To Gate, or Not to Gate, That Is the Marketer’s Question

You’d be hard pressed to find an organization that doesn’t do web and digital marketing. Even a billboard media company, about as old-school and analog as you can find, will still have a web presence to build brand awareness and facilitate the sales process. And, those organizations who do their best to execute upon a digital content marketing strategy all face a common dilemma: Should I “gate” my most valuable content, like eBooks, white papers and recorded webinars, behind a form or a pop up?

Gates are established to make a visitor “pay” for the content material, and the most common “price” is a name and an email address. If the visitor is convinced to believe the content could be valuable, saving her time and/or money, or helping her overcome a challenge more effectively, for example, then the price to pay is fairly minimal. For the organization, it collects a valuable name and email address, producing a lead for it to nurture and hopefully, in time, convert into a customer. 

While gating has been a thought-provoking topic for discussion (and even argument) within Marketing departments for over a decade, most marketers have settled on a blended approach, offering “free,” ungated content like blog posts and informational briefs about products, solutions, etc., and then offering more premium, higher valued content behind a gate. After all, a key objective of many Marketing departments is generating leads, and you have to have email addresses to have leads, right?

Hmm, not so fast.

Marketing teams, as well as their close cousins in Sales, do love leads collected at gates because they are self-qualified, and that’s a big, big, big plus. However, those self-qualified leads just might come at a hefty cost, considering those possible high-quality leads who self-select themselves out of consideration by not converting (not filling out the form) on the gated landing page.

WordStream reports that across industries, the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35 percent. So, on average, across all industries, 97.65 percent of the visitors to a landing page do not convert. They leave without filling out the form, and as a result, they never see your content.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking, “Yeah, but my organization isn’t ‘average.” Okay, fair enough. In the same article, WordStream states that the top 25 percent of landing pages are converting at 5.31 percent or higher and that ideally an organization should seek to land in the top 10 percent of all landing pages, those with conversion rates of 11.45 percent or higher.

Anyway you stack it up, no matter how effective you think you are, over 80 percent of the visitors to your landing page don’t think it’s worth it to give you their names and email addresses. 

In response, more and more Marketing departments are looking to do the once unimaginable, and that is to offer all content ungated, and there are a lot of advantages that just might outweigh the number of self-qualified leads collected through gates.

Photo by Ehud Neuhaus on Unsplash

First of all, freely accessible content has the greatest potential reach and will undoubtedly deliver more individual impressions. Free content is easily shared across a variety of platforms, social media included, and can earn those treasured inbound links from the content produced by others.

Moreover, open and freely accessible content can deliver gigantic SEO benefits. Your gated content is probably your highest quality content, and those eBooks, white papers and case studies are usually chock-full of keywords. It’s the type of quality content that search engines love, and you’ll likely be rewarded with high placements on search result pages. 

So, what’s a marketer to do?

If there’s one universal truth in business, it’s all Sales teams want more leads. The pressure is there to produce leads for Sales to call upon and meet with, and that pressure is real.

First, understand where you are as a business, and how it might differ greatly in different global regions. If you’re trying to build brand awareness and establish a brand identity, most, if not all, of your content should be ungated. If you have great brand awareness and the corresponding high website traffic and you’re looking to convert more web visitors to leads, then look for high-value ways to do so. One way to collect names for your nurturing engines is to produce live online events, like webinars and conferences. Consumers already expect to register for those events in order to receive access links, materials and the like. 

Secondly, produce only high-quality content, content that is informative and likely to be highly valued by the markets you want to attract, and publish at a high cadence. When you create your content, design it much like you’ve designed your website, and include clear call-to-actions throughout. Within your content, offer links to other branded digital resources, including related eBooks, survey research, blog posts and the like. And, of course, link to a Contact Us or Request Demo form in case your consumer wants to speak to someone immediately. 

Maybe most important, don’t be afraid to experiment. Digital marketing lends itself so well to A:B testing, so test, learn, continuously improve and repeat. There’s no single one-size-fits-all solution for every organization, so do your best to learn what’s best for yours.

I would love to learn what’s worked best for you in your marketing efforts. What have you learned about gating through your experience, and what would you recommend? Drop me a note in the Comments, below, if you’d like.