Introduction
When you publish a white paper, you want it to reach as many people as possible and generate high value leads for your business. This is not something you can achieve by sharing it with your network on social media, emails and web traffic.
This is where content syndication comes in handy.
In very simple terms, content syndication involves getting your content out to your target audience by publishing it on third party sites. You can syndicate different formats of content – from white papers, podcasts and ebooks, to webinars, blogs, articles and even infographics.
The reality is, marketing in the current business environment has changed a lot. In addition to boosting sales, more and more B2B marketers are focusing on growth marketing. This means attracting the right prospects to their businesses, and not just the top-of-funnel visitors.
Content syndication is at the heart of this strategy.
Why Get a White Paper Syndication Partner?
According to the 2017 State of Content syndication report, 85% of B2B marketers identified white papers as the most effective content to syndicate.
Content syndication involves publishing high value content on sites that target audiences that are a good fit for your business, but you have no access to them or haven’t formed a relationship with them yet. It is one of the most effective strategies for content distribution, which is a priority for at least 46% of B2B marketers.
Source: Marketing Charts
Most syndication partners publish gated content. With statistics showing that 75% of B2B buyers are willing to share information about themselves or their business to access a white paper, gated content enables syndication partners to gather lead data using surveys, contact forms or polls.
By giving you access to the audience that syndication partners have already established connections with, your company benefits by:
- Getting access to an audience that has buying potential
- Increased brand awareness among your target audience
- Getting high quality backlinks
- Organic traffic on its site
- Accessing quality leads
How White Paper Syndication Partners Generate Leads
Here are the different ways that B2B content syndication partners generate leads for companies using white paper content:
1. Placing White Paper Content Infront of a Wider Audience
Syndication partners help B2B marketers generate quality leads by placing their white paper content before a bigger audience. This gives the content huge exposure compared to the one the company would have reached on its own. For instance, if your company has the potential to reach 1000 readers with one article that simplifies your white paper, partnering with syndication sites will enable you to reach a hundred times more readers with the same content.
The key to reaching a wide audience through syndication lies in converting your white paper into quality content that can boost customer engagement rates. The most effective way of creating highly engaging content is to align your content with your buyer personas. Each persona has its pain points and your content should be able to address those pain points if you want your target audience to find it useful and engaging. Identify keywords from their pain points and use them in content creation.
Source: Curata
Consider repurposing your content into other formats – this will give you a chance to target new demographics and audiences in your syndication efforts. For instance, turning your white paper into video can boost content engagement as Cisco projects that 82% of web traffic is expected to be driven by video by the end of 2020. To succeed in B2B content syndication, choose a partner who has an authoritative site that has a loyal audience. This increases your chances of generating high quality leads.
2. Increasing Brand Visibility and Authority
When you syndicate your white paper content regularly, you enhance the visibility of your brand online. To achieve this, your marketing team should generate content that is helpful and relevant to your target audience in a consistent manner. Content pieces should also be generated in a way that nurtures visitors into leads every time they consume the content.
Syndicating your content consistently boosts your brand’s online presence and enables you to close in on niche areas that may have been challenging for your marketing team. The best way to increase your brand awareness through content syndication is to reach out to partners that have established their authority in your niche and work with them to showcase what your company has to offer.
Content syndication also helps B2B companies to establish their brand authority by positioning themselves as subject matter experts in their industry. In a crowded niche market, content syndication helps companies to differentiate themselves from the competition by unlocking their role as thought leaders who inform as well as delight their target audience in a relatable and relevant manner. By leveraging content syndication, B2B companies attract and nurture high level leads.
3. Driving High Quality Traffic to Your Website
Statistics show that 91% of blogs don’t get organic traffic from social media or Google. This has a significant impact on the quantity and quality of leads that a company is able to generate considering the role that blogs play in driving web traffic and B2B lead generation.
High quality traffic refers to traffic that has a high likelihood of becoming leads, and ultimately converting to customers. Website traffic is among the top three aspects that B2B marketers pay attention to. The goal of increasing traffic flow to your website does not change when you decide to syndicate content. As a matter of fact, syndicating content is an effective way to push your target audience to your site. When syndicating your content, syndication partners will backlink to your site to boost organic traffic.
Besides backlinking, content syndication boosts organic traffic through search engines because they equate syndicated content with authority and quality. For most search engines, including Google, the fact that your content has been accepted by credible sites means that it is valuable and informative for their target audience. This means your syndicated content is ranked highly on search engines, which means more high quality traffic to your website and consequently, more leads.
4. Capturing High Value Leads
Content syndication can play an important role in generating high quality leads for your company by distributing white paper content to publishers that are targeting buyer personas that you’re targeting. In fact, 76% of B2B marketers use content syndication to meet their lead generation goals.
By amplifying your reach, white paper syndication partners allow you to tap an audience that you would otherwise not be able to reach.
This enables B2B marketers to place their content in front of an audience that has high purchase potential as opposed to restricting themselves to their immediate audience that consists of loyal followers and subscribers. This boosts their chances of attracting high value leads significantly.
To capture these leads, most syndication partners publish gated content. To ensure that you work with a white paper syndication partner that delivers value, ask about the successes they’ve had with the prospect leads that they have delivered previously. Some interesting information that you should find out from a prospective syndication partner include:
- Whether they have a history of delivering the quantity of leads agreed
- How they capture and qualify leads
- Buyer personas that they use in client campaigns
- The strategy they use to promote client content
- How they deliver leads to their clients and whether they have a way of integrating with your marketing automation system
- How they track the cost of each lead they generate
Tips for Finding the Right White Paper Syndication Partner
Finding a syndication partner should not be difficult, thanks to the wide range of tools that help with this including Buzzsumo, SEMRush and Ahrefs. Using these tools, you can check websites to see the latest backlinks for syndication opportunities. When selecting a syndication partner, opt for partners who have:
- Sites that have site authority that is better or similar to yours
- Readership that is similar to yours
- Allows you to link back to your original articles
Just like there are good syndication partners, there are bad syndication partners. When selecting a content syndication partner, avoid low authority sites, sites that have spammy outbound links or those that don’t have clear editorial requirements. Syndicating your content on such sites can affect your SEO and brand performance negatively.
Final Thoughts
Lead generation is a priority for any B2B marketer. One of the most effective strategies that B2B companies use to attract high quality leads is developing white papers. But to generate the high value leads that each marketer is looking for, the white papers must reach the right people. Content syndication enables marketers to expand their audience reach by distributing their white paper content in different formats to audiences that syndications partners already have.
To effectively do this, B2B companies should identify syndication partners that have a big audience consisting of the kind of readership they are looking for, have a solid site authority in the industry and are willing to link back to their sites. Working with such partners enables B2B marketers to place their white papers in front of a wide audience, drive high quality traffic to their sites and build strong brand awareness – leading to high value leads for companies.
Gaurav Roy
2 December 2020
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