The Pros And Cons Of Gated Online Content
Gated content can work wonders for lead generation, but is it worth the risk?
You may not be familiar with gated content, but it comprises a growing proportion of online material. From blogs and webinars to white papers and ebooks, content is increasingly being hidden behind forms that have to be submitted before the material can be unlocked. While it remains technically free, gated content does usually come at a price – your personal information.
Gated content has become a controversial topic among digital marketing professionals. Here, we consider the risks and benefits of locking material away behind a web form, and requesting lead information before the content can be viewed:
The Risks of Gated Content
It has been claimed by industry experts that gating content reduces the number of views and downloads by between 95% and 98%. Whether you’re creating material yourself or buying it from a third party, the risk is sometimes too great to consider gated content. Including forms for personal information as a trade for content runs the risk of instantly alienating potential audiences and reflecting poorly on brand image.
Not all gated content is solely aimed at lead generation, but there is a danger that all gated content will become tarred with one of the less wholesome aspects of marketing. Many website visitors are wary of divulging their personal information when first encountering a company. Spam and unsolicited sales called are always a worry when submitting personal information on the internet.
There’s also the wider issue that shrinking your target audience proportionally diminishes the efficacy of whatever content you’ve created. A great deal of online content is informative and promotional, where maximizing eyeballs, likes and shares is crucial; gated content is not usually easily sharable and may not generate the views desired. With so many websites offering open access, even the most illuminating gated document could be consigned to the cyberspace equivalent of a dusty filing cabinet.
The Benefits of Gated Content
It is reported that gating content slashes take-up rates by upwards of 95%. However, in one American experiment, 100% of new business enquiries came from people who had accessed content on days when it was gated rather than the days when it was freely available. In other words, the audience might be comparatively tiny, but there won’t be any timewasters or day-trippers among them – it’s a directly relevant audience. Page views are a very different metric to business enquiries, and anyone willing to provide their contact details is probably a genuine prospect. This provides a highly reliable method of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Although many consumers expect to receive something for nothing, the internet is changing. Newspapers are hidden behind paywalls, entertainment sites ask viewers to ‘answer this question’ to read beyond the first paragraph and most non-gated sites are festooned with advertising. There’s no reason why a valuable piece of corporate communications shouldn’t incur some sort of cost from the readers – informational if not financial. Ebooks have to pay for themselves somehow.
There are also ways and means of making gated content more approachable, particularly if your company already has a reputation for delivering quality content. The first couple of paragraphs or executive summary can be ungated to persuade people that registering is worthwhile and draw them in, and users are much more likely to log in using existing social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Twitter. Reducing the number of data fields in a contact form can double conversion rates, and merely requesting an email address will be far less onerous than demanding job titles and phone numbers. Finally, store user data in cookies so they don’t have to log in for each subsequent visit.
How To Make Gated Content Work For You
By following a few easy rules you can make the most of your gated content:
- Keep forms simple with only an email address and name.
- Don’t ask for information that readers may feel uncomfortable submitting.
- Provide a complete description of the gated content to avoid reader frustration.
- Don’t promise more than your content will deliver. Using hyperbole like “all” or “never” will only disappoint and irritate readers.
- Be sure that all websites are encrypted with SSL certificates for optimum security.