If you’re in the B2B business, you’re aware that content syndication gives your business that extra “oomph” it needs to rise above the noise and get noticed. Too many businesses assume that improving their SEO will generally make a difference, but content syndication channels adds a level of real authority to your content that is hard to ignore.
The challenge comes when you don’t know how to increase your online presence properly. Here are 7 common content syndication mistakes to avoid so your syndicated content can hit the mark.
1. Miss-Targeting Your Content
This is an essential part of creating a great content syndication strategy, and unfortunately, one of the more common content syndication mistakes.
Basically, if you haven’t done research on your audience demographics, you’re not going to create content that meets their needs. One of the biggest challenges, (and mistakes marketers make), is creating content that is broad enough to generate new leads, while also narrowing in on your niche enough to generate quality leads that will actually convert.
Don’t neglect to apply filters to your content campaigns.
Sift through the criteria for filtering your leads. Identify what criteria are essential to generating quality leads, and which you can leave out. The more filters you apply, the more costly each lead will be.
Balance is key.
2. Focusing Too Much on Products
Look at your analytics. (If you don’t have any, get on that too…). The content that comes across too strongly as a product sales pitch, is the content that audiences are less likely to engage with.
If your content syndication strategy isn’t offering solutions to or relevant content for your target audience, they aren’t going to hang around. If they aren’t interested in your content, you can bet they won’t be buying your products.
If you can build a relationship of trust and enable your audience to view you as a thought leader, they are far more likely to funnel into conversions.
Create high-value content of substance. Whenever possible, offer education or solutions that audiences aren’t finding elsewhere. If you can create a monopoly of useful information for your target audience, they’ll keep coming back for more.
3. Neglecting to “Score” Your Leads
Not all leads are created equal. Before you even start your content syndication campaign, you need to decide what your follow-up plan is for the leads your campaign generates.
One great strategy is to “score” your leads. This helps you decide which leads are a higher priority. It also allows you to decide what content is most relevant to each lead depending on its score or level of engagement with your content.
You can sift through or prioritize leads that are more likely to be sustainable customers or continue showing interest in your solutions or products.
From there, you can determine if a lead has engaged enough with your content to be passed along to a sales team.
4. Not Beginning With a Content Strategy
“Begin with the end in mind.” It’s one of the 7 habits of highly effective people for a reason… it works. There is a lot to consider when creating a content syndication strategy.
Some basic items to plan around include:
- Identifying and building your brand
- Establishing an effective publishing frequency
- Identifying a great content syndication publishing platform
- Finding the right target audience
- Determining how to score leads
- Establishing a clear and recognizable “voice”
Diving right in without a pre-established content strategy is like trying to build a boat in the middle of the ocean. Creating a style guide, publishing schedule, and more will protect your brand from looking watery and fluid to audiences.
It will also give you a secure starting point for gathering and analyzing data.
5. Underutilizing What’s Working
Don’t create new content just for the sake of creating new content. This is ineffective and a waste of resources.
Part of your content syndication strategy should be identifying what content is most effective at reaching your target audiences. Make the most of effective content by publishing it to various channels.
This allows for content that is relevant to your audience to live its full life and secure continuity of discussion across your different channels.
This principle also applies to recognizing the publishing times and frequency that are most effective for reaching your target audience or generating leads. Once you find the right flow and frequency, stick with it.
You can’t gather the necessary data to make progressive tweaks to your strategy without some consistency in areas that are working well.
6. Being Inconsistent
This mistake hearkens back to the mistake of not beginning with a content strategy. Once you figure out how often is most effective to publish new content, you need to be consistent.
Starting and stopping new campaigns irregularly skews the data you need to analyze to determine content effectiveness.
If you syndicate your content regularly, you make sure not to miss out on any leads when they decide to convert or find the solution you have to offer.
If your publications are sporadic, it’s harder to stay visible. It’s also harder to make adjustments to your strategy as you are not getting a steady flow of data to analyze what is and isn’t working.
7. Not Letting Partners Select Content
Great content syndication platforms enable your partners to select the content they want to push to their target audiences. It is a major content syndication mistake to be so rigid in your method of publishing that your partners cannot both select what they want and augment certain content to fit within their brand and audience interests.
Remember, your content needs to be useful and moldable to a degree to meet your partner’s individual needs.
Avoid Other Content Syndication Mistakes
While there are countless content syndication mistakes to be made, some basic knowledge and know-how will protect you from harming your campaigns. It doesn’t take much to create a solid content syndication strategy and implement it.
Once you do, you can reap the rewards.
For more helpful marketing how-tos and business articles, browse the Business portion of our blog.
