Come right in… Dump the doorbell

“We have come up with the latest trends of social media for digital marketing. Click this button to download.

Oh, sorry, first fill up this form and give us your personal contact information. Do not even think of giving the wrong phone number or email ID. We shall send links/OTPs to verify.”

How many of you fill out the form with the hope that you will unsubscribe at the very the next mail hits your mailbox? (I have a dummy mail ID that I got only for such purposes!)

We come back to the topic of Trust!

As established in “A Cognitive Theory of Trust”, by Claire Hill and Erin O’Hara, the term ‘trust’ comes with an inherent willingness to make oneself vulnerable to the trusted party. There needs to be an uncertain outcome that we are ready to explore through whom we trust. And it is our choice to either trust someone right at the first go or after a few interactions. Those who are to be trusted hardly have any role to play or demand to make.

Getting back to the initial experience that most of us have been through, let us acknowledge that even in today’s trend of content marketing, meaningful data is hardly available on the internet. But does that mean that we need to share information even before we know if the content is of any value to us?

[Definition: Gated content is online materials, such as white papers, articles and videos that require that users fill out a form before they can access them.]??

Let us bucket three major content-sharing trends that we find nowadays on digital media:

1) The Philanthropists:?Ones who share valuable content and research data freely, without any gate in between.

2) The Diplomats:?Ones who share valuable content and research data freely, but only if you are ready to pass through the gate.

3) The Takers:?Ones make you pass through the gate, but the content and data received are hardly of any value.

The obvious question is what the content marketer would do with all the data they gather. Here the possibilities are two:

1) Send future content and develop stickiness/loyalty.

2) Try to convert to a buyer of a product or service.

If the intent is content marketing, gating the content seems unnecessary. Would it not make sense to make the content attractive so that you have a loyal base of subscribers? First let the brand showcase trust towards its audience by giving away valuable content, with the confidence that those who see the value will become subscribers. Subscribers – the committed audience – will reciprocate by showing trust and signing up for what they’ll get down the road. There will be no question that they will trust to brand to provide future value-based content based on the value already shown.

Those who sign up voluntarily are a much better audience than those who have been deprived of a conscious choice by being forced to provide data before experiencing the content.?

If the intent is to convert the audience to become a customer of a product or service, it might pay to just tell that upfront, instead of obfuscating the audience through a generic form of data capture. Just tell them exactly what’s going to happen once their information is received. Why try to fool the audience into something that they did not sign up for? Is this how a relationship should start?

Again, it might be better for the company to trust first by providing some value through content that convinces the buyer to provide accurate information (not dummy mail IDs!). This would create an option for the buyer to trust the brand enough to feel emotionally, or even intellectually or financially, ready to move to the next step of a buyer’s journey.

In both cases, the gate does not seem to serve much of a purpose, other than feeding our ego of having a huge chunk of data at our perusal (not knowing what to do with it).

But why do we still use Gated Content Delivery? The answer lies in your behaviour.

Which content/data do you trust more? One that you could just access through a single click or one for which you had to fill up a form?

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