Why does everyone know who Dilbert is? Well beyond the fact that Scott Adams is a genius, it happened because the Dilbert comic strip was syndicated in newspapers around the world. Your next content marketing efforts may not produce the next Dilbert, but we can certainly learn a key lesson from this case study. If this comic would not have been syndicated, Dilbert would not be the household name it is today.
So how can you apply this experience to your business? We have covered in multiple articles in our Blog that your content is important for creating awareness, trust and sales. But we cannot always count on the power of our own reach. We often need to search outside of our own networks for help.
In the past this was a public relations effort, working with key publishers to try to get byline articles so that people would see your name and brand, and connect with you as an expert. While that is still a great strategy, there is a goldmine of opportunity to be uncovered by working with other organizations in your market space.
For example, there is a mutual benefit to working with an organization that is not competitive, but serves similar markets segments. There is also a challenge with this strategy. For instance, in an article by Marketingprof’s they discuss that one of the largest challenges with content syndication is that the leads end up with the syndication partner and usually are not delivered to the content owner until it is too late.
Getting the right benefits from syndication efforts is important. So it is important to structure your content so that it delivers these syndication benefits directly to you. One idea is to make sure that there are hot links back to your site within the body of your content. This helps to improve your SEO and keeps your article connected to your brand as it gets syndicated outward. Then, at the end of each article, include an offer that delivers new leads directly to you. For example, if you want to learn more about ContentMX and get 20 minutes free content consulting, you can click here.
One danger is that the desire to create leads can degrade the quality of the story. So be sure to create high value content first. That is your primary goal. The additional links and call to action should be secondary and added into your content after it is fully formed. By following these principles you will have a higher likelihood of receiving consistent, high value, leads.
When thinking about syndication partners, don’t forget about your affiliates – the resellers and independent sales agents that help represent your business. Too often people set-up a great affiliate program, but forget to provide the content and tools support they need.
A great example of a vendor leveraging their partners can be seen in how Microsoft communicates through their Dynamics partners. Microsoft makes relevant content available for their channel partners to help improve their sales effort.
If any of these strategies are of interest to you or if you would like to receive that 20 minutes of free consulting I mentioned above, please contact me here.