like a ‘Single Touch’ campaign)? Or do you want them to be more familiar with your brand when they reach your marketing automation platform (for example, like a ‘Nurture Track’ campaign)?

Stage Two: Choosing the Right B2B Content Syndication Company

Once your campaign objectives are finalized for your content syndication campaigns, you'll want to scope out the suppliers and/or content syndication platforms you plan to use.

The world of B2B lead generation has changed in the last decade.

While working with a B2B content syndication company is still the most common way to promote your content to new and relevant audiences, B2B marketers are now asking more questions of their lead generation suppliers to understand who their audiences are, where their content is being hosted, and ultimately, how their leads are being generated.

There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing from the many content syndication vendors out there. Ultimately, you want to select a specialist who will run your content syndication campaign in a transparent and traceable way. Plus, a supplier who cares about your brand and will collaborate with you to generate the best results.

For example, as a B2B content syndication company, we deliver all of our content syndication campaigns using our six technology brands, which between them have over 250 websites in 60 countries and 32 languages. At Headley Media, we own our technology audiences and are 100% transparent about how our clients' technology leads are generated, unlike many other B2B lead generation suppliers.

Content syndication partners can vary in quality vastly, based on their methods.

The above questions are taken from our annual ungated eBook, The Complete Guide to B2B Lead Generation for Technology Companies  We've created this to help B2B marketers navigate the smoke-and-mirrors world of content syndication lead generation. 

The Guide contains content syndication best practices, more information on what to look for when choosing a content syndication supplier, how to generate high-quality leads, and the importance of selecting a transparent partner you can trust. 

Our Quality Lead Generation Checklist (also ungated!) is another handy resource for checking the content syndication vendors on your list are up to scratch.  

Or, download our entire free B2B Lead Generation Planning Toolkit and we’ll walk you through the whole process! 

Stage Three: Choosing Your Content

As a B2B Marketer, you know your prospects will do a lot of upfront research before they are ready to contact potential suppliers about a new product or solution. Firstly, they might visit several suppliers' websites, including yours and your competitors. Then, as well as their initial research, they are likely to visit comparison or review sites and download several pieces of relevant content during their research phase.

It's therefore essential to choose the right content assets for your content syndication campaign in line with your campaign objectives. Thinking back to Stage Two, if you've chosen a reputable lead generation supplier to run your content syndication campaigns for you, they will be able to advise you on the best types of content to use – based on their industry knowledge and content syndication expertise.

The most effective content will always depend on several factors, including your campaign objectives, the target audience and countries you want to reach, the industry you operate in, and your product, service, or solution.

For example, suppose you’re a B2B technology business specializing in email security software. In that case, you may find an in-depth research paper with unique insights that resonate the most with your audience.

Alternatively, if you’re trying to target marketing professionals, an educational course or video might be preferred. Of course, the type of content will always depend on your target audience, and the pain points your product or solution solves: but video is the fastest-growing type of marketing content, the trend rapidly crossing over from B2C to B2B.

Finally, it’s also important to consider any results you’ve already seen with previous content assets and campaigns. For example, did you produce a piece that drove great results with your audience?

Top Tip: If you want to reach audiences across multiple countries you should run your content syndication campaigns in local languages and on localized websites where possible. Even if you don't have the full content piece available in the local language, running the promotions, landing page, and hosting your content on a localized website is a great way to resonate with your target audience. In addition, running local language campaigns shows how serious and reputable you are in a specific country or region. A specialist content syndication supplier will be able to help you localize your campaign.

Stage Four: Syndicating Your Content

Once you’ve chosen the agency or supplier to run your content syndication campaign with and you’ve chosen the content asset or assets, you want to use within your content syndication campaign, you are ready to syndicate your content and start your campaign.

Again, this is where it’s important to work with a trusted content syndication supplier so that you can trust where they’re hosting your content and how they are generating downloads to ensure they are high-quality.

If we think back to Stage Two, choosing the right supplier will enable you to generate high-quality B2B leads in a trusted and transparent way.

