How Content Syndication Can Empower Your Branding

As a steemed VP of Marketing, you try to win over feats and challenges. And we completely understand that. It’s not easy to: 

• Scale your marketing efforts to captivate a diverse target audience
• Stand out in a saturated market
• Manage multiple channels for an omnichannel customer journey, and so on. 

That's where content syndication services come in. Content syndication offers a dynamic solution to extend your reach and bring in high-value leads. 

Imagine your brand's message being showcased across the most effective platforms, making it stand out in a sea of competitors. Content syndication enables you to amplify your brand's voice while ensuring a consistent presence across channels.

Together, let's navigate the complexities of modern branding and enhance your online presence.

Content Syndication for Enhanced Branding

Why should you make content syndication a priority in your branding strategy?

Well, let's clear that out. 

As of a recent update, astonishingly, over 5.19 billion internet users worldwide consume content globally. Your brand is just a speck in this vast digital universe. So, how do you stand out and make your mark? This is where content syndication plays its magic.

By strategically syndicating your content through the right online channels, you're opening up many entry points for your target audience to discover you. More eyeballs on your content mean more leads and, ultimately, more conversions.

Consider these intriguing benefits of content syndication for your branding success: 

• Cost-Effective: Building and maintaining a brand can be costly. Limited budgets may restrict your ability to invest in marketing, design, and other branding efforts. But, content syndication can be a cost-effective way to reach your specific audience. You can syndicate with cold emailing and LinkedIn, among the affordable marketing channels. 
• Sales-ready Audience Reach: When you syndicate content with the help of a reliable vendor, you’re more likely to reach an interested audience. Your vendor knows the ins and outs of your target audience base. 

Hence, it sends syndicated content only to highly valuable prospects. Further, the vendor sends you a well-segmented prospect list per your prospect's interest levels. Thus, you can know which leads are sales-ready and which need nurturing. 

• Quick Trust Building: Usually, you need proper time and consistency to gain your target audience’s trust. But, when you reach out to your audience with gated syndicated content, your interested prospects share their contact data. It happens once they feel you have something valuable to offer. Hence, you get to use their data to nurture them further. 

6 Right Content Syndication Practices For Branding Strategy 

We have a curated list of best practices you must follow while syndicating:

1. Develop Content Strategies Aligned With Brand Identity

Imagine your brand as a person. What kind of person is it? Fun, serious, informative, or entertaining? Your content should reflect that personality. If your brand is like a helpful friend, maybe you'll use how-to articles or tips. If it's more like a humorous mentor, then using satire or memes to prove your point might be your style.

2. Only Syndicate Top-notch Content

Think of syndicating, like sharing your food at a potluck. You wouldn't bring a dish that's half-cooked, right? So, only share well-researched, error-free content that adds real value to your target audience. On the other hand, poor-quality content can make it the first and last time your readers read your content.

3. Always Use Call-to-action (CTA) That Asks for Prospects' Contact Information 

A CTA is like the cherry on top of your syndicated content. It's where you ask your target audience to take a specific action, like:

• Sign up for your newsletter
• Fill out a contact form

In exchange, give them full access to your gated brand content. 

4. Use Visual Branding in Syndicated Content

Here’s what you can do: 

• Create a Visual Brand Identity: Consider your brand's look and feel. Are you sleek and modern or classic and traditional? Your visuals, like images and graphics, should match this style.
• Incorporate Brand Colors, Logos, and Design Elements: Your brand should have a consistent look. Use the specific colors, logos, and design elements in all your content that act like your brand voice. Also, it helps your target audience recognize your brand immediately.
• Visual Consistency Across Syndication Channels: Imagine you're in a store, and the product looks different on the shelf and in the catalog. It's confusing, right? Therefore, keep your visuals consistent across all the platforms you syndicate on. It helps people connect the dots.

5. Link Your Web Pages in Your Syndicated Articles

Your website is the home base for your brand. When you syndicate content, it's like inviting people over for a visit. So, in your articles, include links back to your website. As such, once your prospects open your gated content, and if they like it, they will likely explore more of your site. Ultimately, it'll bring more potential clients to your brand. 

