Accurate data is the unsung hero of all B2B marketing, including content syndication. Without it, even the most brilliant copy and eye-catching visuals won’t be enough to drive results. Why? Well, think of it this way:

Imagine you’ve opened a bakery in your hometown. You figure everyone loves chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and scones, so you assume the business will be a slam dunk. You open your shop, only to realize a large percentage of your customers are allergic to gluten. If you had done your market research beforehand, you would have known to include gluten-free options in your bakery, and you could have driven more sales among this significant customer base. But instead, now you have a bunch of inedible pastries and a negative balance sheet.

It’s the same deal with content syndication. In order to drive the most impactful results from your content syndication efforts, you first need to get your hands on clear, accurate data to guide and shape your strategy moving forward. By leveraging reliable data sets at the onset of your content syndication campaign, you can determine:

• What content distribution channels your ideal customers frequently use
• What content formats your ideal customers like to consume
• What content topics your ideal customers find most interesting
• What modes of communication your ideal customers prefer

With insights like these, you can create a more ideal plan of attack, pinpointing the most relevant aspects of your strategy to ensure an optimized, results-driven content syndication campaign, complete with all the accompanying benefits.

On a basic level, it’s easy to understand the impact accurate data has on the overall success of your content syndication efforts. But to really grasp its significance, let’s take a deeper dive and explore the essential elements of clean, accurate data and how it helps drive effective lead generation and conversion.

Why is accurate data so essential to content syndication?

Accurate B2B data lays the foundation for positive content syndication ROI. Here are four examples of how reliable data insights allow for a more efficient, more effective lead generation campaign.

1. Precise audience targeting and segmentation

Content syndication performance is all about reaching the right audience, not necessarily the biggest one. Casting the widest net possible and publishing your content to every available channel might increase your overall reach and grow brand awareness, but if the people who read or view your content don’t quite fit your ideal customer profile (ICP), you’ll likely end up wasting time on leads that’ll never convert.

However, when you leverage key customer data, including…

• Demographics
• Firmographics
• Technographics
• Behavioral data and intent signals

…you can develop all the necessary insights to properly target and segment individual audiences and buyer accounts. By separating your audience into smaller, more focused segments, it allows you to be more strategic and efficient with your campaign planning, making it that much easier to generate quality leads from all your hard work.

Here’s how it works. Starting with your ICP, identify the demographic, firmographic, and technographic criteria of your top buyer personas. What industries do they work in? What size companies do they work for? And what technology products do they have in their tech stack? Keeping those parameters in mind, you can use insights from your customer data to further segment your intended audience into smaller, more targeted groups. For example, you can create separate audience segments based on job titles and business types (e.g., executives at healthcare companies), current use of tech solutions (e.g., buyers who use marketing automation software), or whether they have official purchase authority (e.g., decision makers at small-to-medium-sized businesses). By grouping your target audience into smaller segments like these, you can more effectively engage prospects with relevant content suited to their unique needs and preferences, which in turn offers you a more efficient path toward content syndication ROI.

Now, imagine doing that without the help of accurate, enriched customer data guiding the process.

2. Campaign strategy optimization

Just as accurate data lends to precise audience targeting and segmentation, it also provides the ability to design relevant, highly focused content syndication campaigns that drive conversion across all audience subsets. Knowing who your customers are and what makes them tick allows you to deliver solution-driven content tailored specifically to their individual needs and business pain points. And your customer data, therefore, provides the necessary information to do just that.

Once you’ve segmented your target audience based on demographic, firmographic, and technographic data, apply additional layers of behavioral and intent data to gain actionable insights that’ll help further refine your content syndication strategy.

Behavioral data refers to any information generated from the engagements of target audiences across various digital channels, including your website, mobile app, and other integrated technologies. You can look to these behavioral metrics to get a crystal-clear picture of audiences’ content preferences, consumption habits, and any other insights that’ll help you create a more optimal path toward conversion.

Behavioral metrics can include:

• Click-through rates
• Content engagement (i.e., sharing, liking, commenting)
• Newsletter sign-ups

Now, imagine you work for a company that sells project management software to general contractors, and one of your target segments includes IT directors from large contracting companies. You can assess the behavioral data of this target segment to find out which types of content generate the most engagement. Not only does this data help you improve your content syndication efforts and boost chances for conversion; it also provides a more strategic direction for additional nurturing. For example, let’s say a good portion of your segmented audience downloads a white paper from your website about how project management software plays an important role in limiting quality assurance issues on construction sites. Data like this points to the fact that quality assurance exists as a common pain point for prospective customers. You can use this insight to design more relevant content offerings and establish your brand as a credible, reliable solution to their business concerns.

3. Reliable performance tracking

Just like any other marketing activity, you need to measure the effectiveness of your content syndication campaign to see if your budget’s being put to good use. With accurate data at the ready, you can track key performance indicators (KPIs) to see if your campaign is firing on all cylinders.

Some common content syndication KPIs include:

• Lead volume: total number of generated leads

• Cost per lead: total cost of your campaign divided by the number of generated leads

• Website traffic: total number of unique and repeat visitors to your website

• Conversion rate: percentage of generated leads who convert to customers over time

• Bounce rate: percentage of visitors who leave your website after only viewing one page

• Click-through rate: number of clicks your content receives divided by the total number of impressions it receives

• Scroll depth: how far a visitor scrolls down on your landing page

With this knowledge, you can identify potential gaps in the customer experience or gauge whether certain aspects of your marketing strategy need some additional tweaking. For instance, you might find your syndicated content drives impressive traffic back to your website, but your bounce rate shows visitors leave just as quickly as they came. These data insights indicate your landing page lacks a certain “stickiness” factor among target audiences, and you’ll need to revisit your messaging and overall design to better reflect the needs of potential customers.

You can also leverage campaign performance data to see what’s working well. For example, if you notice a certain infographic generates a lot of engagement among a specific audience segment, you can repurpose that asset with updated copy and visuals and use it as a means to engage other target segments.

4. Faster conversion

Ultimately, content syndication is all about generating quality leads who convert to paying customers. And with accurate data collected and surfaced within your CRM, your marketing and sales teams will be armed with everything they need to accelerate the sales pipeline and close deals faster.

Here’s an example. Let’s say someone clicks on a link to your gated content and they complete a form to gain access. Data analytics can capture key information from this digital exchange so you can design an optimal nurture path based on that buyer’s recorded preferences. Since you’ll know the exact kind of content the buyer’s interested in, you can enroll them in a drip campaign and offer additional resources closely aligned with their topics of interest. This helps drive engagement and encourage further progress through the sales funnel, taking that buyer from marketing-qualified status (MQL) to sales-qualified lead (SQL). Once that lead’s in your sales team’s hands, you can provide them with all the pertinent customer data to design effective sales outreach and drive swift conversion.

Without all that accurate data, your sales conversations wouldn’t pack the same punch, and your attempts to nurture prospective customers would likely fall flat. But by increasing access to high-quality data, everyone on your team can do their job better and speed up the sales cycle with qualified, verified buyers.

Get started with data-driven content syndication

Want to leverage your customer data to drive content syndication ROI? Check out our on-demand webinar, “Let’s Upgrade Your Content Syndication Approach” and discover the benefits of working with a trusted B2B data vendor.