As a responsible B2B Marketing Professional, you need to control how your leads are generated, not only to protect your ROI and develop the best results but to protect your company’s reputation and your integrity as a Marketer.

A reputable B2B lead generation will syndicate your content across their own website. That means they won’t host your content on 3rd party websites or mysterious networks; you will know exactly where your content is being hosted, giving you visibility into how your leads are generated. Questionable data and suppliers can cloud content syndication for lead generation purposes. The content syndication platforms a supplier uses will vary in quality which will affect your results and the leads you receive from syndicating your content.

Content syndication companies with expert knowledge and a transparent approach will be able to show you exactly where your content is being hosted to generate downloads.

However, there are several questions you need to ask any content syndication provider you are considering working with, as the quality of leads can vary significantly.

You’ll want to know what content syndication websites your content syndication partner is using, to give you full visibility of the websites your content is hosted on, and subsequently, your brand is associated with.

For example, at Headley Media, we generate leads for our B2B technology clients via content syndication, using a 100% digital reader journey - providing a fully transparent content-led marketing approach.

Stage Five: Generating Your Content Syndication Leads With a Fixed Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)

The fifth and final stage of your content syndication marketing campaign is to predict your results before your campaign begins.

No, there’s no need to get your crystal ball out, there really is a way to predict the number of leads your content syndication campaign will deliver before it begins, giving you the guaranteed number of leads you can get for your budget.

Unlike other lead generation methods, such as LinkedIn, PPC, webinars, and events, you will know the exact number of leads you will receive from your content syndication campaign, allowing you to budget with confidence and prepare your Marketing and Sales teams for the next steps.

A specialist will be able to provide you with the exact number of leads your content syndication campaign will be able to generate, based on your campaign criteria.

Taking a fixed CPL approach enables you to determine your content syndication campaign’s results, for example, you’ll know exactly how many leads your budget will provide before the campaign begins. For an example of a fixed CPL approach, take a look at our Reader Journey, which is the exact content syndication lead generation process we deliver at Headley Media.

Many factors will be involved when choosing how to run your content syndication lead generation campaigns. Although it may be tempting to choose a supplier based solely on the price i.e. the lowest CPL quote you can find, it’s important to consider a number of factors when deciding.

For example, if the CPL is low, the chances are that the quality of the leads generated from your content syndication campaign will also be low – so although the ROI from your marketing budget is high initially if none of the prospects produced convert into sales, your content syndication campaign will have failed to achieve ROI for your business overall.

 

Headley Media’s Approach to Content Syndication

B2B content syndication vendors that take a fixed cost-per-lead approach will help you budget with confidence and syndicate your content across the most suitable websites.

What Headley Media does differently is offer our own B2B content syndication platforms to host your content. These content libraries are trusted brands in themselves, offering senior professionals in the IT, Cybersecurity, HR, MarTech, FinTech, and Electronics sectors dependable sources of information for their research and education purposes.  

This means we can follow your content syndication leads through their entire digital reader journey, tracking the pieces of content they read and gaining insight into the buying signals they’re leaving. 

On that note, you might also want to consider combining your content syndication lead generation with Account-Based Marketing (ABM) or Intent Data Targeting to create even more focused campaigns.

ABM allows you to laser your focus on a select list of businesses and their teams, spending your marketing budget and time on creating content that will resonate with your most lucrative targets.  

Intent Data Targeting is all about using the digital buying signals your prospects drop on content libraries and across other websites to identify how close they are to a purchase. 

Whatever strategy you decide is best for your business, it's important to trust the provider you are working with. The quality of syndication methods can vary greatly per supplier so it's important to ask all the right questions when choosing an agency to work with.

For example, all of our B2B technology lead generation services are delivered using content syndication, 100% digitally. Each lead is fully traceable and we only syndicate our client's content to platforms that we own. Our six media brands span over 250 websites in 60 countries and 32 languages, making our content syndication services completely transparent and 100% digital.

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