Photo By Josep Ma. Rosell
Have you ever paid attention to how they syndicate television shows? They don’t just let a TV show all of a sudden run on a new network without prefacing it. And they don’t just run promos for the show that previously ran on the channel that was the original home of the show. They create entirely new promos specifically explaining that the TV show is being syndicated to a new network. Marketing content syndicators should take note of how television shows are syndicated – with care.
If there’s one thing you can do in your online marketing that can quickly derail your efforts, it’s thinking that you can syndicate marketing content with a quick copy and paste. I don’t care what your content is or where it’s going, if your marketing content is going to live in multiple places online and NOT stick out like a sore thumb, it’s going to have to be reformatted. In social media, your marketing content is going to be formatted differently for Twitter than it is for Facebook. On Twitter, even if all you’re doing is putting your headline into a tweet with a link, you should still hashtag your keywords. If you’re bringing it into Facebook, you better post directly/organically (Facebook has recently throttled impressions from third-party apps) and you ought to tailor your headlines, images and summaries. Rarely can you drop a link into Facebook that looks right without manipulating something.
And when it comes to distributing a blog post to an article directory, be ready to rewrite (sometimes large chunks) of your marketing content in order for it to look right and/or be accepted by article directories. On your blog, your marketing content needs calls to action that make sense and direct references to your product/service. Some article syndication sites don’t have comment sections, so that call to action that you wrote for garnering comments isn’t going to look right once the article is syndicated. Likewise, many article syndication sites have strict guidelines surrounding salesy-sounding content. All those direct references to your product/service in your marketing content? They might be what you need to see ROI from your company blog, but they’ll get your marketing content canned in a lot of other places online.
If you’re not individually reviewing how and where your marketing content is syndicated online, then you’re flirting with looking like a spammer one level removed from being the same as those Twitter accounts promising to make body parts bigger or smaller than what should be humanly possible (or promising something tech-related, if you prefer). There’s a special circle of hell reserved for those spammers, I’m sure of it. And there’s enough ill-fitting marketing content in the online world. Don’t add to the white noise. Stand out and put quality and thoughtful marketing content into the world. Then hold your marketing content’s hand wherever it goes online to make sure it’s behaving itself properly.
