We recently conducted a survey on the State of B2B Pipeline Growth in collaboration with our friends at Demand Metric and one of our most surprising findings was that only 23% of B2B marketers report using content syndication.  

That’s less than a quarter! Fewer than one in four! 

This means that 77% of B2B marketers are missing out on a tried-and-true channel that can maximize their content reach. In fact, 61% of B2B marketers who use content syndication were able to reach their goals as compared to 45% for those who do not use content syndication. 

And to make matters worse, we then found out that 37% of respondents have not considered using content syndication for lead generation, 38% don’t know what content syndication is, and 35% don’t understand how it works.  

And yet, marketing teams typically spend about 25% or more of their budget creating content. With budgets and headcounts shrinking amidst continuing economic headwinds, marketers can’t afford to limit the exposure of costly assets by placing them on one or two platforms. It won’t make money and it doesn’t make sense.    

After all, our jobs are to be seen; to be heard; to be engaged with. So, what gives? 

Content syndication clearly has a marketing image problem. And we’re here to clarify the confusion.  

Content syndication ensures the right people see your content, even if they’ve never heard of you, by republishing assets beyond your company’s website, blog, LinkedIn, or social media accounts.  

It’s finding potential customers where they are, rather than hoping they find you, and by utilising the right insights, it’s giving them exactly what they need to continue their buyers’ journey. 

Content syndication boosts brand awareness, drives more traffic to your site, and generates more leads. In fact, our survey found that of those using content syndication, 43% did so to reach different or a new set of prospects, and 23% to replace less effective lead generation channels. 

It’s predictable pipeline—matching your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) at target accounts, at a pre-set cost—during uncertain times. 

Most buying groups start their research via search and portals, so spreading content around increases the likelihood it will be seen. Having it featured on well-respected sites not only increases the company profile, but it also elevates its credibility. 

According to research by LinkedIn and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, at any given moment only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market, so connections need to be made well before they’re ready to become customers. 

Capturing their attention by serving solutions as they seek them is key to advancing the buyers’ journey and helps begin the nurture process. And when partnered with digital display, demand generation increases as does ROI. Instana generated over $6m in qualified sales pipeline using this approach.    

Some marketers have written content syndication off, suggesting the leads it delivers don’t convert, but that’s because it isn’t being used correctly, and those leads are being rushed.  

Content syndication is just one stop on a 20+ stage journey involving, sometimes, dozens of buyers. The leads need to be nurtured to become MQL’s (Marketing Qualified Leads) ready to be handed over to sales. Early buying signals shouldn’t prompt sales calls.

Lead quality is often cited as the reason for not using content syndication, and that came up in the study as well, but the majority of survey participants using it—78%—are not ignoring that, they’re measuring it. Eighteen percent enjoy inquiry-to-conversion rates between 26% and 50%. 

While half of those surveyed said they were satisfied with their lead-generation process, that jumped 9% when content syndication was in the mix. 

With marketers facing the triple whammy challenges of budget constraints, economic headwinds and escalating targets, now is the perfect time to learn about, and utilize the easy wins content syndication delivers.  

Awareness might be the first stage of the buying journey, but it’s one marketers must continually revisit to understand what is and isn’t working for them, and their competitors. Sometimes the best option has been there all along.  

It’s clear from the survey that those using content syndication have no doubts: they’re increasing or maintaining their spend at a time when budgets are only shrinking. And those not using it, are giving it serious consideration—70% in the next six months. Getting leads, the main reason. 

There is a lot of truth to the saying that “everything old is new again.” We see this over and over again. Cottage cheese, a diet food darling of the 1950s is having a new moment in popular recipes. Check out Instagram and you’ll see that current fashion is being driven by a nostalgia for the 1990s and Y2K looks. And the color pink – last trending in the 1980s – is taking center stage on the heels of “Barbie” mania. 

We see this cycle in B2B marketing mix preferences too. Direct mail staged a modest come-back during the pandemic. Live events, shut down for three years, are bouncing back. Email, a mainstay of B2B marketing, is experiencing a downturn due to overuse. And then there is content syndication. 

When you mention content syndication to most B2B marketers, you don’t get an enthusiastic response. In fact, many marketers react with some version of, “Ugh. I don’t like using content syndication in my mix, because the leads I get from it are terrible.” But, given the accelerating changes in B2B buying behavior, it’s time to take a fresh look at content syndication programs as part of a healthy marketing mix. 

There is no disputing the fact that B2B buyers are in charge and that the buying experience matters. According to recent industry data, the already complex B2B journey is only getting harder. Consider that: 

What this means for marketers is that many preferred tactics no longer work for today’s buyer journeys. B2B marketers need to adapt and to shift their attention to where buyers are these days. And that is increasingly on third-party web sites including business and industry publications, review sites, and online communities. How do you effectively reach buyers in these places? Through content syndication. 

