The Content Syndication Process from A-Z

According to James Green, partner at ActualTech Media, content syndication for lead generation is essential for generating new leads that are in the market for your products or service. It also helps increase the size of your database for internal marketing nurturing.

The team at ActualTech Media dives deeper into these two benefits and how marketers can achieve them through the content syndication process.

Key Takeaways:

• Content syndication for lead generation produces new leads and builds your database with new data

• The process starts with a clear goal that defines themetrics marketers use to measure their success
• ActualTech Media is flexible and works with marketers to create and distribute content to a target audience

🤫 PS: Looking for pricing on content syndication leads? Get a price list here

What’s a Content Syndication Process?

Essentially, content syndication is distributing digital content, or another asset outside a brand’s own website and marketing channels. Therefore, how a marketer performs content syndication for B2B tech companies can vary widely.

ActualTech Media’s founders saw a need in tech marketing not just to increase awareness, but to turn interested buyers into leads that businesses can nurture through outreach campaigns—such as email marketing—that slowly move leads to the point of conversion.

Amy Susienka, the demand generation manager at ActualTech Media, refers to this form of syndication as content syndication for lead generation. She describes this model as “Taking existing content assets –e-books, whitepapers, infographics–and using those to get in front of a fresh audience . Then you generate leads from those contacts, and increase the size of your contact database that you can then nurture on your own.”

How Does Content Syndication for Lead Generation Work?

The experts at ActualTech Media break content syndication up into five distinct steps:

1. Discovering Your Goals

Geordie Carswell, chief marketing officer at ActualTech Media, says the first step is to figure out what a marketer is trying to achieve through content syndication.

Goal setting gives the strategic direction and tells marketers what campaigns and actions will be most effective for responding to the leads and new data the business acquires from content syndication. If a marketer has clear goals, they can understand and measure outcomes more effectively at the end of the day.

Four examples of content syndication goals that the experts at ActualTech Media have seen are:

• Building your database: Hitting an acceptable cost per lead
• Generating lead opportunities: Generating an acceptable cost per opportunity
• Increasing brand awareness: Counting the number of downloads or impressions
• Increasing web traffic: Monitoring inbound web traffic from the digital asset

2. Describing Your Audience

Who’s the audience you need to reach? Outline this audience with an ideal customer profile with firmographic details, location, and behavioral patterns.

Narrowing down the audience tells marketers who the most effective vendors will be. For example, a marketer doesn’t want to publish a digital asset for tech professionals on a site like Medium that reaches anyone from financial experts to everyday consumers. Rather, marketers want to work closely with B2B content syndication vendors within the tech niche.

ActualTech Media has connections with tech publishers ready to share digital assets with an audience of tech professionals. Marketers who work with ActualTech Media also gain access to these publishers’ audiences.

3. Choosing the Right Lead Filters

Lead filters are gates that keep out low-quality leads while focusing on the leads that match the ideal customer profile previously discussed.

The most effective content syndication processes use a target account list (TAL). A TAL is a list of specific companies and accounts that have the greatest needs for a brand’s products and match a brand’s ideal customer. Marketers use TALs to perform account-based marketing, where brands build relationships through highly customized content and direct marketing activities.

A marketer doesn’t need a list of target accounts to perform content syndication for lead generation, although a TAL is helpful. ActualTech Media offers extensive filters to help marketers find those target accounts. Some of the filters include:

• Geography
• Company size range
• Job titles or roles
• Maximum number of contacts per company
• Custom questions
• Compliance questions

4. Finding Your Best-Performing Content

Susienka says, “The beauty of content syndication is that there is no need to create new content–just use the best-performing content assets already in your resource library.”

Content syndication for lead generation works with any digital asset a publisher can gate. Marketers should continue to switch up assets, so they’re always using a new media format. For instance, if a marketer syndicated an e-book for one campaign, then they should try a video for the next campaign. The average B2B buyer consumes 13 pieces of content before making a purchase, so more content is better. The most effective content is a mix of first- and third-party content, so the B2B buyer can see proof from brands not connected to the original business to support that business’s claims and build authority.

Some examples of B2B content for syndication campaigns include:

• Whitepapers
• E-books
• Videos
• Webinars
• Tech briefs
• Tech comics
• Third-party content (like ActualTech Media’s Gorilla Guides)

For example, when marketers use ActualTech Media’s multi-vendor webinars for lead generation, marketers can also access the video on demand. These webinars make excellent materials for content syndication for lead generation, so marketers can continue capturing leads from the webinar for months after the event.

5. Nurture Your Leads

You generated a list of leads or filled your database with new data–now what?

Marketers that measure their success by the number of downloads won’t see the same results as someone who chooses the goal of lead generation because impressions don’t automatically translate to customers. Surprisingly, 50% of leads aren’t ready to buy. However, lead generation goals include measuring results from lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing is the step between content syndication and conversion that takes those impressions and new data and turns the views into sales-qualified leads.

Two-thirds of companies run up to 10 nurturing campaigns annually. Marketers that nurture leads see 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. Some of the most effective lead nurturing tactics include:

• Sharing targeted content
• Using multi-channel techniques
• Sending customized emails
• Retargeting leads through search or display ads

How To Start a Content Syndication Campaign

ActualTech Media is flexible and works with each company’s needs. For example, do you want to syndicate a thought leadership e-book you put together this year? We have you covered and work with vendors in the tech field to share that content with the target audience you provide. Are you not sure what content to share? We can also help with that. Our content creators will help you strategize for effective and innovative digital assets specifically for your content syndication campaign.

Whatever you need, we can take the workload off your team’s shoulders. All we need to start the process is your filters and the number of leads you want. Then, we’ll handle the rest.

Contact us, and let’s get you started with your content syndication campaign.