It’s all too easy to fall into one of the many traps that await anyone embarking on a content syndication strategy.
From amassing a voluminous number of leads but no real quality ones to conflict between marketing and sales over what qualifies as a bona fide opportunity, frustrations abound if the syndication strategy isn’t on point and everyone isn’t singing from the same hymn sheet.
However, while there are mistakes aplenty in B2B content syndication, many can be fixed by focusing on the funnel stage, customer profile and by using the services of a syndication specialist like Headley Media.
Get these fundamentals right, and the rest will follow. In this post, we take a look at how to do just that.
Volume Not Quality
We’ve all been there – the marketing people are happy because the funnel is filled with what it thinks are promising leads. Still, the salespeople are frustrated because although the pipeline is ostensibly full, the leads aren’t converting.
The good news is that there is an easy fix here simply by tweaking your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Get the stakeholder(s) profile right, especially the firmographic information and technology stack data, and the quality of your leads will improve immeasurably.
Premature Reachout
It’s easy to jump the gun with syndicated content and push out sales-led content when buyers aren’t quite in the mood to make a purchase.
This can come across as overly aggressive and doesn’t serve the needs of your leads in their current phase of the buying cycle. The fix is simple – drill down into the buying cycles of your ICP and understand where they are so you can reach out with perfectly timed follow-ups.
Unnurtured Leads
Content syndication is often a numbers game, and leads are generated quickly and in large numbers, meaning they are dumped unaggregated in the CRM for manual follow-up.
The fix involves having a clear lifecycle automation or segmentation, and a structured nurture path, one based on both intent and fit.
Poor Lead Qualification
It’s too easy when the leads come in on the back of a content syndication campaign to use superficial or basic criteria like firmographic data to qualify leads.
However, this all too often leads to poor lead qualification, as it overlooks the real nitty-gritty data that will allow you to qualify leads properly. Instead, the data from your content syndication campaigns needs to be sifted for more granular data, including firmographic, demographic and technology stack status.
Lack of Feedback
The problem with many B2B campaigns is that they are simply too linear – leads are fed from marketing to sales, and the information on wins and losses, conversion rates, and pipeline status isn’t subsequently looped back to the marketing division.
By employing a more circular and looped feedback cycle, you can avoid this. It’s only by closing the feedback loop that you can update and refine your ICP, which is all-important in any B2B marketing, not least in syndication campaigns.
Conclusion
Content syndication is an important part of the B2B marketing mix. Done right, it fills your funnel with promising leads and those hard-to-reach B2B buyers who are primed to make a purchase. But it’s easy to miss those leads without the right systems and approach in place.