Gate or Ungate Content?
What do you do with quality content? Do you put it behind a form? It’s becoming more and more of a debate in the B2B space especially.?As marketers, we can do better. It requires a mindset shift. We need to think in terms of our potential customer needs, not leads. I know that’s easier said than done. We want an immediate fix. The leads will come when we prove ourselves.?
B2B buyers are not buyers … until they are.? Of course, that sounds obvious, but we often forget. As good as we are as marketers, we cannot make people buy until the need is there. What do we do in the meantime? We brand. We grow awareness. We educate. That’s what the content does. Hiding that behind a form is not doing any of those things.
Let’s step back and look at the purpose of gated content. Putting a white paper, for example, behind a form is ultimately there to gain or build on contact information. It sounds perfect. We put up content. They fill out a form. It’s a win/win for everyone, right? We know better.
Good or bad content? It doesn’t matter.
Our gated content is not good. We often oversell the content on the landing page, but once it’s delivered it’s a PDF of fluff.?We may have gained an email address, but at the expense of losing trust from the potential customer. I realize no one thinks their content is bad, but someone needs to say it – “your baby is ugly”.?We have been putting a form in front of something that’s not that great.
Our gated content is good. Ok, let’s look at it from the other point of view. Let’s say our content is great. It has weeks of research, well resourced, lots of quotes, case studies, and graphs. We feel confident it would really WOW the audience. Ok, then why hide it behind a form? We should let the industry see how bright we are!
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Then, how do we grow leads? Our content can still have call-to-action (CTA) points throughout it.?At this point, through quality ungated content, we have proved our worth. We’ve shown that we know what we are talking about. Let’s expand on that through a small form.
We still want to make the contact process as easy as possible. However, CTAs need to relate to the pain points and solutions pointed out in the content. That includes very specific things like:
The shift to ungated content requires leadership buy-in. Offering up “free” content is a hard thing to do in a corporate structure.?It requires educating the team on a holistic, multi-touchpoint marketing campaign. Marketing, especially in the B2B space is not linear. We would all love if a downloaded white paper led to sales qualified lead, but that’s not very likely.
There is a time and place for everything. Gated content still has a place. In many cases, it’s necessary. That includes event-based content like webinars, dinners, exclusive events, meetings, etc. Not only is it needed, but it’s also expected from the user standpoint. Anyone wanting to attend an event would fully expect to provide contact information.
What are your thoughts on gated content? When or if do you use it?