What is B2B Content Syndication and Why is it the Key to Brand Visibility?

Posted by Mike Farrell

Content syndication has been a game-changer for digital marketers. If you are a B2B marketer, then you want to generate quality leads for your sales team. But how can you increase the number of leads without spending more time and money creating content?

B2B content syndication is a proven way to get your content in front of more eyes and increase your lead generation results - both in quantity and quality.

Content syndication means that content owned on other sites can now be republished. It's duplicated material. Content sync helps increase the content’s reach and attract new audiences.

How can content syndication help increase the effectiveness and increase your audience for the product? This guide will help you understand how content syndication campaigns can improve brand recognition and keep your sales team happy.

Let’s take a look at how content syndication is helping marketers to increase web traffic, generate high-quality leads, and, in turn, grow their businesses.

 

What is B2B content syndication?

B2B content syndication is the process of distributing content to other sites. Write once, publish often. Content syndication can be done through RSS feeds, but most marketers prefer distribution channels like Medium, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

A content syndication campaign coordinates the duplication of original content to many sites. For example, if you want to reach out to a wide variety of businesses, then syndicating your blog post to various industry web portals will help you reach several niches with limited content development resources.

In this post, we will be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of content syndication campaigns and how to get started using content syndication.

How does B2B content syndication work?

B2B content syndication means duplicating information from one place to another. It’s similar to a syndicated column in newspapers.

Take Dave Berry, for example. He wrote each of his columns for the Miami Herald, but then syndicated them to hundreds of different newspapers. The wording and his byline stayed the same, but his humor reached thousands of readers beyond his home newspaper.

B2B content syndication works in a similar way. After you post a blog or upload a video to YouTube, you can syndicate it to several distribution channels so that it is widely available and easier for your potential customers to find.

However, you do have to be careful about reposting the exact same content in several places. In general, Google and search engines penalize multiple copies of the exact same content, but you can get around this by using canonical tags that link back to the original post.

We’ll discuss this in detail later in the article.

Should you use content syndication?

 

Content syndication can be an effective way to spread your message and build brand awareness. It can also be used to increase your company’s reach by putting relevant content in front of readers who are not regular readers of your blog. By publishing content on third-party websites, you can attract new customers and boost your brand’s popularity.

 

 

What are the main benefits of B2B content syndication?

 

Content syndication is extremely important if you want to build good relationships with your customers and prospects. B2B content syndication provides important leads by making your messaging available to a larger audience.

Content distribution remains an essential priority for B2B marketers. Approximately 46% of marketers are looking at improving their use of distribution channels, including syndication, with content marketing being the key strategy.

Advantages of Content Syndication

  • Easy to create and publish content to multiple websites
  • Add backlinks to your website to increase traffic
  • High authority sites can be reached easily
  • Search engines love it and will increase your rankings
  • Generate more quality leads
  • Refresh old leads who have wandered or temporarily lost interest
  • Improve return on investment (ROI) by writing once and sharing many times

Syndicating content increases brand awareness and finds customers in pockets of the web that you may not have known about. Generating better leads means your sales team will waste less time cold-calling leads with a low chance of a conversion.

By identifying prospects beginning the customer journey, they can focus on leads likely to enter your sales funnel and come out as paying customers. Plus, syndicating your B2B content can position your marketing team as thought leaders in your industry.

B2B Content Syndication examples

 

Syndicating B2B Content on Medium

Syndicating content on Medium is fairly simple. First, you will need an account. Second, open your account and choose the option to “Import a Story”. Third, paste in the URL of the original content. The Medium publishing wizard takes it from there.

Medium will upload and format your content. It will automatically put a canonical tag at the bottom of the article that says something like “Originally published” with the backlink to your original content.

 

 

Syndicating B2B Content on LinkedIn

As a B2B marketer, LinkedIn has multiple advantages for reaching business audiences.

Republishing content on LinkedIn is not as simple as on Medium, but it just takes a little more caution. Google and other search engines do not favor content on LinkedIn. (It may be because so many posts are so blatantly self-serving.

How to post duplicate content on LinkedIn

First, LinkedIn does not automatically add a canonical tag like Medium does. At the top of your post, you need to announce that the material is duplicated verbatim from a post on your website and give the URL to the original post.

Second, the LinkedIn ranking engine heavily favors likes. Although you can add another call to action, asking for (and getting) likes is what will increase the circulation of your article on LinkedIn. The more people who like your post, the more often it will appear on dashboards.

