Content syndication is the process of sharing content strategically across different channels. While this may sound like something you already do (for example, by sharing articles via social media and newsletters), content syndication involves republishing content on external websites. 

According to HubSpot, there are four main ways to share syndicated content:

• Submit your article to a larger website
• Submit content to a similarly-sized website
• Guest post on a larger publication then re-share the content on your own channels
• Get picked up organically by other publications

When syndicating content, a typical workflow looks something like the following. After writing an article or creating an infographic, you approach other websites and ask them to share it on their channels. Alternatively, smaller publications may circulate your content on their platform by crediting you or your organisation as the original author. 

Syndicated content appears on a range of different platforms, but some of the more popular ones include Medium, Quora, LinkedIn, as well as paid channels. The former are particularly attractive options since they’re free. Submitting your content for republishing doesn’t cost anything and can help you easily grow your brand awareness with a new cohort of potential customers. However, there’s no guarantee that your content will be published on these mediums, so they can sometimes be of limited use.

By contrast, paid channels like industry publications will work with you to share your article how you like. And so, you get to maintain stronger control over your brand and the peace of mind that your lead generation efforts will actually pay off

If this wasn’t enough, the relationship between campaign spend and outcome can be unpredictable. Programmatic campaigns can incur unexpected costs when poorly optimised or your ad receives unexpected engagement due to things like ad or click fraud. Click fraud is where automated bots click on your adverts repeatedly until it depletes your budget and causes your advert to be pulled prematurely.

Instead, with site direct advertising, the process is clear: you’re dealing with people. You pay for an ad placement of your choice and you receive it. This means that if you want pride of place and have the budget to match or a slightly less conspicuous banner ad for less money, you get it, every time. 

Although it adds to the already large task of content marketing, content syndication offers a range of benefits to markets.

First and foremost, syndicated content helps you generate leads from a new pool of potential customers. As a result, you can reach a larger segment of your target customer and educate them on your product or service. You can even generate more qualified leads by strategically syndicating content strategically to relevant news or opinion websites for your industry. For instance, you can target your ideal customer profile more effectively by syndicating content to paid and free channels at the same time, since there’s no limit on the number of times your article can be shared online.

Content syndication also comes with a variety of indirect benefits to your organisation, like increasing website traffic and optimising your website for search engine results. For example, by linking to your home page in your call to action, you can attract interested prospects to your site to learn more about your offerings.

However, these links can also increase your website’s domain authority on search engines, which helps you rank higher in relevant searches by other potential customers looking for similar information online. Therefore, content syndication can support your long-term lead generation goals by increasing your online brand awareness.

Finally, and most obviously, syndicated content is a great way to save time on your content marketing. By recirculating existing creative assets like articles and infographics, you can maximise the value of the time and energy you’ve spent on creating them in the first place. This means you can spend more time engaging audiences and qualifying prospects, and shortening the time it takes to generate revenue in your business.

Moreover, for programmatic ads to be effective, you need a detailed database of consumer data. Yet with the recent constraints on data collection (and targeting soon to follow), this data is slowly becoming less relevant, meaning the advertising campaigns that rely on it are becoming less effective, too.

Using a site direct advertising approach means you can get ahead of the changes within consumer privacy and receive guaranteed attention online. By working with a select number of sites directly, you can still advertise to your target audience and build brand awareness effectively.

Content syndication may sound easy enough, since all you have to do is reshare content that you’ve already written or designed. However, you need to stick to a few rules and manage your expectations.

Always disclose where your content was originally published. Otherwise, Google and other search engines will rank it lower in search results since the algorithm will class it as duplicate or plagiarism content. Adding a brief message at the beginning or end of your piece like ‘originally published in’ or ‘republished with permission’ can help prevent this from happening.

Similarly, you may find that a syndicated version of your content outranks the original on your website in online search results. This can happen for a range of reasons, like the syndicated site using keywords more strategically or simply having a larger content marketing presence. It’s important to remember that this outcome is still positive for your organisation since the content ultimately links to your website, so you’ll still be able to generate leads from it (albeit slightly less than if the ranking was reversed).

This creative flexibility means you can run truly novel, eye-catching marketing campaigns that fit into the wider design of your site partner. If this wasn’t enough, you can even deploy immersive, full-screen ads for maximal consumer impact and wow audiences with stunning visuals.

Read our most recent case study to learn how we assisted a global cloud security provider (Datadog) in increasing brand awareness and generating leads – (link)