6. Monitor Your Syndicated Content's Effectiveness

Similarly, monitor how well your syndicated content is doing. 

• Are you getting new leads through it? 
• How many leads turn into paying customers? 

Use tools that offer in-built analytics to measure and make improvements. You can use tools Taboola, Outbrain, and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms for this.

Technologies to Syndicate Across Channels and Platforms

You can use different technologies to smoothen your syndication process across different channels, such as:

1. Content Operation Solutions 

Ensure to leverage these two innovative solutions while syndicating your content. 

• Digital Asset Management (DAM)

It's a dual-purpose solution, functioning as both:

• A strategic business process
• An advanced information management technology

It establishes a centralized framework that empowers you to arrange and retrieve your diverse content assets efficiently. With DAM, you enjoy the following facilities: 

• Managing all content types, including text and 4K video, in one centralized location.
• Gaining a comprehensive overview of the time, resources, and financial investments in content creation.
• Combining data on content performance and effort for informed decision-making.
• Automating content expiration processes.
• Using auto-scaling cloud infrastructure for seamless management and scalability.

• Marketing Resource Management (MRM) 

It's a marketing management solution that can hold all of the resources of your marketing team. For example, details of your marketing team staff, budget for constant syndication, etc. You can also store information about external vendors.

Here's what you can do with MRM: 

• Centralize all syndication campaigns for easy access and oversight.
• Monitor the advancement of projects effectively.
• Offer your executives insights across marketing operations.
• Equip project managers with tools to monitor project status.
• Facilitate mobile reviews for greater accessibility.
• Compare outcomes against key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Employ user-friendly data visualization techniques
• Generate personalized reports to meet specific needs

2. Critical Workflow Tools 

Your tools should seamlessly integrate with your daily workflow to be truly effective. You can make your content operations solutions excel by linking them with important syndicating tools, such as: 

• Salesforce

The tool helps you:

• Unify your syndication marketing and operations with its campaign management feature. 
• Rapidly craft tailored customer experiences.
• Access market-ready content and create personalized messages seamlessly.

• MailChimp

With this tool, you can: 

• Swiftly locate and incorporate DAM content within MailChimp.
• Quickly create captivating email campaigns featuring consistently high-quality, on-brand syndicating content.

• Trello

You can leverage the tool to:

• Enhance project management to locate and employ your DAM assets easily.
• Leverage its calendar view to plan, run, and manage syndicated content easily.

4 Branding Challenges With Syndication

Here are some major challenges that you may face during your branding syndication process: 

1. Uneven Balance Between Sustainable and Quick Rich Approach 

When you syndicate your content across various channels to establish your brand, it becomes a struggle to balance between two things:

• Getting quick revenue now
• Making a sustainable brand image for the future

You might get so caught up in generating conversions right away that you forget about building something valuable for the long term. 

A well-planned nurturing strategy for your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) can help you balance well. 

2. Difficulty in Achieving Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)

When you use different ways to tell people about your brand through content syndication across:

• Paid ads
• Social media
• Email marketing, and more. 

-these methods often work separately instead of together. 

They compete instead of helping each other because the media world is so complex and constantly changing. Thus, you may be challenged to make all these methods work together smoothly.

Maintaining consistent branding messages and visual appeal is one way to tackle it.

3. Maintaining Brand Relevance

It's tricky to keep your brand relevant to your target audience. Three things can make it less relevant:

• Fewer people conversations
• Outdated content
• Loss brand’s appeal in your offers

To tackle this, you must understand your market and be ready to make changes and investments.

4. Legal and Regulatory Issues

As a marketing head, you must be aware of issues in staying updated with evolving regulations. It includes changing regulations related to:

• User data protection
• Online advertising 

Failure to navigate these legal and regulatory hurdles can cause your brand reputational damage and legal consequences.

