6 Best Content Syndication Platforms For B2B Marketing

Content syndication continues to gain momentum with the rise of unique platforms and avenues for information consumption beyond just traditional blog posts. As a result, it now features highly in the toolkit of content marketers, especially when it comes to B2B marketing and lead generation. 

Still in its nascent stages, there is still a lot that is left to be figured out, but the outcomes, thus far, seem promising. No matter what type of marketing collateral you create, from blog posts to whitepapers, and ebooks to infographics, syndication can increase your reach exponentially. 

The growing acceptance of syndication has since led to even dedicated content syndication services for B2Bs in recent years.

If you’re still working with a lone blog to spearhead your content marketing efforts, in this article, we present some robust alternatives to help complement the same. The goal isn’t to replace the humble blog, but to drastically augment its reach across platforms, audiences, and demographics.

1. Quora

What was once a cleaner, and more intuitive approach to Yahoo Answers has since transformed into a platform for engaging discussions and thought leadership content. Since its founding in 2009, it has grown steadily, and now boasts 300 million monthly active users, making it the 42^nd most visited website in the world.

The core functioning of the platform remains similar to that of Yahoo Answers, and most other discussion sites, wherein, users ask questions, and other users answer them to the best of their ability. Quora, however, goes above and beyond when it comes to highlighting quality answers, and encouraging discussions, making it a far more active and engaging platform than most other similar sites.

Beyond the user base and engagement, a key hallmark of Quora is its dominance in Google search results, being ranked for 100s of millions of keywords across niches. While it's always possible to answer relevant questions while posting a link to your blogpost, Quora even allows users to create a blog post, using which existing content can be effectively syndicated within the platform for a wider audience.

2. Medium

Publishing platform Medium has been a boon for writers, marketers, and readers alike, given how easy it makes it to discover and share relevant content. Unlike other platforms, it allows and even thrives on content syndication without being tagged as duplicate content and remaining safe from any SEO penalties that come with the same.

All you have to do is create a brand profile on the platform and start importing stories. The platform creates a canonical link, so only your original content is considered and indexed by Google, not the one published on Medium. This way, you get substantial additional exposure across Medium’s massive user base without any SEO side effects.

This can be taken further still by syndicating the same content across numerous Medium blogs and publications relevant to your niche. While the platform’s algorithm is designed to organically deliver relevant traffic to quality content, getting republished in popular publications can supercharge your content marketing, lifting the total number of views overnight.

Source - https://unsplash.com/photos/JLj_NbvlDDo 

3. LinkedIn Publishing

A leading social media platform for professionals, LinkedIn remains the hotbed for thought leadership content across topics, niches, and industries. The platform is aimed at fostering relationships between professionals and business, but works wonders when it comes to building a B2B brand with the help of engaging and thought-provoking content.

Here again, articles published on your blog can be republished on the platform with a link back to your site, resulting in traffic flow and some SEO benefits. Despite the platform’s massive user base, however, getting views on your content often requires substantial first-level connections, at least to get the ball rolling, before it can reach and be shared by more people.

A great way to boost your reach on LinkedIn is by getting your content featured on any of the site’s 100 different channels. There are channels across a wide range of topics, from social media to entrepreneurship and finance to education, with millions of followers each, but getting your content featured in any of them will not be easy and requires additional work.

4. Flipboard

This is a news aggregation and content curation service with over 100 million users all over the world, with the potential to drive substantial traffic to pages that get featured on the app. With the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal as publishers on the platform, the audience and its quality are very well regarded in digital marketing circles.

Users on the platform can browse through their feeds, subscribe to certain feeds and topics that interest them, or even to certain magazines of curated content created by other users. Setting up a feed to Flipboard is fairly straightforward, and the platform even suggests that you promote your own content by ‘Flipping’ it regularly, but getting a regular stream of targeted visitors takes a bit more effort.

A great way to get started in this regard is by creating a magazine based on any of the 32,000 topics on the platform and regularly posting evergreen content there, which need not be your own. 

Over time, as you build a strong audience, you can start promoting your content. You can also include relevant widgets and buttons on your site to improve traction on Flipboard.

Source - https://unsplash.com/photos/gMsnXqILjp4 

5. Slideshare

The visually stunning and engaging presentations we create for various purposes can now reach a much wider audience with the help of Slideshare. With 80 million global users, mainly young professionals in tier-1 countries, the traffic and exposure set to be realized on this platform are often second to none.

You can think of this as Youtube for presentations, with substantial organic traffic allowing all uploads to receive exposure. The best presentations make it to the top of the first page on Slideshare, generating 10s of thousands of views within a few hours. The site offers a massive audience while facing substantially less competition compared to Youtube and other social media sites.

Just simple presentations created using Powerpoint, or Google Slides can do exceptionally well on the platform, with ways to funnel traffic towards your site, social media profiles, or sales funnels. Unlike other platforms on this list, this requires a bit of effort, as it's not as simple as just copy-pasting the content and needs a presentation to be created from scratch, but the result is often worth it.

6. Taboola (Paid)

The first paid option on this list, for marketers who are looking to crank it up a notch. One of the early pioneers of native advertising, Taboola currently holds a massive audience and substantial reach across various leading publications, including the likes of CNN, BBC, and the Huffington Post, among others. With Taboola, you can now advertise your content on these leading sites, for relatively small sums.

This is similar to a pay-per-click campaign, with your thumbnail and ad text showing up, for which you will be charged $0.02 to $0.20 per click on an average. While it might seem counterintuitive to pay for traffic to your blog, it could be beneficial especially considering the low costs per click, which makes it possible to generate steady revenues from higher value clicks, conversions and sales on your site.

Native ads arbitrage has been a popular trend in recent years, and essentially involves buying targeted traffic for cheap, and funneling it towards high value content, offers, or purchases. 

Based on how you approach this strategy, the visitors you acquire can further be converted into subscribers, or be used to trigger a viral chain to bring more organic traffic to your site, with a minimal budget of just $10 per day.

Final Words

If you’re tired of writing for search engine bots and having to wait for weeks or even months before the traffic starts to trickle in, content syndication offers a robust new alternative. Many of the above-mentioned platforms have substantial owned traffic of their own, which you can leverage towards your own site to grow your traffic, brand, and conversions without any major investment.

Content syndication further allows bloggers and publishers to craft content that ultimately appeals to readers, as opposed to search engine bots. This means no more trying to fit in unnatural keywords within the article, or needlessly increasing the depth with fillers and fluff statements to appeal to search engines, the focus remains entirely on adding value to readers, with a different set of metrics and KPIs.

Syndication is growing by leaps and bounds, and while the traffic may not be that reliable or consistent when compared to search engines, it is the future for a great many topics, niches, and types of keywords, which Google is currently unable to cater towards. If you’re a marketer, a blogger, or product owner, make sure to keep an eye out for the trends in content syndication to make the most of them.

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