If you’re in the marketing business, then you’ve likely heard the expression “content is king.” It’s no secret that rich, original content drives engagement. Across the board, companies have shifted their focus to creating great content, with over 71 percent of marketers in B2B Marketing’s 2014 Content Marketing Benchmarking Report agreeing that content marketing is critical.
But what about the other piece of the marketing puzzle? Your content might be well-written and carry your key message points, but if nobody sees it, you’ve wasted time and resources. It’s not enough to create great collateral; how well you distribute that content directly influences your success in generating leads. These days, everyone has upped their game when it comes to content creation, but the new differentiator is distribution, and how well companies tackle that step will influence how effectively they reach their audience.
Spreading the Message
Most marketers already have a well-established pool of connections. What they typically lack, however, is a tool that allows them to distribute their content from the original source to the right people, partners and websites that represent their products. This is when investing in a content syndication solution can really pay off. Content syndication technologies allow companies to ensure that all of their marketing collateral is disseminated quickly and effectively throughout their online partner channel. All materials are co-branded with the partner’s logo, which allows the partner to keep its identity (and personally benefit from lead generation). Moreover, updates are made automatically, so partners don’t have to spend time revising outdated or incorrect messaging—saving everyone time, money and unnecessary headaches.
Businesses that distribute digital content through the partner channel via content syndication solutions have an enormous leg up on the competition. Content syndication technology has great potential to immediately enhance sales growth – both for your organization and your partners. It also alleviates the workload for partners who previously resorted to the resource-intensive manual processes of informing, selecting, replacing and updating assets every time a supplier pushes out new content. By automating these steps, it makes things easy for partners, and in turn keeps the channel relationship strong. And, current syndication solutions on the market can customize down to the individual level, ensuring that partner sales representatives are recognized for conversions that reflect their personal efforts.
Don’t Forget About Social
These days, with the explosion of social channels, you won’t meet many marketers who don’t incorporate social media strategies into their marketing campaigns. Twitter, in particular, has stood out from the social platform crowd as a key business communication channel. Syndication technology also offers the ability to efficiently and effectively distribute tweets—same as it does with content—throughout your partners’ Twitter channels.
In the past, marketers resorted to a process that involved emailing “suggested tweets” to their partners, which then had to be manually loaded and tweeted out. This required time and effort on the partners’ side and introduced the possibility for the introduction of errors into the promotional content. Social syndication eliminates that tedious step by automating Twitter posts and publishing them through a partner’s corporate handle. All pre-scheduled tweets automatically link back to vendor content on each partner’s website to ensure that the partners – not just the suppliers — reap the benefits. From an outsider’s perspective, it looks as if partners are publishing updates themselves, even though they are all coming from the supplier. For partner companies, this means all the lead-generating benefits, but none of the work.
Creating high-quality content has been a marketing focus for years, but with the number of different digital channels available, today’s businesses must rethink their distribution strategy to guarantee the right content is reaching the right audience. Success isn’t determined by strong content alone; it’s what you do with that content. Content syndication technology allows marketing collateral to reach its full lead-generating potential and ensure that partner channels continue to drive profit and success, benefitting both the principal business and the partners.
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