Plus, you need to ensure compliance with:

• Copyright laws
• Intellectual property rights
• Data privacy regulations 

Avoid Branding Mistakes While Syndicating Content

Let us look through what common branding mistakes you must avoid while leveraging content syndication:

1. Not Keeping the Logo and Messaging Consistent 

Imagine you have a favorite fast food restaurant, which you recognize by its iconic logo and catchphrase. Now, think about what would happen if the logo and message differed every time you visited. It'd be confusing, right?

The same goes for your brand. If your logo and messaging keep changing, it confuses your audience. So, to avoid this mistake, make sure your logo and message stay the same across all platforms. It helps your prospects recognize and remember your brand easily.

2. Ignoring SEO Best Practices

Suppose your content syndication vendor plans to share your content on their publishing platforms. Then, you must ensure your content is SEO-rich, as 60% of marketers say it is their highest lead quality source.

To avoid missing on SEO, pay attention to its best practices, such as:

• Use relevant keywords
• Create high-quality content
• Optimize your syndicated web page for search engines

This way, more people can discover your brand when they're searching online.

3. Focusing Only On Lead Generation

Numerous brands fall into the trap of syndicating content that solely intends lead generation. Although leads are crucial, they should not monopolize your attention. Your syndicated content should foster strong relationships and actively connect with your desired audience.

4. Overlooking Distribution Channels

When you depend on a single channel to distribute your syndicated content, you unknowingly take on a greater risk. For instance, that channel may become ineffective over time, and you have no backup option to tackle the issue. 

Thus, you must use various distribution channels to avoid depending on a single one. This approach ensures you have alternative options to rely on.

Also, while you syndicate via a specific channel, verify that your intended audience is actively present there. Distributing content through a channel your target market doesn't engage with or use is pointless.

5. Not Leveraging Marketing Automation

You are missing out on so much if you are not using marketing automation for content syndication. A good automation tool:

• Streamlines content distribution
• Tracks results
• Enhances campaign impact

Without it, tracking content performance is hard, wasting time and resources. Further, you can excel in content syndication with marketing automation, as it saves your time and money while boosting results.

6. Generating Leads With No Nurturing Plan 

Like many B2B marketers, you seek fresh ways to generate leads. But, you may make a common mistake: lacking a lead nurturing plan. Remember that an increase in readers doesn't mean you have instant buyers. 

Most are still in the early stages of the buyer's journey, just learning about your company and offerings. Therefore, design a plan to push them further to your sales funnel with continuous nurturing.

Moreover, nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle duration compared to leads that haven't undergone nurturing.

7. No Value-based Nurturing

Most brands neglect value-based nurturing for leads they gain from content syndication. It means you may not deliver genuinely valuable content to your audience.

Value-based nurturing guarantees your content consistently offers something beneficial.

It might be in the form of 

• Practical tips
• Intriguing insights
• Simply entertainment

Whatever you use, ensure it's compelling enough to retain your target audience's interest and bring them back for more.

Measure Branding Success Through Content Syndication Metrics

Let's talk about measuring the success of your branding syndication efforts.

1. ROI (Return on Investment)

ROI is about knowing if the money you put into branding activities is paying off. You can measure it through these parameters:

• Increased sales
• Improved reputation

2. Lead Volume

Imagine if people came to your lemonade stand, asked about your lemonade, and left their contact information. That's like lead volume. 

In branding, this means tracking how many people are interested in your brand or products. It's important because more leads mean more potential customers.

3. Lead Quality

For example, not everyone who stops by your stand might buy lemonade. Some might just be curious and not interested. 

Lead quality is like figuring out which people genuinely want your lemonade. 

In branding, you want to know if the leads you're getting will likely become paying customers. Quality over Quantity!

4. Conversion Rate

Measure how many leads (people interested in your product) turned into customers. It tells you how effectively your syndicating strategies turn interested folks into loyal customers.

Conclusion

As we've explored, content syndication can elevate your brand presence, resonate with a diverse audience, and carve a distinctive identity. Thus, we suggest leveraging this strategy with a reliable content syndication service provider.

You can choose Revnew as your strategic ally in this journey. With a proven track record of amplifying brands, we can effectively empower you to reach and gain potential leads. Our marketing experts can help maintain consistent branding for you across channels. Don't wait, and connect with us today.