Content syndication is a marketing strategy that involves republishing your company’s content on other platforms versus simply publishing on your owned sites. A variation of content syndication involves using publisher databases to send content directly to specified buyer personas. Syndication allows you to distribute your content to new and larger audiences. It maximizes the investment you make in existing content development and is a simple and cost-effective way to engage with target buyers. 

Content syndication works best when you use credible, quality content that speaks to the needs of your target buyers, rather than being solely focused on your company and its offerings. Top examples of preferred content for syndication include third-party analyst reports, relevant articles, topical blog posts, customer case studies, and applicable eBooks or infographics. Above all, content used in syndication should convey a story that engages and resonates with your different buyer personas.  

Finally, content syndication, like other tactics, gets better with smart targeting. You can do more with content syndication than simply share general awareness content to a broad population of buyer personas. Other approaches include:  

Let’s go back to the concern that B2B marketers have about the quality of content syndication leads. “They’re terrible,” marketers say, “They don’t convert when we hand them over to the SDRs for follow-up.” This is utter nonsense. This issue isn’t with the content syndication leads; the issue is with the follow-up. 

Numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of content syndication in attracting high-quality leads. For example, Demand Gen Report revealed that 70% of B2B buyers engage with a minimum of four or more pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. Furthermore, reputable content syndication platforms employ lead verification and qualification to ensure that syndication leads meet specified criteria such as job title, industry, and buying intent. By leveraging these platforms, businesses can access a pool of high-quality leads. 

The fundamental issue is assuming that a single lead, regardless of the source, is fully qualified and ready for sales hand off. This is akin to going on a first date and expecting the other person to show up with a ring in their pocket. It’s not going to happen. Any lead is simply an expression of interest on behalf of an individual. This is why B2B marketers invest in technologies for lead scoring and nurturing. If a buying journey now takes an average of 27 interactions across multiple buying group members, then a single lead is simply one step in the process. And content syndication is a significant source of those leads. 

It’s time to go retro and revisit content syndication. Grab the cottage cheese, put on some hot pink, and check out the references that Pipeline360 has developed including “Why You (Still) Need Content Syndication in Your Marketing Mix,” and “Best practices for content syndication follow-up.”

If you’re a seasoned demand generation marketer, you’ve probably felt burned by content syndication programs at some point or another. And while content syndication has long been a critical channel in B2B marketing, many of us feel like we’re just throwing our money away. Why? Because content syndication efforts are often riddled with poor data quality, high costs, and appropriate scalability issues. This results in a failure to deliver on pipeline goals, wasted marketing budget, and lost credibility with sales teams.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can make your content syndication strategies work smarter and make it much more useful for your demand efforts. Look for ways to simplify and connect your content syndication efforts across channels and nurture your buyers along their journey.

Below are 6 content syndication strategies to make your demand generation marketing efforts more useful.

As a demand marketer, it can feel like there are simply too many options for you to consider. You can struggle just trying to identify which ones are the best fit for your organization. That can lead to a lot of time spent manually assessing every publisher in the market and determining whether they are reaching your ICP. But that’s not necessary. There are plenty of powerful tools that streamline the process and ensure you only pay for the leads that make sense for your campaigns.

The right software decides whether a lead should be accepted and rates it based on viability. It validates, standardizes, qualifies, and routes that lead to your specifications. By doing so, it keeps your database clean and provides new intelligence to help your sales team do its job. If you work with a sales team that’s skeptical of previous content syndication efforts, this is worth its weight in gold, ensuring you maintain a positive relationship with sales leadership.

When you have a robust content syndication program running with multiple publishers, the likelihood of lead duplication is high. If you entrust vetting to manual processes, it’s inevitable that duplicate leads will slip through the cracks. The right software ensures duplicate leads and leads outside the campaign’s scope are instantly rejected.

Marketing today is about being flexible, agile and responsive. If you’re not aided by technology, it’s likely you’ll struggle to identify reasons to course-correct or to increase spending with high-performance publishers. An intelligent software system can control lead volume based on budget changes, business objectives, and the adjustment of organizational goals.

When the right lead is qualified and activated, the right system can transcend mere ABM and identify additional contacts through third-party data collection while getting compliant opt-in for additional communication. It can also ensure the data matches your persona criteria within strategic accounts. From there, you can activate and nurture leads across all your channels.

Content syndication is a core channel for marketers, but we need to evolve our strategies for today’s world. We need to streamline our approach and make content syndication work for us, not against us.

Solutions like Pipeline360, powered by Integrate, ensure you can connect your content syndication dollars to real buyers. Pipeline360 provides a reliable and easy-to-use solution to manage content syndication publishers and campaigns. Use it to reach the right buyers, protect your budgets, prove ROI, and deliver the high quality leads your sales team needs. Streamline content syndication campaigns so you can grow the pipeline faster and increase the speed to lead.

Want to learn more about enabling better content syndication programs to support demand programs? Check out our ebook on “Setting Up Your Content Syndication Program for Success.”

