How to Gate Content that Delivers Leads

By: Cori DiDonato, Silver Tiger Consulting

“Gating” content is requiring contact information in exchange for access to an educational whitepaper, ebook, or an article. It has long been a staple of generating leads online for a business. Many marketing funnels are essentially gated content strategies. Some of them work very well, and some don’t work at all because they end up annoying prospects instead of engaging them.

In this article, I’ll be sharing a few simple tweaks we've developed for our clients to implement and improve your company’s gated content strategy to deliver more qualified leads for your business. If you need help implementing the technical aspects of gated content, please contact us for additional resources or attend our next workshop.

In its simplest form, there are 4 parts to a gated content campaign:

1.      Hook (content offer- can be a page on your web site, a social media ad, a printed brochure, etc)

2.      Landing Page (the actual “gate” that the hook directs your prospect to)

3.      Data Capture Mechanism (this is the form to collect the contact information that is part of the landing page)

4.      Delivery of Valuable Content (could be a redirect to another landing page to download the content, an email with the content attached, or an email with a username/password to unlock the content)

You do not need a web site to gate content- many sophisticated email marketing software packages include ways to do this without needing to host the gated content, create a password protected web site, or create a form on a web site. If you are interested in the actual technical implementation of one of these gated content systems, and are in the Greater Boston area, I’ll be covering how to do this entirely within Constant Contact in my next seminar here.

If you do have a web site that is hosting your gated content, or has a password protected section hosting your content, the information in this article will also be very helpful.

Step 1: Determine What and When to Gate

Gated content works best if it is more valuable than what can be freely found elsewhere on the internet without needing to provide personal contact information. Most people that are downloading gated content are in active research mode. They are looking for solutions to a challenge they are facing in the near term. If your content does not appear to be part of that solution, or it can be found ungated elsewhere, you will have a very hard time getting people to trade their contact information for your gated content. They’ll simply bounce out and onto their next search result when they hit your gate.

Gated content should also be something that not only provides additional value to people already using your products and services, but to people who have not yet engaged with your service. For example- I have a hard gate (i.e. you can’t get through without a username and password) around my introductory article on how to set up a successful compensation, referral, and partner plan on my company's site. We frequently provide paid consulting services on compensation planning, and this is some of the getting started collateral we provide along with the rest of our services to new clients. Since it is also introductory and can lay the groundwork for new consulting arrangements, I also freely provide it to prospects that engage with my company on a deeper level (i.e. my library subscribers) than just our monthly newsletter list. These prospects not only get a better understanding of our thought processes around compensation planning, but they get solid takeaways they can implement with or without hiring my company or buying any of our services. This keeps them positively engaged with us while they are considering our different services and determining if they want to commit to a consulting project.   

If the content you are presenting is only useful if someone immediately goes ahead and buys your service or product it shouldn’t be gated. This is a big turn-off to prospects. Funnels and content gating strategies go very wrong if at the end of your gate people still need to make a purchase to get or use the item of value. You’ve captured their contact information and given them nothing in return. Your very next email to them will most likely end up marked as spam or as an immediate unsubscribe. 

I have different types of gating other than password protection for other types of content. For example: emailing a document directly after registration for content that most likely needs to be shared with a team of decision makers in a company. This form of gating can’t limit sharing of content to the extent a username/password protected site would (i.e. a hard gate), but it makes it easier to share the data for the person receiving it.

For my own company's content marketing, I create a yearly content calendar. I publish a lot of ungated content and then slowly gate pieces over time as corresponding seminars pass, we package up services around the content, etc. I’ve found that I have gotten more followers when I release some of the valuable content ungated for at least 30 days on LinkedIn and on my web site’s library. I incorporate that timetable in my content marketing calendar.  This establishes my expertise in a certain area without requiring someone to give up their anonymity. Then, when they do come across the gated content they are more likely to subscribe. They have a better idea what they are getting in exchange for their contact information. 

