In order to be visible in today’s crowded online environment, small local businesses need to adopt a buyer-driven, omnichannel marketing approach. This includes using top-of-the-funnel efforts like content syndication and finding ways to make such tactics more agile and precise.
Historically, marketers have struggled with proving the ROI of content syndication, due to poor data quality and overly complex publishing systems. However, with a solid strategy and the right tools, content syndication can be a highly effective tool in the marketer’s toolkit. It allows small businesses to exponentially increase their brand exposure among prospects that fit their ideal target audience profile.
So, in this article, we are going to explore three ways you can upgrade your content syndication strategy to drive the results you want.
What is Content Syndication?
“Content is king” is a popular maxim in the marketing industry – and for good reason. It highlights the importance of creating and sharing quality content across your entire online presence in order to strengthen your online presence and make your brand more visible online. Content is how you create connections with people who are learning about your business and convince them to give your business a try over a competitor.
However, you are not the only one producing content on the web – just check out the 2021 Data Never Sleeps infographic on how much data is generated every minute.
With all the noise and competition, how do you ensure your content gets discovered by the right people? And how can you do more with the high-quality content you have already created?
One important tool for promoting your content across the web is through content syndication – which is when your work (including blogs, infographics, videos and images, podcasts, social media posts, and other media) is republished on third-party platforms with a link back to your original post.
To clarify, content syndication is not plagiarism, as you agree to have your work republished and are given full credit.
Content syndication is also not the same thing as guest posting. Guest posting is where you produce a new piece of content specifically for another party. In most cases, guest posts are not a scalable digital asset, as the piece “belongs” to the publisher. With content syndication, your proprietary content is republished on a third-party site (sometimes in a new format) and you retain control of the work.
Syndicating content can be a particularly important strategy for smaller brands that might otherwise get overshadowed by large, national chains. When done correctly, content syndication can have many benefits, including:
- Increased audience reach – Having your content syndicated on larger, more popular sites is great for increasing brand visibility. Not only does it extend your reach, but having a respected site feature your content also conveys a sense to readers that you are an authority in your field.
- More traffic to the original piece – Oftentimes syndicated content is a summary, or abbreviated version, of an entire article that is accessible on your website/blog. It also helps extend the life of your content, where it drives relevant traffic to your website over a longer period of time.
- Improved SEO – When your content is syndicated to a third-party publisher, they also include backlinks in their post that point to the original post you made on your site. The more quality backlinks your website has, the more authority a search engine will assign to it. This makes your site appear frequently in search results, thereby increasing the potential for organic traffic.
For example, say you are a newer business that is still working on getting your website to rank well in organic search. By working with content distribution partners, such as digital publishers or industry influencers, you can extend your brand reach, improve your search rankings, and boost engagement among a wider audience – all without having to spend more time developing new content.
Three Ways to Upgrade Your Content Syndication Strategy
Content syndication can push your inbound marketing efforts to the next level, but only when it is executed in the right way. Below are three ways to streamline your content syndication strategy to make it more effective and scalable.
1. Omnichannel Approach: Comprehensive strategy that touches all platforms your business may appear on.
Marketers need to orchestrate a content syndication strategy that operates across multiple channels. Rather than being viewed as its own special thing, content syndication should be integrated into a comprehensive content marketing strategy.
For instance, a syndicated blog might be the first place a prospect encounters your business. You need to make sure it includes a clear path to follow to keep the engagement going. This includes things like having related pieces already in place on your site that they can read for further information or a way for them to easily subscribe for future content.
A prospect might first read your syndicated article, then hop over to your blog for more information, or sign up for your newsletter. Later, they might see one of your ads on social media or search for your business directly on Google. As such, you need to have the tools in place to track engagement across all of these different channels and platforms and understand how the different pieces of your content strategy work together.
2. Target with Precision: Personalize your content to the platform + audience.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to syndicate all of your content and publishing across any and all websites. This is a waste of time and resources, as your work will end up showing to the wrong people (resulting in low engagement and poor quality leads). Rather, you want to take a more targeted approach where your content is syndicated by publishers/influencers whose audience overlaps with your own.
When selecting pieces to syndicate, it is important to select high-quality pieces that fit the needs of a particular platform/target audience. This is especially true if you aim to have your content picked up by publishers with large syndication networks – such as a trade publication or national magazine.
However, this type of strategic syndication requires having access to good quality data.
You need to understand the needs and interests of your target audience and where they are in their customer journey. You also need to be able to track how they engage with your content – even if it is off your website. This will allow you to use audience intent signals to your advantage and better track leads, so you get a true sense of the ROI of your content syndication campaigns.
3. Centralize and Connect: All-in-one platform to simplify and make content syndication easy to manage.
The nature of content syndication means that you will have to interface with a lot of platforms and traffic sources – social media, email, websites, etc. To gain visibility into performance, you need a way to centralize the management of all these different campaigns, so you can do things like compare results and optimize marketing spend.
An all-in-one marketing platform can break down data silos and make it much easier to run effective content syndication campaigns. You are able to easily track things like how many people interacted with your content and the number of qualified leads generated by each syndicated piece. You get a multichannel view of where and when prospects engage with syndicated pieces, so you can determine which content partnerships are working for your business.
Take Your Content Strategy to the Next Level Surefire Local
The Surefire Local Marketing Platform is a next-generation marketing solution designed around the needs of local businesses. Our innovative all-in-one marketing platform allows you to manage the entire content creation and syndication processes from one place.
Our content management and digital asset tools encompass the entire content process, from writing to approving and scheduling. This makes it easy to create and publish personalized content directly to your website, blog, and social media channels.
You are also able to track performance metrics across multiple channels to determine which content resonates most with your audience. Based on this information, you can then use syndication to share your most popular content to a wider audience and stay top-of-mind. Furthermore, you can follow up syndication campaigns by engaging and nurturing leads with targeted email campaigns.
Everything you need to run a comprehensive content marketing strategy is available in one streamlined platform.
Schedule your free demo to see how Surefire Local makes marketing easy for small businesses.
