d-tags
Loading...Gated content - what is it?
Gated content is unique, quality marketing content you share with users in exchange for a specific activity such as filling in an appropriate questionnaire or subscribing to a newsletter.
In a way, this is a kind of sale - after all, someone gives you their data for a certain value. Gated content works great in both B2C and B2B systems.
Gated content meets the requirements of customers who are at the very top of the engagement pyramid. These people don’t want to be passive readers anymore, they’re attracted by your marketing content and want to find out more about the company, brand, and offered solutions.
It may also be a tool for reaching interested users who are just at the very beginning of the AIDA model (the “attention” stage). Maybe they don’t know yet if they actually need your products, maybe they just started learning about your company.
Gated content includes ebooks, white papers (tutorials, tips, guides), unique webinars and podcasts, email courses, or free demos of your products. Obviously, it’s not about sales-related materials, it’s about valuable content helping your potential customers to develop.
What is the purpose of gated content?
- Positioning yourself as an expert
- Acquiring leads
- Improving leads
- Increasing sales thanks to being consistent
- Marketing content analysis
Gated content - what should it be like?
- Unique - it’s not about providing comprehensive knowledge about given fields in the same exact form as everybody else.
- Useful - in order to ensure that people download your gated content, you need to provide them with texts that meet their requirements and are a useful knowledge compendium on a given subject.
- Visually appealing - the text, graphic design, and selected forms of gated content need to be of the finest possible quality. This is something your company should focus on.
Gated content: examples
In exchange for providing potential customers with ebooks full of professional and helpful content, you may gain their verified email addresses (require users to provide this data in a form to get access to the ebook). The objective is to collect contact details of potential customers in order to build more lasting relationships, educate them, and create sales opportunities. [caption id="attachment_33657" align="aligncenter" width="750"]
Klood distributes their WordPress Guide for beginners in exchange for data such as e-mail. This way, they can create a base of potential customers interested in the given subject and gain a way to reach out to them![/caption]
[caption id="attachment_33659" align="aligncenter" width="718"]
Bloominari promotes their e-book on a pop up including a form.[/caption]
The most notorious marketing mistakes
- Gated content isn’t about catalogs, sales materials, and product specifications - all of these should be available on your website for free and accessible just with a few clicks.
- Gated content isn’t the end of your work and effort - plan what should happen after downloading an ebook. A series of emails? Direct contact from a new business manager? If you don’t do anything and rest on the laurels, your previous efforts won’t pay off.
- Gated content isn’t the right place for comprehensive customer research - shorten the form the users need to fill in to access the content to a minimum. Moreover, your content should also be adapted to mobile devices.
Gated content - to do or not to do, that is the question
It’s definitely worth doing it. Better lead generation, branding, more selling opportunities - these are only some of the benefits of gated content. To sum up, content is king, on the condition you provide users with quality information in a form that allows them to fully benefit from it. As many as 80% of B2B marketing content is gated so don’t share your valuable work and knowledge for free. P.S. Let’s take a look at the infographics prepared by Hubspot. Should you create gated content? Check it out:
