Imagine if from Edison’s lamp to Marie Curie’s radium to the advent of the Internet, all of these discoveries stayed hidden. The world would be deprived of such life-altering stellar innovations. 

Your brand and its offerings could be the life-altering stellar innovation of today’s B2B landscape. But it needs to be found and endorsed by the right audience. 

Content syndication distributes content to third-party sites to tap into their audiences. Like a library loaning out books, it leaves ownership intact while widening access. This approach enhances exposure, draws more visitors to your site, and strengthens expertise in your field.  

The impact of content syndication cannot be overstated because it helps direct the right traffic to your website, boosting web page rankings and laying the groundwork for increased sales and skyrocketing revenue.

Let’s explore in detail how content syndication works, its pros and cons, and how you can come out on top with strategic syndication!

Types of Content Suitable for Syndication

The following are the types of content that are particularly well-suited for syndication:

• Blogs: It is the most common content type used for content syndication. It is generally used to educate and generate awareness about your brand in new audience bases.

• Infographics: Infographics are visual representations of complex data, usually used to expand your consumer base or engage with your target audience more efficiently. 

• Videos: Videos help provide customers with a clear understanding of what your brand’s solutions can achieve. Through them, you can showcase live demos of your products and services. This makes intercepting your brand’s offerings much easier. 

• Ebooks: Ebooks are a long-form content type, usually used to educate an audience still in the awareness stage about industry-specific problems and pitch your products and services as the perfect solution.

• Webinars: Through webinars, you can personalize your sales approach a bit further for your prospects. This optimizes their buying journey and reduces the chances of lead attrition.

• White Papers: White papers usually come in during the consideration stage of the buying journey. It provides an in-depth understanding of what your brand can accomplish, establishes brand credibility, and positions you as an industry expert to your prospective clients.

With content formats for high-impact syndication efforts singled out, you can now move into understanding the risks and rewards of content distribution and decide whether it’s a viable marketing strategy.

Pros of Content Syndication

Let’s explore some of the key benefits of content syndication and understand how it can maximize revenue potential:

Increased reach and brand awareness

Content syndication, if done correctly, can truly help your products and services gain the attention they deserve. If you can distribute content strategically on your industry-specific platforms, which have higher visibility and are your target audience’s go-to, with proper attribution, your brand can maximize its reach significantly. 

The referral traffic obtained from your syndication network works towards increasing brand awareness and the establishment of a secure digital footprint.

Improved SEO

Content syndication cannot directly improve your SEO rankings, but it can supplement your SEO efforts to a great extent. By embedding backlinks to the original site in the syndicated article, syndication platforms pave the way for increased user engagement to your site. This maximizes your online presence and improves your position in search results. 

Higher lead generation

You cannot deny the impact of content syndication in generating new leads. Syndicating content across various platforms redirects a fresh audience back to your site. Monitoring their engagement metrics, understanding their pain points, and tailoring your products and services accordingly would help you convert these new visitors into qualified leads and ultimately paying customers. 

Better cost savings

In content syndication, you are essentially recycling old but high-performing content and republishing it on third-party platforms. Since you efficiently use existing content, you do not incur the labor costs of generating new content. This, along with some additional factors, makes content syndication much more cost-effective than other promotional tactics. 

Cons of Content Syndication

It is important to explore both the advantages and disadvantages of content syndication to make an informed decision about whether it’s an investable option for your marketing efforts. 

Following are some of the cons of content syndication:

Risk of duplicate content

If syndicated content is not attributed properly with backlinks and canonical tags, you have just published duplicate content. When search engines find the same content on two different URLs, they tank the SEO rankings of both sites. Plagiarism has legal consequences as well. 

Excessive reliance on unoriginal, syndicated content can also decrease customer engagement. Customers respond to unique, informative content that provides value.

So keep in mind the legal considerations in content syndication and uphold content quality, and you’re good to go!

Loss of traffic to the original site

Users might be reluctant to visit the original site because they received all the information they wanted from the syndicating page. If that happens, you need to conduct a content distribution evaluation, understand what not to republish, and partner up with syndicating platforms that know how to incentivize users to flock to your site. Otherwise, third-party platforms remain flush with cash and traffic, and you lose out on both.

Brand misalignment

Syndicating platforms often refurbish the original content to avoid duplicate content charges. Often, the process might frame it according to their preferences or reduce it to a clickbait piece, etc. Since content quality in syndication is compromised, your brand is misrepresented to the audience. This inconsistency in brand communication can foster customer distrust and harm sales.

Diminished analytics insights

To understand the impact of content syndication, you have to access a third-party database. This proves to be extremely challenging. Without access to data gleaned from key content syndication metrics like conversion rates, engagement rates, etc, how would you point out areas of improvement?

Tracking mechanisms of syndication platforms may differ from yours. This results in incomplete tracking of certain key metrics related to user interaction, which may hinder you from accurately measuring content syndication impact and improving accordingly.

Tracking metrics vary, too, for each syndicating platform. With varying metrics providing diverse forms of data, it is difficult to unify them and understand customer wants.

Key Considerations Before Syndicating

Before delving into syndication, here are the key factors you need to consider:

• Choosing the right partners: Republish your articles on platforms with an established reputation of being the industry zen, superior engagement metrics, and who your target audience prefers. This enhances targeted reach, and your brand gets the recognition it deserves.

• Understanding the target audience: It’s all about them, isn’t it? Get into the heads and hearts of your audience. Pinpoint their interests, issues, and secret wishes. Sharpen your message so it slices through the noise and whispers directly into their lives—personal, relevant, and on-point.

• Setting clear syndication guidelines: Lay down the law, but make it friendly. Be explicit about how your content can be used, where it can go, and how it should look. It’s your brand’s reputation on the line, so keep those guidelines tight to ensure your content remains in sync with your brand wherever it appears.

• Monitor content syndication metrics: Measurement is pivotal. Regularly analyzing engagement rates, lead generation, and performance metrics helps you understand the impact of your syndicated content. This is the intel you need to fine-tune your strategy, ensuring your syndication efforts translate into tangible benefits.

Conclusion

Content syndication is not just a tactic; it’s a strategic powerhouse for amplifying your reach. Our in-depth exploration reveals an undeniable truth: when used with precision, content syndication skyrockets traffic and expands your digital footprint. 

Investing in content syndication takes your valuable content into new territories, tapping into audiences that would otherwise remain untapped. It’s a straightforward and efficient way to multiply your content’s impact, making it a necessary addition to your marketing strategy.

But if you fail to correctly syndicate content, you would fall into the trap of duplicate content and keep battling plagiarism charges. All this only translates to sub-optimal reach for your brand, which is completely counteractive to what syndication aims to achieve.

Does this scenario seem nightmarish to you? Then why don’t you reach out to Marketboats for help?

Through our Content Syndication & Multichannel Marketing services, we ensure that the content syndication pros always trump the cons, and you’re never stuck at the bottom of the search barrel. Additionally, our cutting-edge cloud-based platform, CALS, helps you generate leads that have been thoroughly cleansed, standardized, and enriched.

So what are you waiting for? Contact us now!