What is content syndication?
For B2B marketers buying syndicated leads, or deciding whether to.
Content syndication is paid distribution of your content through other publishers' sites, where you pay an agreed price for each reader who downloads it and becomes a lead. What you receive depends heavily on two things a buyer rarely sees: where each form was filled in, and what was checked before the record reached you.
How a syndicated lead is made
You give a syndication provider a piece of content and a specification: the industries, company sizes, geographies and job levels you want, and the number of leads you are buying. The provider promotes the content across its publisher network. A reader who wants it fills in a form, and their details become a lead delivered to you, usually at a cost per lead fixed in advance.
Where the data goes wrong
The form is filled in by someone who wants the content, not by someone who has decided to buy. Some details are mistyped, some are deliberately wrong, and some belong to people well outside your specification. The same person arrives twice from two publishers. Consent is collected to one standard on one site and another on the next.
None of this shows in a lead file. A spreadsheet of names looks the same whether the records were checked or not.
What to ask a provider before you buy
A provider can answer each of these in writing.
Where does validation happen?
Validation means checking the details on a record: that each value is in the right format and, by a lookup against an outside service, that it is real. Look for checks that run as the record is captured. A check run after delivery tells you about a record your systems have already acted on, and usually one you have already paid for.
What travels with each record?
A strong answer is the site it was captured on, the wording the person agreed to and the time they agreed to it, so the question of consent stays answerable months later.
How are duplicates handled?
Look for matching against your own file and across the whole programme, as well as within one publisher's supply.
What happens when a record fails the specification?
The specification should set that out before the programme starts, and the failures should show in the reporting, so the count you see is the count that passed.
Which sites were the records captured on?
Ask for it record by record as well as in total, so the source producing the weakest records can be found and stopped.
When syndication works well
Syndication works when the content is worth the download and the specification is honest about who can actually buy.
Frequently asked questions
Is content syndication just gated content?
Gating is how the details are captured. Syndication adds the distribution: your content reaches readers on other publishers' sites, and you pay for the reach and for the details of the people who responded.
Why do syndicated leads get rejected by sales?
Often because nobody checked the data against the specification before it landed: wrong details, duplicates, people outside the profile. The other common reason is timing. A syndicated lead responded to content, so it is usually earlier in the buying cycle than a demo request, and it needs nurturing before the sales criteria apply.
How is content syndication priced?
Per lead delivered, against a specification. The cost per lead and the number of leads set the price, and the specification sets what counts as a deliverable record. The practical question is what your contract says happens when a delivered record fails it.
How should syndication be measured?
By what the leads did next. With delivery connected to your CRM, acceptance, conversion and opportunities can be read per source, and the programme judged on pipeline.
Where to go next
Content syndication services.
What LeadScale sells, who does the work and what a programme includes.
Syndicated leads that convert.
When syndicated leads are arriving and not converting.
A CRM company that cut its cost per lead.
New publishers vetted and added, existing partners managed by LeadScale, and the cost per lead fell.
If you have a recent lead file, bring it.
Walking through real records shows where each one would have been checked on its way to you.