Content Syndication: An Effective Marketing Strategy for Lead Generation

Content syndication is the process of distributing and republishing your content on a third-party website. You can syndicate any type of content including blog posts, infographics, videos, and more.

It is a win-win process for you as well as the publisher. Wondering how?

Well, the third-party website will get new, relevant, and quality content for free to keep its readers engaged. At the same time, you can generate more exposure for your content, build backlinks, and, thereby, boost organic traffic.

But that’s not all. Leveraging content syndication can offer a number of other benefits. Let’s find out.

Why Should You Leverage Content Syndication?

Are you syndicating content?

If not, you should consider using content syndication now for these reasons:

• Syndicating content can help you leverage the same content multiple times to reach and engage wider audiences.
• Many syndicating sites have a large following, which can help you increase the overall visibility of your content.
• Republishing content on authoritative sites can help you tap into new audiences, build readership, and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
• It can also help you build qualitative backlinks without creating new content, which can positively impact your SEO performance.
• Syndicating content can help you educate consumers about how your product or service can help solve their problems and make their life easy.
• Last but not least, it can help you generate qualified leads for your business, which have a greater potential of turning into conversions.

Now that you are aware of the benefits of using content syndication, it’s time to understand how to use this marketing strategy for lead generation effectively.

How to Use Content Syndication for Lead Generation the Right Way

Here are the steps you should follow to generate more leads and better leads with content syndication:

1. Create a Content Syndication Strategy

Just like any marketing initiative, content syndication starts by creating an effective strategy for lead generation.

And to create the perfect strategy, you need to consider:

• What are your content syndication goals?
• Who are your ideal buyers?
• What actions do you want your prospects to take? Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter or download your ebook? Or, do you want them to sign up for your tool?
• Which websites does your target audience visit frequently?
• Are those sites accepting content syndication?
• What are your criteria for selecting a content syndication site?

The answers to these questions will help you plan ahead and make sure that your content syndication strategy will generate great leads for your business.

2. Create Shareable Content

For content syndication to be successful, you need to create shareable content that people will love to interact with.

How can you create such content?

My experience as a digital marketer tells me that certain content types work best for syndication, including:

• How-to guides for beginners
• Infographics
• Case studies
• Statistics and industry reports

If you want to republish your content with minimal effort, you should consider leveraging these content formats.

Most sites willingly accept and republish insightful infographics on niche-specific topics. You just need to provide a short, 300-400 word long description to go with the infographic. Besides preparing the copy, there’s a significant amount of planning, research and creativity that goes into creating infographics. 

For example:

Copyblogger created a highly-valuable infographic on common grammatical errors which helped them generate over 263K shares.

Here is an excerpt from that infographic:

Image via Copyblogger

This infographic significantly increased the reach of Copyblogger’s content and contributed to boosting their traffic and readership.

What else?

If you want to generate leads with content syndication, you should also create content based on which stage the buyers are in.

According to a recent content preferences study by Demand Gen Report, consumers are turning to different content formats at different stages of their buying journey.

For example:

Buyers prefer more visual and engaging content during the initial research phase.

Image via Demand Gen Report

However, the same buyers trust and rely on peers and industry influencers during the evaluation stage towards the end of their journey.

Image via Demand Gen Report

3. Choose the Right Content Syndication Platform

There are a lot of websites that offer content syndication. You need to choose the ones that can help you reach and engage people who are likely to be interested in your products/services.

The best way is to choose sites in your own niche because they are likely to have audiences similar to your target audience.

For example:

As a digital marketer, I would prefer to syndicate my content on sites in the same domain. Some popular publications include HubSpot, Social Media Today, Business2Community, and Convince & Convert.

But do these websites accept syndicated content?

You can simply perform a Google search using the search string “originally appeared on” with the “site” operator and “site URL” to figure this out.

If it displays results, this indicates that the website, Business2Community, is allowing users to do content syndication. You can add them to your list of syndicating websites.

When syndicating content for lead generation, you should always choose publishers that have a good reputation and are relevant to your niche.

Here is another thing to note:

There are two types of content syndication platforms, which include:

• Free platforms such as Medium, LinkedIn, Quora, Mashable, Reddit, Tumblr, SlideShare, and BuzzFeed
• Paid platforms such as Taboola, Outbrain, and Sharethrough

You can use both of them to syndicate your content.

4. Reach Out to Your Selected Syndication Sites

Once you’ve narrowed down your list of prospective syndicating sites, it’s time to reach out to them via email.

While pitching them for syndicating your content, you should:

• Appreciate their content and website.
• Keep the email copy short and crisp.
• Highlight your achievements with social proof.
• Tell them how republishing your content can provide value to their readers.

Unsure how to start your email copy?

Here’s an example to help you:

Ready to Leverage Content Syndication As an Effective Lead Generation Strategy?

Leading brands regularly create great content and syndicate it for lead generation. You can do the same.

I hope the tactics mentioned in this article will be helpful. You should use these tactics to syndicate your high-quality content and maximize its reach. Doing so will help you attract prospects to your site and increase your chances of conversions.

As with any other lead generation tactic, it can take time for content syndication results to show up. You need to be patient and dedicatedly create and syndicate content that provides value to your target audience for the best results.