Gated Content: A Bane or a Boon for B2B Marketers?

Inbound Marketing is all about creating and publishing high-quality content, so it’s no surprise that it has been the rage for many years. Gating content is an effective and standard way adopted by marketers to generate leads. However, some B2B marketers prefer not to gate their content for easy access to the users. This gives rise to an unresolved question:

Whether content should be gated or not? 

 

Before you decide and choose a particular content marketing strategy, here are some benefits of both gated and ungated content:

Benefits of Gated Content

• Generation of High Quality Leads: Generating superior leads is the biggest benefit that gated content offers to businesses. It helps you to collect specific information about leads which can be further used to nurture them into a sale.
• Advanced Control: It helps prevent your content piece from being read and used by anonymous users or competitors. You can also seek more information about users through progressive profiling.
• More Valuable Content: By gating information, it adds more value to your content rather than keeping it form-free and assists many companies in establishing high revenue streams too.

Benefits of Ungated Content         

• Heavy Site Traffic and Large Opportunities: By making your content public/ungated, it helps attract more traffic to your site. With better SEO and more content sharing, it supports you in building a loyal audience.
• Increased View of Content: Ungated content receives 10 times more views than gated content as there aren’t any opt-in forms that people need to fill with their personal details.
• Enhanced SEO: As a B2B marketer, using ungated content can provide you keyword-optimized indexed pages to help you attain your goal of visitor-to-lead conversion

So, the debate between gated and ungated content remains unsolved as both tactics provide favourable results either way. The answer to the question, whether to gate your content or not varies depending upon the value of the content piece.

According to Mike Volpe, CEO of Hubspot, “gating your content helps you identify qualified leads who want to be nurtured.” On the other hand, Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg says, “From my experience, gating content creates a lot of backlash. Opt-in forms give me 3x the leads of any other method, but they tick people off... by a lot.”

Maintaining balance between Gated and Ungated content

 

So, it concludes that there is no as such perfect answer to this question. Ideally, a blend of gated and ungated content can drive revenue for your business. By adopting a content-pillar approach, you can maintain a healthy balance between gated and ungated content strategies for achieving your objective.

Under this approach, a central piece of content is termed as “pillar” which is gated whereas it is surrounded by several ungated pieces. This approach helps B2B marketers with better lead generation as the ungated content drives traffic to the pillar (gated) which further transforms the traffic into leads.

So, you need to test whether gated or ungated content will work well for your business! Also, you need to be careful while taking the decision as it can affect your entire business.