Transforming Content Syndication Leads to Opportunities

More than just getting in touch with your leads, it’s also important to gauge their level of interest.

Content syndication leads have been all the rage for the past several years as marketers search to get endless top-of-the-funnel opportunities into their pipelines. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the term, content syndication is the process of republishing your content on third-party sites. It’s about creating, publishing and distributing content for a targeted audience online, and is often used by businesses in order to increase brand visibility and generate leads.

But, not all content syndication leads are made equal. Quality can vary greatly from one contact to another — sometimes prospects download a whitepaper out of sheer curiosity; others because they are actively looking for solutions on the market. Sometimes people click on banners by accident and they’re not even interested in your offers at all.

While focusing on the top-of-the-funnel is a good way to get high quantity, it’s not always the best way to ensure high quality. Having a lot of top-of-the funnel leads that never make it down into the actual sales process may be enough for some; but for others, it’s better to focus attention on transforming those leads into sales qualified opportunities.

So if content syndication is your thing, how can you ensure a higher conversion rate and push those leads down the funnel faster?

Here are some tips to get you started:

Follow up with telemarketing

The best way to understand the intention of a content syndication lead is to gauge their level of interest on a call. By engaging in a dialogue with the lead from the very start, you can understand if they can be disqualified outright — maybe it’s a student doing research on a topic, or someone that downloaded an e-book out of sheer curiosity (but that has no intention whatsoever to go ahead with a purchase). Instead of wasting time and resources nurturing those prospects, they can be discarded, freeing up more time for your team to focus on the ones that are more important.

For the leads that do show an interest but that may not be mature enough to require a sales meeting outright, you can put them into a nurture program (more on that in a bit). The leads that clearly are out there benchmarking solutions, that have a need/project in a short time frame will appreciate the personalized outreach approach. Not all prospects will take the time to contact you, but they are likely to engage if you take the first step. Setting up one-on-one meetings with this select group of prospects will surely benefit your sales pipeline.

Create a nurture program

I want to preface this by saying that nurturing leads does not mean suddenly spamming them 3 times a day. On Friday last week, I downloaded an interesting report on IoT (a subject I adore even though I am not currently developing an IoT application) from a particular company website — over the weekend, I received 8 email messages from that same company (no joke). Well, first of all I’m not their target, so I really should just be disqualified as a lead (just a curious bystander who has no intention of purchasing. EVER). Second of all, now all I want to do is unsubscribe as fast as I possibly can before my inbox explodes! It’s not a good policy to over-solicit prospects — especially when they are new top-of-the-funnel leads who probably don’t even know you (or your offers) well — since it will only be seen as a turn off.

Nurturing leads with a combination of (low frequency) emails with access to varied types of content, along with occasional telemarketing can work well to qualify information on those contacts/accounts and keep people’s interest level up. So here, if there’s a mantra to learn here it should be: keep in touch, but not too much!

Content innovation

Content delivery doesn’t have to be static. Innovative delivery methods are the new new thing, so get creative. In fact, we’ll soon be launching our 3D Bot so check back with us soon to learn more about white-labeling possibilities!

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