We’ve been quite fortunate this year to be featured on a number of podcasts. Most recently, Paul Mosenson, host of Fix the Convince and Founder of NuSpark Consulting, welcomed David Fortino, NetLine’s newly anointed Chief Strategy Officer to discuss content syndication, how to target the right audiences, and how to determine the best content that drives quality leads. 

Before listening to the show (which you can listen to here), let’s review some of the highlights from the episode.

What is Content Syndication’s Role in the Demand Gen Process?

While NetLine works to amplify B2B content through content syndication every day, not everyone understands what it is. So before we broach the question posed above, let’s define it.

What is Content Syndication? 

Content syndication is a tactic which acts as a discovery tool for users in which they educate themselves with your content. For marketers, it’s also a discovery tool to help you better understand your total marketplace, better understand the needs of your prospects, and the types of people who actually engage with your content. If you’re paying close attention, you can even learn more about who your content isn’t resonating with and optimize accordingly. 

Now that we’ve established this baseline, let’s return to content syndication’s role in creating demand.

Creating demand for your product or service is hard. There are millions upon millions of competitors in the world competing for your target buyer’s attention and engagement. Getting your content seen is massively important. Your competitors are churning out content at a pace that seems impossible to keep up with. Most troubling, your prospects are consuming content at a velocity and veracity not seen before…to the tune of 16 petabytes worth of consumption data over 12 months. 

Content syndication is able to amplify your content beyond not only appropriate audience personas, but most importantly, allow your content to engage with those specific audiences and deliver only qualified leads that explicitly meet the criteria of your campaign. As an executive at the web’s leading content syndication platform and an experienced veteran of the B2B content world, David can point to specifically why B2B marketers need to syndicate their content in order to reach and engage with their ideal customers. 

“If you’re fortunate enough to be a recognized incumbent, then [your target buyer] probably already know(s) where to get your content. But most users don’t (know where to get your content). Most people don’t know where things are on the web, and if they did, Google wouldn’t need to exist.”

Simply put, content syndication plays a massive role in the demand gen process because it helps you become visible to your ideal buyers. Considering that the final outcome for content syndication is to develop opportunities that can translate into closed, won business, the best way to continue increasing this pipeline is to find the folks who actually want your content. 

To Gate or Not-to-Gate?

At NetLine, we gate a lot of content. Like, a lot. 

Part of this is because it’s a core part of our product, but mostly it’s because we all believe it as a philosophy. Still, it’s important to find balance. For example, we present a lot of awesome, in-depth research on our blog, which is obviously ungated. Each of the entries in our COVID Impact Series could have easily been turned into simple, gated PDFs, representing thousands of potential downloads and leads. 

Would it be great to drive direct, attributable sales from our blog? 100%. That would be spectacular. But our goal here is to create awareness of our business and our capabilities. Instead, our aim with our ungated assets is to showcase NetLine’s capabilities around what NetLine can do. 

We do everything in our means to amplify this content, but there’s one thing we’re certainly not going to do: pay to play. David explained why. “Telling a CMO (or in our case, the CEO) that you backed into 17,000 pageviews [isn’t the best allocation of budget. If you do this consistently,] good luck; your career will be short. Vanity metrics mean nothing in Demand Gen. There are upstream metrics that you should pay attention to, but these aren’t the things that [your executive] wants to hear.”

Listen to the Show

The two highlights we’ve listed above are just from the first 10 minutes of this super-informative episode. The rest of the show contains a ton of juicy takeaways (i.e., how many possible filter combinations there are within the NetLine Portal) that you can use within NetLine or in any other amplification campaign.

Our thanks to Paul Mosenson for having David on the show!

Listen to David’s episode of Fix the Convince, Content Syndication: Driving Targeted Leads Across the Web.