Content is a B2B marketer’s best friend. But if you’re not taking the steps to get your content in front of your target audience, all the hours your team has spent perfecting that report, ebook, or whitepaper might be wasted.
Why You Need Content Syndication
Content syndication is a third-party demand generation strategy that leverages media partners to distribute branded content, allowing you to reach a broader audience. Once someone downloads that piece of content, you receive privacy-compliant contact information to fuel your pipeline. And that’s great—but it’s not enough.
Turn Up the Volume with Intent Data
By adding intent data to content syndication programs, you amplify their impact on your pipeline and revenue goals. How? By identifying accounts in an active buy cycle, prioritizing those accounts, and highlighting which content and messages are resonating with your target audience. The result? Better prospect experiences and higher conversion rates.
You can use intent insights to:
- Segment target accounts into custom campaigns
- Align specific assets with prospects' interests and buyer journey stages
- Select the right combination of engagement tactics and messages to use for each in-market account.
Here are five critical steps to help maximize your investment in intent data.
Step 1: Build a Strong Target Account List (TAL)
Make sure your TAL:
- Features only prospects who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Includes firmographic and technographic data
- Focuses on people and organizations that are researching intent topics and keywords related to your products and solutions
Pro Tip: Use intent data to refine your ICPs and generate greater results
Step 2: Establish Strong Persona Targets
The key to B2B marketing success is connecting the right people in the right places. So don’t cut corners on the persona selection process and make sure you:
- Provide multiple job titles for similar roles
- Target decision influencers as well as decision-makers
- Set geographic targets matching intent signal origin
- Don’t restrict your targeting to executive titles
Step 3: Build and Use Content that Delivers Results
Put yourself in your prospects’ position and then build content accordingly. Content should:
- Briefly introduce your brand’s approach to solving a problem –– their problem
- Be educational, interesting, and informative
- Provide guidance for taking action
Once you have the right content, boost your chances for success by giving your media partners three to five assets per campaign and abstracts for each asset.
Pro Tip: Keep it personal. Align your content with your targets’ interests.
Step 4: Verify Your Leads, Then Nurture Ideal Prospects
Before you send leads to your sales team, establish lead verification processes that prevent duplicate, inaccurate, poor-quality data from entering your database. Use integrations to directly inject clean leads into your marketing automation system.
Once you have the leads, launch an email nurture campaign that gives your target audience even greater insight into your brand and solutions. To maximize your return on this nurture campaign:
- Follow email best practices
- Avoid spam folders by limiting batch emails to 20 to 30 contacts at a time
Pro Tip: Use intent data to select the right follow-up messages and nurture tracks
Step 5: Analyze Performance and Make Adjustments
After any campaign, your analysis and action plan should include:
- Tracking your high- and low-performing content and adjusting action plans accordingly
- Changing the caps on leads generated from accounts: Consider accepting more leads from highly engaged accounts
- Enriching the buying experience by running programmatic ad campaigns in tandem with content syndication to surround engaged accounts
