Gated content - Should the gate be closed, open, or locked for weekends
What Is Gated Content?
If you are actively sharing and reviewing content on various social media platforms, like Linked-In, you have most probably experienced gated content. So you come across an interesting article while reviewing posts on Linked-In and want to learn more about the subject at hand. You click on the link and a pop-up appears asking for your contact information before providing you with the content you initially wanted to view. The content is simply locked until an exchange of information occurs.
5 Tips To Take Into Consideration Before Gating Your Content
1.What Is The Nature Of Your Business?
Understanding your business is vital when creating a successful gated content strategy. The type of content you gate may depend on how you segment your customer base, along with choosing content that is geared for a certain stage within the buying process. For example, gating content that is geared towards gaining visibility may not yield the best results for traffic, although gating your content may showcase leads that are looking to become a committed customer (more invested in your company’s offering and published content).
2.What Kind Of Content Are You Gating?
Gating your content doesn’t have to be an all or nothing strategy. Some content is worth gating, this could be due to the content type/quality (whitepapers, guides for example), while other content should be given freely (a blog for example). It’s important to keep in mind that you are asking for the reader’s contact information in exchange for valuable content. If the quality of the content does not surpass previous free published content the customer may ignore your messages moving forward.
3.What Is Your Goal?
So what are you trying to accomplish with your gated content strategy? Great content that is pertinent to your client base may be downloaded and shared more frequently without any barriers, as a result it is important to keep in mind that this amount of downloads/shares will drop significantly due to asking for the readers contact info. So why use gated content you ask? Those that downloaded your document would have provided their contact information, resulting in potentially higher quality/invested leads.
4. Quality v.s. Quantity – Let’s Take The Time To Review Both Options?
The benefits of not using gated content
More views, clicks, shares … It’s just simply easier to share content that has no barriers/limitations.
Improved site traffic; due to SEO, improved amount of clicks, and an increase in the amount of sites linking to your content.
Improved SEO. Your content is easily crawled and indexed by search engines.
The benefits of using gated content
Improved quality leads. Those contacts that download the document are more involved in your company’s offering, and more invested in the content they downloaded.
Improved quality lead volume for your sales team.
Due to the above points you can expect improved conversion rates.
Now that you have a foundation built on quality leads you can further segment them and create focused content campaigns to further grow those contacts, moving them along to advanced buying stages.
5. What Kind Of Information Will You Be Asking Your Audience For?
Consider the various types of forms & login requirements (example: social logins). Facilitating the process will help in improving conversions (content downloads).
When asking for the reader to provide contact information, try to keep it short and sweet. The more complicated and difficult you make the process, the harder it will be to earn that download/view.
Segment your visitors as much as possible; if a visitor previously filled in the form why make them complete it again…
Finally, as you can see, no one choice is the best option. After evaluating your needs you may decide to do a mixture of gated and non-gated content to achieve various goals and objectives. The important thing is to understand the purpose of your content and what it is intended for, this will help in choosing which option is best for you.
What are your experiences with gated and non gated content? Do you have any tips/recommendations?