As B2B marketing and sales organizations prioritize account-based revenue strategies, traditional inbound tactics alone can’t provide the quantity or quality of decision-makers to convert target accounts. You simply can’t wait for prospects to find your website through inbound marketing tactics – it won’t scale quickly enough to hit goals. That’s where 3^rd-party demand generation and content syndication come in.

Unfortunately, 3^rd-party programs can be incredibly time-consuming and frustrating to manage without the right tools, making it very tempting to take shortcuts or “guess” instead of dedicating the time required to properly plan, launch, measure, and evolve content syndication programs. Does the phrase “We have to move quickly” sound familiar?

Here’s a list of the 10 most-common content syndication mistakes we see our customers make, as well as some guidance on how to get it right.

Not all publishers are created equal, and it takes some work to find partners that will work for you. It’s important to ask a lot of questions, such as:

Managing multiple publishers can be a daunting and time-consuming task. It can seem like there’s never any economies of scale. Every publisher you add means more time and confusion, which drives many marketers to drastically limit the number of partners they work with. They find a couple that work and then stick with them for years.

There are a couple of problems with this:

Do I really have to say this? Save the stuff that talks about your product for your own website, or later in the nurture game. The goal of content syndication is to identify new prospects who haven’t heard of you but are researching a problem you might be able to solve for. So, serve them up some helpful information and tools first before you start selling them your stuff.

Learn more about content syndication done right – grab a copy of Integrate’s resource: “Getting Started with 3rd-Party Demand Gen: A Guide to Scaling Revenue.”

Everyone loves a good analyst report. Or benchmark report. Or rankings list. But that’s the problem: everyone loves them, regardless of whether they’re in a buying cycle for your product. Invest in these reports, but don’t give them away via content syndication programs. Instead, start with an awareness piece that will attract potential buyers for your product. Once you’ve nurtured them to be familiar with your product, that’s the time to deliver the analyst report to show accreditation for your solution.

Have a beautiful, thick new piece of awareness content that your content team is eager to get “in market”? Awesome news. Now chop it up.

I don’t mean get rid of it, but rather determine ways you can revise it into other, smaller pieces of content. Turn a white paper into an infographic, a checklist, a stats sheet and a blog post. Bonus points for video or engaging social content! …and you can still use the original white paper version too!

Then, work with your publishers to determine which of these smaller pieces will resonate best with their audience. Some will say the full white paper, but many will suggest a combo of the stats sheet, infographic and video. Listen to them, but also measure and optimize based on your own data.

Different buyers prefer different information formats and have preset expectations for the formats they’ll encounter in each place they go for information. Cater to that, while also getting more juice from all your big content investments.

3^rd-party demand gen provides an introduction to potential buyers, but it’s not an indicator that someone is ready to speak with a sales person. Have a plan to nurture the contacts you receive from your 3^rd-party programs before letting the BDR team jump all over them.

I know I just cautioned about sending leads right to sales, and now I’m telling you to send them to sales? Hang with me here. Traditional BDR tactics like calling and email blasting to “book a meeting ASAP” are not the right approach. Instead, marketing should provide BDRs with scripts and cadence coaching for 3^rd-party demand follow up. A mix of email, social and phone can be used here, and the tone should be helpful and personalized – making deposits before taking withdrawals (asking for meetings).

3^rd-party demand gen is not a set-it-and-forget-it effort. Like any of your marketing efforts, testing, measurement and regular optimization should be the rule. Watch for underperforming assets or sources that should be replaced with higher-performing ones, and make the swap quickly after identifying a problem. A word of caution – if you notice an asset drastically underperforming, first confirm that the publisher is actually distributing that particular asset. It’s possible they forgot to set one of your assets live or they may be unable to support the number of assets you gave them. Don’t write off a good asset when the publisher is really the problem!

If you’re able to take a longer-term look (thanks to having closed loop reporting), evaluate sources not just on “lead quality” but on how many opportunities were ultimately driven as a result of that source. Deal velocity by source is another great metric, if you can get it.

Do you only eat when you’re absolutely starving? Hopefully you’re regularly fueling your body to keep it primed and operating at a high level. Same goes for your demand engine – you should be continually filling the top of the funnel to keep the rest of the pipeline operating at maximum capacity.

Plus, you never know when your potential buyers are in a buying cycle. Sure, you can guess based on fiscal calendars, but what if a new leader comes in to shake things up out of cycle, or an acquisition happens? Point is, if your 3^rd-party demand engine is always running, it will catch those buyers whenever it is they’re looking for a solution.

Many incredibly helpful data types and tech systems are available to support your content syndication programs and 3^rd-party demand gen strategies. Some of them even help you sidestep the above mistakes – so it’s wise to look into how they may help your specific goals and programs. Here’s a list of the 4 of the big ones:

Content syndication isn’t easy, but with the right knowledge, strategy and technology, it’s an effective strategy to quickly scale pipeline and meet your revenue goals.

If you want to learn more about how to do content syndication or other types of 3rd-party demand generation the right way (efficiently and effectively), download Integrate’s new guide: “Getting Started with 3rd-Party Demand Gen: A Guide to Scaling Revenue.”