What Not to Gate:

If your content details something that would help people make a decision on whether or not to buy your product or service, it should not be gated. Having to provide contact information to receive content about your product or service rarely works for quality lead capture.  When we help create a company’s marketing strategy, we encourage getting as much information out on their web site as they can to help people qualify themselves as leads before asking them for their contact information. Providing contact information in exchange for receiving a demo, an in-home quote appointment, a mailed catalogue, or a complimentary consultation is great. This is also very different than needing to provide contact information to download a product specification sheet or access a feature comparison between your product and a competitor’s. If you are trying to capture “everyone” who comes to your site, you won’t have the resources to focus on the ones that have already determined they think they need to buy from you. If someone has reviewed your product data sheet, your feature comparison sheet, and then is providing you contact information for a demo or free consultation, this is a much higher quality lead than someone that can only get this product and service information after they’ve given you their information.  

Step 2: Make Sure Your Delivery Method Enables Them to Keep in Touch with You

This is the biggest mistake I see happening when I first start working with clients who’ve gated content. An easy way to provide the gated content is to just redirect the person to the content hosted on your web site after they’ve filled out the form. This is fast and simple. If that is the ONLY thing your gating system is doing as soon a prospect goes through the gate, however, you’ve lost a huge opportunity. I always recommend implementing an automated email going directly to the person who submitted the information. In it, you should remind the person who you are, how to get in touch with you on their terms, what they were interested in, and a premium format such as a .pdf of the content they requested attached if it isn’t part of a password protected site. I recommend doing this even if they were able to download the content directly off the web site after going through the gate. People in research mode don’t jot down every site they’ve visited, and why. Sometimes it is late and at night and they are on their phone doing the research. They frequently forget where they read or downloaded the content from within a day or two.  We implement this outbound email for all our clients when we build their content gating systems and have found that it rapidly increases the number of leads that result in a sale.

You don’t want to rely on your sales team only making outbound calls. Why? Most often, if you don’t send an immediate reminder with the content also attached, the person who read your whitepaper might not even remember your company’s name.  They might want to refer back to the whitepaper but can’t find it in their downloads. They might want to forward it to their manager for approval on engaging your services but can’t find the web site in their browser history.  Having a salesperson call them the next day or a few days later probably helps to jog their memory, but it more often results in the salesperson being rushed off the phone because your prospect can’t talk to your sales team at that time. They didn’t have your information when they actually needed it. Additionally, not at gated content is going to lead to a direct sale, demo, or consultation. Pushing the outbound calls and emails can lead to disengagement (i.e. they won't deal with your company) when they would have otherwise called you in the future. Just because someone downloaded your content doesn't mean they are looking to buy a service related to the content. If your content is valuable enough, however, you'll have established a connection that could lead to further engagement off of future content or interactions with your company.

Step 3: Make Sure Your Gate is Simple

You want to collect the bare minimum of information you’d need to categorize a person’s interest for more meaningful interactions and to actually follow up. Depending on how you set up your gate, you can infer quite a bit of information just based on what they decided to download. If, however, your product works better for certain industries, types of companies, or you specifically need someone in a certain type of role to make a buy decision, you’ll want to capture some of that to better focus your follow up with that particular contact. You also want to provide for the optional capture of an alternate contact point, such as a phone number in case there are typos in their email. To avoid capture failure, I strongly encourage delivering the final gated content only via email or via directions in an email instead of a redirect. This creates a better incentive for getting an accurate email address entered so you can keep the required fields on your form down to just a few.

Step 4: Make Sure Your Gated Content Includes the Right Call to Action

Calls to action can include linking to other articles, setting up a demo or phone consultation, or making the actual purchase or service sign up right then from your gated content. We frequently come across gated content being delivered that does not have a clear or relevant call to action anywhere on the content. Make sure your content reader knows how to get more information from your company and the next steps if they want to make a purchase at the very least. We see too often companies relying completely on future email bombardment and numerous outbound calls by their sales teams to leads gathered from gated content downloads. All of this because the call to action in the gated content was missing or couldn’t deliver the next step towards further engagement on the prospect’s own terms. Instead of quality closed sales, this leads instead to rapid unsubscribes and prospects annoyed at having their day interrupted with phone calls. Make sure your call to action can lead to even more engagement with your company on the prospect’s terms and you’ll be rewarded with faster, easier, and increased client acquisition.

Cori DiDonato is the Founder and Owner of Silver Tiger Consulting in Wakefield, MA. She is also a certified Constant Contact Solution Provider.