The CMO Guide to Driving Demand with Content Activation

According to a 2022 marketing research paper by the Digital Marketing Institute, 20% of senior marketers rate delivering a greater ROI on their marketing budget as the number one issue they face.

Content activation can directly assist with improving ROI as professional syndication platforms not only boost reach by providing a larger audience for relevant content, but also increase the conversion rate of nurtured leads, as the audience for the content is more qualified and aligned with Ideal Client Profiles (ICP). In the case of gated content, targeted content activation provides valuable lead generation through forms filled and, on some platforms, even additional revenue.

By significantly augmenting reach and providing lead generation data, effective content activation provides an increased ROI by maximising brand visibility, capturing qualified leads, and driving conversion rates.

For CMOs, Directors of Marketing, and VPs of Marketing, the focus is on the bottom line. Crucial KPIs that can be achieved through content activation include lead generation, sales conversion rate, lead to opportunity ratio, ROI, and cost per lead (CPL).

According to the aforementioned 2022 marketing research paper, 70% of CMOs, Marketing Directors, and VPs of Marketing experienced budget reductions over the past 2 years. This makes optimising and streamlining campaigns whilst securing outcomes and reducing costs essential.

Content activation can reduce costs through:

The same 2022 research by the Digital Marketing Institute showed that 17% of senior marketers rated 'unlocking the power of data' as their second-greatest challenge. Content activation can provide rich data on prospects by expanding the reach of content across various platforms and audiences and providing detailed reports on performance. This is particularly pertinent for CMOs as their responsibilities often require achieving specific performance KPIs.

As content is distributed to different websites, social media channels, and digital publications, it generates valuable data on audience engagement, click-through rates (CTRs), and conversion rates. This data can be analysed to gain insights into audience preferences, content performance, and user behaviour.

CMOs can use this information to make data-driven decisions to optimise their content strategy, refine their messaging, and tailor their distribution channels. This iterative process helps improve content effectiveness, enhance audience targeting, and maximise ROI through continuous optimisation based on rich data insights.

With social distribution, businesses can promote content to a wider audience with low effort and cost by having their content shared on third-party social media channels.

With this strategy, businesses can track engagement with easily accessible analytics. By utilising paid ads on these social platforms, organisations can further increase the reach of their content, also often increasing ROI.

Indeed, according to the same 2022 marketing research paper, 31% of VPs ranked paid social media and content distribution as number one in delivering the best ROI in their campaigns.

Some B2B companies use social distribution with their clients or sister companies on a favor-to-favor basis which can be effective if the target audience of both brands is similar.

However, if the brands have different voices and target audiences, prospects will notice the disconnect and will likely not engage.

Co-marketing, where content distribution is concerned, refers to two or more companies uniting to launch content on an identified platform. This works best with long-form content, such as reports, whitepapers, and eBooks.

With a co-marketing strategy, businesses share their leads and filter them according to qualification criteria. This helps to reduce costs for reputable publishers, such as news websites, and allows each brand to tap into a wider audience than might otherwise be unachievable.

According to 2018 research by Partnerise, 54% of companies said that partnerships drive more than 20% of total company revenue, a statistic that continues to ring true for many. 2020 research by Hubspot also reported that roughly 11% of marketers said that 'partnership posts' are their brand's most engaging type of social media content.

An example of co-marketing could be two start-ups that co-write a specialist article, with links to their own assets, for the blog of an industry figure.

Both social distribution and co-marketing methods are simpler and more affordable than traditional content activation. The trade-off is that results can vary dramatically depending on the chosen partner.

Allow search engines to index your content before activating. There is no designated time frame, but a week is recommended to allow search engine crawlers to rank content.

Publish content on distribution networks with these tags to prevent search engines from ranking that content over yours:

If the publisher won’t allow tags, then place a backlink to your business in the content.

You can place the link at the start with 'originally appeared on ….' so readers can click to learn more about your brand. This phrase also signals to search engines that your company published the content first.