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.

Why We Love Content Marketing (And You Should, Too!)

What is content marketing? What role does it play in running a business? How can marketers sell smarter by leveraging content marketing? These are just some of the questions that play through the minds of business owners. In order to run your business efficiently, you need to understand content marketing and its nuances.

What is content marketing?     

Content marketing is used by marketers to attract new customers by creating and publishing useful content. It is the fuel that ignites the entire sales process with the help of blogs, eBooks, case studies, social media, white papers, videos, etc.

Role of content marketing  

Creating valuable content can set you apart from others and help you resonate with your target audience. Let us take a look at the roles that content marketing play in running a business successfully: 

• User Engagement: Content marketing aims at strengthening your relationship with people reading and sharing your content (usually your fans and advocates) and drives high user engagement.
• Brand Establishment: Content marketing is a great way to establish your brand in the competitive market. With value added content, you can win the trust of your users and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
• Traffic Increase: With effective content, marketers can drive traffic to their website from different sources. Moreover, publishing content on social media platforms can help generate more followers, convert them into leads, and further into customers and active promoters of your company.     

How to implement a successful content marketing strategy?   

Implementing a content marketing strategy can be challenging. Here are a few steps involved in building an effective strategy:

• Specify the key challenges that your content strategy will solve and their relationship with business metrics 
• Include targeted buyer personas and understand the content gaps
• Determine your plan for publishing and maintaining the quality of your content

Considering the above-mentioned steps, you can create an effective content marketing strategy to enhance your business reach.