 

B2B Content Syndication Strategies

Win-Win B2B Content Syndication Campaigns

As a B2B content marketer, your syndication strategy should benefit the platform as well as your business. If your reposts increase traffic to the content platform, the platform is more likely to favor your post. So your posts get higher rankings and your strategy is a double win.

You have to make sure that the content you share is relevant to potential customers scanning the content platform. If your content isn’t good enough, the people who are interested in your content will simply not click on it.

For example, if you decide to write about how to play golf, your content will probably be good enough for golfers at most clubs. However, if you want people to find you, you have to convince them to click through to your article.

To do this, you have to make sure that the content you share is relevant to the problem the person is trying to solve, and that the problem is something that they should care about.

Account-Based Marketing and Content Syndication

Account-based marketing is an excellent complement to content syndication. You can duplicate content in places your target accounts are most likely to see it. You can do this through email campaigns, retargeting social media posts, or adding comments to a potential customer's social media and blog postings.

B2B Content Syndication Vendors

A content syndication vendor lets you outsource republishing content to multiple syndication channels. Syndication of content not only increases your audience reach but builds and also adds backlinks to your website or blog.

Selecting the Right Content Platforms

Content platforms are the backbone of any digital marketing strategy. Platforms like Facebook, Medium, Twitter, and Instagram have made it easy for publishers to share their content with a wider audience.

But it’s important to understand that reposting randomly is not the same as sharing your content with people who are already your customers. You need to expand your digital content strategy to include the areas on content platforms most likely to reach your target customers.

In a world where content is king, content platforms are the kingmakers. They hold the keys to the kingdom. For a content platform to make money, they need to find ways to drive traffic to its site.



 

What types of content can be used in content syndication campaigns?

Content syndication is an effective tool for transforming almost any type of content into quality leads by attracting potential customers to visit your site.

Don’t limit yourself to syndicating blog articles and white papers. Leadership bios, an employee of the month, videos, webinars, eBooks, and press releases can also build your brand.

 

How does content syndication affect SEO?

Reposting content in multiple places can incur a heavy SEO penalty, but there is an exception.

Canonical Links Protect Your SEO Rankings

Using canonical URL tags is Google’s preferred way to identify syndicated content. In fact, your SEO ranking will go up because there are more backlinks to your blog or website.

The safest way to link syndicated content back to the original is to use canonical links. A canonical URL tag looks like this:

 

You can learn more about canonical links and Google’s recommendations at Google Developer Support.

In addition to keeping Google’s search engine happy, consolidating your backlinks with a canonical link makes it simpler to track the metrics going to a specific article or product. Uniform links also make it easier to find and remove back-links when a promotion ends.

It’s also a good idea to use Google’s URL inspection tool in case their robot designates a different canonical than you expected.

There are two ways to use Google’s URL Inspection Tool:

  • Type the URL you want to check in the inspection search bar at the top of the Google Search Console screen.
  • Click on the Inspect link next to a URL in a Google Analytics report. (You may need to hover over the URL in some browsers)

Most third-party content platforms generate a reference to the original content automatically, but it is important to inspect the URL after you post your first few articles on a platform. In order to avoid SEO penalties for duplicated content, you can also tweak accompanying descriptions or summaries of the content pieces to be different than those as on your website.

Also, consider changing the title. If you use a content syndication vendor, verify that they always use a canonical tag to identify the article as syndication and link back to the original posting.

Important Note: LinkedIn does not use canonical URLs, so you need to take special care when syndicating to LinkedIn.

The best strategy is to wait at least two days before republishing an article on LinkedIn. This gives the search engines time to index the original content and other syndications. When your article shows in Bing Search or Google Search, then it is okay to repost it on LinkedIn without penalizing your SEO ranking.

source: https://directiveconsulting.com/resources/glossary/content-syndication/

Final thoughts

Executing a solid B2B content syndication strategy can help marketers generate leads, boost brand awareness, and improve SEO rankings. A well-planned content syndication campaign can trigger a huge boost in your return on investment (ROI) on whitepapers, blogs, videos, and other custom content. You can design and execute a content syndication campaign on your own or you can outsource the work to a content generation vendor. By combining content syndication and account-based marketing, you can give your sales teams better leads while increasing brand recognition.

 

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