You’ve taken the time to come up with content ideas that should resonate with your ideal customers. You’ve published great pieces that should be spreading like wildfire. And you’ve done what you can to promote those pieces across social media.

But despite all that effort, so many blog posts fall flat. Studies have shown that 91% of all pages get zero organic traffic from Google and organic social media traffic is becoming increasingly elusive. You can (and should) embrace digital advertising to amplify your content—but that’s not the only way to get eyes on your ideas.

Content syndication should be part of any B2B marketer’s plans to increase brand awareness. With the right approach, you can get your content in front of a much wider audience of your target customers.

The Value of Content Syndication for Brand Awareness

For a long time, content syndication has been touted as a key SEO tactic. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise. When handled properly, content syndication can build backlinks to your website, build domain authority, and help your site climb the SERP ranks. Despite concerns about duplicate content, the SEO benefits are real.

But the truth is that most people who read your content on third-party sites won’t click back to your actual website. Even if you do get a clear backlink from the syndication partner, content syndication likely won’t become a major source of referral traffic.

Instead of looking at content syndication solely as an SEO tactic, focus more on its ability to increase visibility for the messages you want to spread to target customers.

As long as you’re not syndicating content that’s aggressively trying to convert readers, your brand name and thought leaders will start to become more recognizable to audiences of syndication partners. Then, when it does come time to make a purchase decision, you’re more likely to be considered right from the start.

Brand awareness is more difficult to measure than SEO results. However, when you play the long game and use content syndication to boost visibility, you’ll eventually start to see an impact on your bottom line.

The problem is that there’s no one-size-fits-all playbook for content syndication. Finding the right strategy can be easier said than done, but if you focus on the three main pillars of content syndication, you’ll find success.

Three Pillars of Content Syndication for Brand Awareness

Strategy will make or break your success with content syndication. There are a wide variety of ways you could approach this tactic. You could syndicate your blog posts to larger websites, form partnerships with similarly sized sites, pitch guest posts for major publications like Forbes and Inc., or get picked up organically by a variety of publications that will link back to the main source.

No matter which path you choose, there are three core pillars of a successful content syndication strategy:

  • The Target Audience: Do you know exactly who you’re targeting with syndicated content? Even though the goal is to boost brand awareness, you want to make sure you’re focused on creating content for the right people. Vague buyer personas aren’t enough. You need detailed, specific information about your target audience before starting with a syndication strategy.
  • Content Topics: You don’t want to run a strategy that involves syndicating every piece of content that exists on your website. Flooding third-party sites with too much content can lead to quality issues that turn target audiences off to your ideas. Understanding exactly what kinds of topics are most interesting to your target audience is key. This means knowing which stage of the buyer’s journey your content should focus on and the best ways to address key pain points.
  • Ideal Syndication Sites: There are all kinds of places you can syndicate your content. Social media sites like Medium, Quora, Reddit, and LinkedIn are all options that could work for a variety of situations. But more specific platforms exist (like Business2Community for a B2B marketing audience) that could become valuable syndication partners. Beyond dedicated platforms, you could find partners just by using tools like BuzzSumo or SEMRush to analyze backlinks for sites that publish syndicated content. Regardless, the key is identifying the sites that your target audience visits. Don’t waste time publishing on websites that will put you in front of the wrong people.

Content syndication works for brand awareness. That’s why so many opportunities exist to republish your content. But if you want to avoid wasting your time and effort, you need to have the right data available to create a more specific strategy.

If you want to learn how intent data helps with content syndication and other marketing efforts, download our free report, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data.