Should You REALLY Ungate ALL Your B2B Content?
Daisy McCarty
You CAN Afford a Fractional CMO ★ Brand Messaging Expert ★ Public Speaker ★ B2B Marketing Strategy ★ Co Host of The Marketing Blender Show ★ Grow Revenue Faster ★ Make the Most of Your Marketing Budget
“Long live 100% free content! B2B lead magnets are dead! Ungate all your content immediately!”
Or not.
It’s time for me to jump into this debate on whether you should gate or ungate content as part of your B2B marketing strategy. Should you really let it all hang out and stop putting forms in between your content and your audience?
As always, the answer is, "It depends..."
First, a quick definition:
Gated content is provided to an audience in exchange for contact information such as name, email, phone, etc. A piece of gated content is often called a "lead magnet."
Ungated content is publicly visible to everyone without requiring an exchange.
Now, on to my advice...
Top 3 Types of B2B Content to Keep Gated
These assets are FAVORITE lead magnets for our B2B clients. That’s because people who are looking for tools they can USE are often at a later stage of the buyer journey than those just looking for information.?
The critical point here is using keyword research to determine if these are tools your target market is SEARCHING for, not just what you'd like offer them.
Even if you make everything else ungated, these assets are good ones to keep behind a wall because you can understand the intent of your audience by what information they are willing to exchange and how they engage with your follow up nurture campaign. And why would you turn off a lead generation strategy that's working well?
Want a look at gated content strategy done right? Here's our #1 downloaded asset: Free Marketing Plan Template .
Why I Recommend Gated B2B Content
It gives my clients the ability to:
Note: It’s usually a best practice to give existing customers and even later stage prospects a way to get your gated content without filling out another form. However, make sure you can track what content they are consuming so you can follow up appropriately based on their interests. As an example, any new piece of gated content that would be helpful to your customers and prospects should be delivered to them proactively via email or other methods.
Example: Showpad? is just one example of a B2B Sales content management platform that lets you create trackable links for your asset library.
Top 3 Types of Content to SOMETIMES Gate
With this type of content, only put the MOST desirable content behind a form fill. And remember, you don’t have to gate it right away.?
Example: Ungated vs. Gated Webinar ?
Scenario 1
You promote a live webinar on LinkedIn and invite people to attend but DON’T make them fill out a form that gives you permission to follow up via email. They can just click on the Zoom link on the event page to attend. These events often get a LOT of people accepting the invitation, since you are only asking for a button click to register. However, following up is harder since you don’t have permission to put those attendees into your CRM for marketing purposes. You’ll also often find that there is a steep drop off from RSVP to actual attendance.
Scenario 2
You gate the webinar to narrow the response to the most highly qualified and interested attendees. These are the ones who are serious about showing up because they have a REAL problem to solve and you are talking directly about that problem. If you ask them to fill out a short registration form, they’ll do it because it’s worthwhile. See what happens to the registration to attendance ratio. You might find that even though fewer people RSVP, a greater percentage of them show up.?These are more qualified leads, and you have permission to follow up with them.
These two options are both valid ways of getting your content in front of people. But YOU get to decide which type of outcome is more important for your business goals - audience quantity or lead quality.?
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Note: You can also do the webinar ungated the first time and then gated the second time once you’ve verified the topic generates a lot of interest. As always, marketing is about TESTING to see what works.
Top 3 Types of Content You Should NEVER Gate
This one is pretty simple.
Basically, if getting as many eyes on the content as possible is the MAIN goal, make it free and ungated.
Now, let's talk about why the current finger wagging about how you "SHOULD" give all your content away without gating it is wrong.
Never Feel Guilty about Gating Your B2B Content!
It is APPROPRIATE to have multiple exchanges of value in the B2B buyer journey. Here is a simple way to think about the typical exchanges that occur along the path from awareness through consideration into decision.
Your prospects are:
If you are never asking for anything from your audience or prospects along the way, then you are not appropriately valuing what you are bringing to the table. There always comes a point in a relationship where people start devaluing what they aren’t exchanging fair value for in some way.?
A give-and take relationship respects both parties. Isn’t that the way you want to do business? - Daisy McCarty
Making Data-Driven Decisions to Move from Gating to Ungating
Below is the kind of statement (paraphrased) that I'm seeing from influencers in the B2B marketing space right now.
“Make every piece of content freely available! If it is truly amazing, people will proactively reach out to you for a sales conversation!”?
Amusingly, this advice often comes from people who figured out what type of content generates the highest quality leads and the best response for their particular business BY GATING IT FIRST and only ungating it later. That’s because gated content delivers MUCH more insight into buyer behavior than ungated content. The amount of data you can derive from KNOWING who is consuming your content and having a way to FOLLOW UP with them to learn more is incredible.?
And yes, sometimes, you’ll find that data leading you to the conclusion that IS time to ungate a particular asset.?
For example, a content piece might be helpful to your audience but just not attractive enough to be worth filling out a form. This might be the case if you are educating your audience about things they don’t know to ask about or that aren’t already a top priority for them.
Occasionally, you may also ungate content on one platform and keep it gated it on another depending on where your audience tends to be in the buyer journey on each platform. It's fine to experiment with gating and ungating assets to see if the trade off between more exposure to a broad audience is worth having less insight and ability to follow up.
Sometimes it really is. Sometimes it really isn't.
YOUR marketing data should tell you what works for YOUR business and YOUR target audience. Don't listen to people who tell you that gating/ungating works the same for every B2B company.
Of course, there's always this situation to consider...
What If No One Wants to Fill Out Your Lead Magnet Form?
If your audience doesn’t want to fill out a form to get content, it’s because of one of the following:
Ungating content DOES NOT FIX the first two problems. The third problem can actually be fixed on the lead generation landing page itself (message me to ask how).?
I’m available to talk about content marketing strategy! Grab a time on my calendar here and let’s have a conversation.?
Communications Manager | Strategic Communications | Integrated Campaigns
1 年Great points Daisy McCarty! I was just discussing this with a client earlier today. I explained to them that there is also an in between option where you can make an email sign up optional and offer a Skip button. That way you can identify the most interested leads who actively want to be kept up to date with your content - but also still give a bigger audience a chance to find out about what you have to offer even if they don't want to share their email address with you.